“Let us be clear,” the White House statement said, “online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs.”

However, it added, “We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”

The bills currently under consideration in Congress were intended to combat the theft of copyrighted materials by preventing American search engines like Google and Yahoo from directing users to sites that allow for the distribution of stolen materials. They would cut off payment processors like PayPal that handle transactions.

The bills would also allow private citizens and companies to sue to stop what they believed to be theft of protected content. Those and other provisions set off fierce opposition among Internet companies, technology investors and free speech advocates, who said the bills would stifle online innovation, violate the First Amendment and even compromise national security by undermining the integrity of the Internet’s naming system.

One other metric is available to anyone, just go to facebook.com/ads and create an ad. It will tell you how many people your ad can reach. For people of all ages, that number is 1,126,020. That is, Facebook has 1.13 million users that claim they’re in Sri Lanka. Even if you lop off 130,000 as errors, it’s still over a million Sri Lankans on Facebook.

So What Now?
So, to come round the bend, my rough guess is we have at least two million people on the Internet, or about 10% of the population. The raw numbers say 1.3 million, so why round-up so much? Well, because connections are used by multiple people, and I think we must have more Internet users than Facebook accounts. A lot of people also use the net at work, and thus wouldn’t be counted.

With smartphones, which seem to be surgically attached to the hand of every teenager and many an adult, tablets have opened up a new dimension to mobile computing that is seducing consumers. Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, believes that in 2011 combined shipments of smartphones and tablets will overtake those of personal computers (PCs).

The revolution is mobile

This marks a turning-point in the world of personal technology. For around 30 years PCs in various forms have been people’s main computing devices. Indeed, they were the first machines truly to democratise computing power, boosting personal productivity and giving people access, via the internet, to a host of services from their homes and offices. Now the rise of smartphones and tablet computers threatens to erode the PC’s dominance, prompting talk that a “post-PC” era is finally dawning.

In the Economist.

This produced a total of 2,184,018 — which takes the percentage of population to almost 11%. And if we apply the same average number of 3 users, it could give us 30% of population accessing and using the Internet. But is that assumption of 3 users per subscription equally applicable to mobile devices? I’m not sure. I’ll wait for industry experts to clarify.

In fact, neither industry sources and researchers have a reliable figure of how many smartphones are in use in Sri Lanka. Because a significant number comes in through private channels (via returning travellers or Lankan expatriates), the looking simply at the import figures could be misleading. A conservative estimate is that at least one million smartphones with Internet access capability are in use. The number keeps growing.

Exactly how many such smartphone users go online on a regular basis? What kind of info do they look up? How long on average do they stay online per session?

If you know the answers, or have reflected on these, please share.

Let’s hope more reliable data would emerge from the 2011 countrywide census of population. An early report (July 2010) said: “Information will also be collected for the first time on people’s communication methods.”

We too look forward to the HIES and Census data being released. But I would caution against using a multiplier of 3. A smartphone is a personal device. Among the well-to-do, it will not be shared. That means that you have to assume a much higher number using a smartphone in common among the less wealthy.

Our Teleuse@BOP4 survey data that are just in may be able to give a figure on shared use (though not specific to smartphones).

Mail volume has plummeted with the rise of e-mail, electronic bill-paying and a Web that makes everything from fashion catalogs to news instantly available. The system will handle an estimated 167 billion pieces of mail this fiscal year, down 22 percent from five years ago.

It’s difficult to imagine that trend reversing, and pessimistic projections suggest that volume could plunge to 118 billion pieces by 2020. The law also prevents the post office from raising postage fees faster than inflation.

Meanwhile, the agency has had a tough time cutting its costs to match the revenue drop, with a history of labor contracts offering good health and pension benefits, underused post offices, and laws that restrict its ability to make basic business decisions, like reducing the frequency of deliveries.

Full story.

The other point about not anchoring innovation on how consumers actually live their lives is more problematic. As the NYT says:

Mr. Jobs did not so much see around corners; he saw things in plain sight that others did not. “It’s not the consumer’s job to know what they want,” he explained.

Mr. Jobs has walked quickly and surely past conventional wisdom. He had no interest in market research. He did things his own way and expected the rest of the world to fall into line. He both brought the mouse into our homes and more or less killed it off, eliminated the floppy disk with the first iMac, and did away with the DVD on the MacBook Air, decisions that foretold the obsolescence of physical media. He shrank Web-enabled devices by piggybacking on the phone business, profoundly changing the way in which people consume media.

“Before the iPhone, cyberspace was something you went to your desk to visit,” said Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and longtime Apple watcher. “Now cyberspace is something you carry in your pocket.”

The first assumption is that you’re online everywhere you go. That’s rather critical, because when it’s not online, a Chromebook can’t do much of anything. You can’t peruse your e-mail, read documents or books or listen to music. With very few exceptions, when the Chromebook isn’t online, it’s a 3.3-pound paperweight. (Google says that an upgrade this summer will at least permit you to read your e-mail, calendar and Google Docs when you’re offline, and that over time, more apps will be written to be offline-usable.)

Developers caution that independent networks come with downsides: repressive governments could use surveillance to pinpoint and arrest activists who use the technology or simply catch them bringing hardware across the border. But others believe that the risks are outweighed by the potential impact. “We’re going to build a separate infrastructure where the technology is nearly impossible to shut down, to control, to surveil,” said Sascha Meinrath, who is leading the “Internet in a suitcase” project as director of the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan research group.

I hope they will link up with our friends at the Center for Internet and Society in Bangalore and become active in South Asia as well.

The Internet shutdown severely disrupted the flow of the YouTube videos and Facebook and Twitter posts that have allowed protesters and others to keep track of demonstrations, since foreign news media are banned and state media are heavily controlled. Both land lines and cellphones are so frequently monitored by Syria’s feared secret police that Skype had become a major means of communication among activists, and its loss as a tool may be a blow to the protest movement. Government Web sites, including those for the Ministry of Oil and the state news agency, SANA, remained online.

Two-thirds of Syria’s Internet network went offline at 6:35 a.m. Friday, said James Cowie, an analyst at Renesys, an Internet analytic firm, in a cascading blackout that took 30 minutes.

Forty of the country’s 59 Internet pathways were disabled, including Syria’s entire 3G mobile network, run by the country’s only telecom provider, Syriatel, which is owned by Rami Makhlouf, Mr. Assad’s cousin.

“People that want to use their smart phones to Tweet or read Web pages cannot,” Mr. Cowie said. “All of the IPs on those phones appear to be down.”

Phone service was also heavily disrupted across the country, and for the past several days, rights activists have reported that water and electricity had been shut off in a string of towns in central and southern Syria

Sri Lanka had 574,000 broadband customers by end December 2010, including 294,000 mobile broadband users.

Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT), the country’s only wireline operator has been pushing ADSL (assymetrical digital subscriber line) aggressively since last year notching up 213,000 customers by end December.

Fitch said it was equal to 24 percent of the firm’s wireline base. Malaysia’s UT group is now the effective managing shareholders, being the second largest shareholder after the state in SLT.

Broadband users can now self-regulate the bandwidth provided by the operators with the help of software which will be made available for free.

Bhutan InfoComm and Media Authority (BICMA), in a move to facilitate the operators give better services and to emphasis evidence-derived regulations, tied up with LIRNEasia, an ICT policy and regulation think tank. LIRNEasia is based in Sri Lanka but works in all the South Asian countries and some South East Asian countries.

LIRNEasia had earlier presented a study on broadband quality in Bhutan. The study showed that the quality of connectivity among the national internet service providers was not up to acceptable international standards.

“It was revealed that one of the most pressing problems is connecting two internet service providers (ISPs) called “peering”. It shows that the quality of peering is not satisfactory,” said Wangay Dorji, the head of telecommunication division of Bicma.

The internet speed of the ISPs in Bhutan was above the international benchmark, which is 300 millisecond return trip time.

He said that Bicma felt the need to do something. “If we do not do anything, the traffic within Bhutan cannot be exchanged at the international level. If it has to be exchanged internationally, it has a lot of cost as well as bandwidth utilisation.”

As a regulator, rather than being reactive, we want to be proactive, he said.

The slides presented by LIRNEasia on 9th May 2011 on the AT tester findings can be found HERE

The Syrian government is cracking down on protesters’ use of social media and the Internet to promote their rebellion just three months after allowing citizens to have open access to Facebook and YouTube, according to Syrian activists and digital privacy experts.

Security officials are moving on multiple fronts — demanding dissidents turn over their Facebook passwords and switching off the 3G mobile network at times, sharply limiting the ability of dissidents to upload videos of protests to YouTube, according to several activists in Syria. And supporters of President Bashar al-Assad, calling themselves the Syrian Electronic Army, are using the same tools to try to discredit dissidents.

In contrast to the Mubarak government in Egypt, which tried to quash dissent by shutting down the country’s entire Internet, the Syrian government is taking a more strategic approach, turning off electricity and telephone service in neighborhoods with the most unrest, activists say.

Full story.

The fourth myth is that “the Internet is becoming a wireless internet”, to quote Malcolm Turnbull, who appeared on the program with his nifty little wireless tablet computer.

The claim is disingenuous, and Turnbull, of all people, knows the limits of wireless technology. Bandwidth is limited, and what works today for a few users will become the Internet equivalent of road gridlock in just a few years. Even now the wireless spectrum is getting crowded, and the up-and-coming 4G network will provide no more than a stopgap improvement.

The future will almost certainly see more wireless devices, but these will be on short tethers generally within homes and other buildings; the domestic wireless LAN with a range of 10 or 20 metres is the model and these need the support of widely distributed fibre.

Indian media highlight the absence of connectivity as one of the clues that identified Osama bin Laden’s hideout in a Pakistani suburb.

A large mansion in a massive compound with 12 feet to 18 feet tall walls topped with barbed wire. No telephone or internet connection to the house. And seldom seen residents who burnt their trash rather than dispose it as other neighbors did.

These were the slender leads that eventually took US spooks and seals to the world’s most wanted fugitive. Osama bin Laden lived not in a cave in some frontier mountain redoubt, but in a suburban neighborhood in a million-strong city just an hour’s drive from Islamabad, right under the eyes of the Pakistani military.

I guess he should not have given in to his telecomphobia, supposedly caused by the Cruise missile attack in 1998 that was triggered by his use of a satellite phone. Next thing you know, phone Internet connections that generate no traffic will cause suspicion, especially at the cheap rates we have in South Asia. So future terrorists will have to employ flunkies to watch porn on the Internet to get the spooks off their tails.