Here is Clayton Shirky on the subject in a debate in Foreign Affairs:

It would be impossible to tell the story of Philippine President Joseph Estrada’s 2000 downfall without talking about how texting allowed Filipinos to coordinate at a speed and on a scale not available with other media. Similarly, the supporters of Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero used text messaging to coordinate the 2004 ouster of the People’s Party in four days; anticommunist Moldovans used social media in 2009 to turn out 20,000 protesters in just 36 hours; the South Koreans who rallied against beef imports in 2008 took their grievances directly to the public, sharing text, photos, and video online, without needing permission from the state or help from professional media. Chinese anticorruption protesters use the instant-messaging service QQ the same way today. All these actions relied on the power of social media to synchronize the behavior of groups quickly, cheaply, and publicly, in ways that were unavailable as recently as a decade ago.

Here’s indi.ca in Sri Lanka’s Sunday Leader:

Another characteristic of modern revolutions is that they are efficiently coordinated via social networks like Twitter and Facebook and cellular technology like SMS. While aging dictators have been adept at censoring mainstream media and obstructing public assembly, they have been slow to crack down on social media. By the time they do, like Egypt shutting off the Internet, it is often too late. Social networks by themselves cannot ignite revolutions, but they do seem able to catalyze the street protests that ultimately do.

We have been thinking/talking about the larger problem of ICTs and their relation to liberation/coercion for some time including issues in Kashmir, Iran, Jaffna, and Myanmar.

But that aside, this is very good news. I hope SLT will offer decent leased line prices to Jaffna and that some entrepreneur will quickly move to set up BPO operations in the peninsula. Our friend Muttukrishna Sarvananthan is talking up building a knowledge economy in the North. One precondition has been satisfied.

Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT) has commissioned a fibre optic cable linking the former war zone in the northern Jaffna peninsula with the rest of the country, offering high-speed communications, a statement said.
The “information superhighway” to the north has been built alongside the A9 main route to Jaffna, where information technology and business process outsourcing ventures are being promoted to provide jobs for youth after the war.

SLT said its expanded fibre optic information system will improve customer access to high performance broadband, helping business expand and enabling all telecommunications operators to expand their operations bringing new facilities to the north.

The new cable has the capacity to meet all future requirements of the Northern Peninsula, it said.

Sri Lanka Telecom began the project after the end of the island’s 30-year ethnic war, fought largely in the north and east, in May 2009.

The important thing is to think about warning as a chain with many links. If one link breaks, the chain breaks. The conclusions are that one must minimize the number of links and ensure that each is link is robust. It appears from the story that a link in the Galle district failed. Why can we not directly connect the Met Department which has been given authority to issue warnings directly to the towers using a robust technology such as WorldSpace addressable satellite radio that does not even require mains power?

Is not foolhardy to install more towers before the operation of the existing towers has been remedied?
:: Daily Mirror – Features ::

Thousands of people living in the Hikkaduwa area which was of the worst affected area in the south heaved a sigh of relief when a Tsunami Early Warning Tower was installed on the Hikkaduwa beach.

The residents of several other surrounding villages in the area including Kahawa Akurala , Telwatta, Peraliya, Seenigama, Thotagamuwa and Dodanduwa , the business community and the owners of tourist hotels praised the Minister of Disaster Management and Human rights, Mr. Mahinda Samarasinghe for providing a disaster warning system to the area. The Korean Government funded the project costing US dollars 2000 and provided the technical expertise. Similar Early Warning Towers beaming alarm signals to an extent of 4 kilometres were installed at Kalmunai in Ampara the district and at Point Pedro in the Jaffna district.

The Minister and the disaster management experts from Sri Lanka and Korea guaranteed the smooth functioning of the disaster Warning Towers on the day of commissioning which was celebrated in a grand way. However it is a matter of serious concern that the Hikkaduwa Tsunami Early Warning Tower failed on the eventful day when the area faced a threat of a possible tsunami in the aftermath of an earthquake in the sea off the Sumatra islands.

Powered by ScribeFire.

http://www.lbo.lk/fullstory.php?newsID=2020236857&no_view=1&SEARCH_TERM=24 
 
March 08 (LBO) – Indonesia, like Sri Lanka, sends its women to foreign lands to work as housemaids. The numbers may be larger, though the proportion is smaller. 
 
Telecom networks are expanding fast in both countries, Indonesia faster. The telecom sector is attracting massive investments in both countries as operators scramble to meet the burgeoning demand.

Generally, politicians and officials responsible for a sector are happy when it grows. Therefore, I was surprised to hear several senior telecom officials in Indonesia express concern about lowered gold sales supposedly caused by excessive use of calling cards by expatriate housemaids.

I could understand concern from those in charge of gold sales, but this was telecom.

I thought this was an Indonesian peculiarity, until I heard it in a different form from a Sri Lankan journalist. “The westerners had given us phones,” he said, “but not taught us how to use them: our people are wasting their money on phone calls.”

“What is waste,” I asked. I did not receive an answer.

Beneath both statements lay a concern about “wrong” uses of technology by people lacking the good judgment that the speaker was endowed with. But let us see what the evidence is on how poor people use phones.

How do people actually use telephones?

LIRNEasia recently conducted a five-country sample survey, involving almost 9,000 respondents, of how people at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) use information and communication technologies (ICTs). AC Nielsen affiliates in the five countries conducted the field research in July-August 2006.

This study, which used quantitative methods including a diary in which people recorded each call made in a two-week period including purpose, duration, and cost, provides unique insights on teleuse at the bottom of the pyramid, defined as the two lowest (D and E) socio-economic classification (SEC) groups in each of the five countries.

In Sri Lanka, the study accurately represents teleuse by 4 million Sri Lankans, ages 18-60 in SEC D and E, with a margin of error less than 3 percent.

Ninety two percent of those approached had used a telephone in the past three months. Of the users at the BOP in Sri Lanka, 41 percent owned the phone they had used. The others relied on friends, relatives, neighbors, and communication bureaus.

Both numbers are unexpectedly high. An overwhelming majority of people in these countries (that include a substantial part of South Asia, the largest concentration of poor people in the world), are familiar with the telephone. This allows one to infer that many of the world’s people are indeed familiar with, and have used, telephones.

This is a sea change from the claim made just eight years ago that half the world’s people have never made or received a phone call by then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in a speech at an International Telecommunication Union event. (Read Speech)

The number that owned mobile phones or had a fixed phone within the house in Sri Lanka (41 per cent) was also high; in India, the comparable number was 19 per cent.

As recently as in 2004, the Central Bank’s consumer finance survey showed that 25 percent of the households had some kind of phone, fixed or mobile. The LIRNEasia survey shows that, just two years later, 41 per cent of the poorest households had some kind of phone in the house, indicating that the percentage of households with phones overall has to be even higher.

Sixty five percent of those at the BOP in Sri Lanka could reach a telephone within five minutes. Over 95 percent could reach a phone within one hour.

These people used the phone sparingly: 13 outgoing calls a month on average and 10 incoming. Obviously, those who owned a phone made/received more calls than those who had to go to a neighbor’s house or a communication bureau for that purpose.

Their calls were of short duration, 80 percent being less than three minutes long.

The principal purpose of calls for 65 percent of users at the BOP was to keep in touch with friends and family. Except in Thailand (29 percent), very few at the bottom of the pyramid used the phone for explicit business or instrumental purposes. In Sri Lanka, only eight percent reported this as the principal purpose.

Of course, the task of differentiating a call to friends and family from a business call in a not-fully monetized economy is not an easy one. Unlike in developed countries where roles are clearly demarcated and the division of labor is sharply defined, in countries like Sri Lanka, especially at the bottom of the pyramid, the roles are intermixed.

For example, maintaining good relations with one’s brother-in-law may be no different at the BOP than making a call to one’s insurance agent, because in a society lacking insurance, the reliance has to be on friends and family.

Compared to other South Asian BOP teleusers, the Sri Lankans made more international calls, explainable both by the large number of expatriate workers and the low international call prices. Four percent of the calls made at the Sri Lankan BOP were international, just below the Philippines (six percent)

A 2005 study conducted during the window of opportunity created by the MOU in 2002-2004, showed that the inhabitants of Jaffna were the heaviest users of international calls among the four districts (Badulla, Colombo, Hambantota and Jaffna) surveyed.

Seventy five percent of Jaffna mobile users made calls to family and friends abroad. Fifty five percent of public-phone users in Jaffna called abroad.

Teleusers at the BOP used a variety of cost-saving techniques. Sixty percent use texting (SMS) though the levels of use are less than in the SMS capital of the world, the Philippines, where everyone texts and almost everyone texts at least once a day.

In 2006, calling off-peak and missed calls (ringcuts) were among the most popular cost-minimizing strategies at the Sri Lankan BOP, used by 40 percent and 35 percent users respectively.

When asked the reasons for owning a phone, the highest weight was given to its utility in an emergency, 4.58 on a scale of 5. The phone was seen as improving the efficiency of day-to-day lives, 3.98 on a scale of 5.

However, the value assigned to allowing one to make money or save was the lowest in Sri Lanka (3.19/5 as against 3.97/5 for India, for example), possibly an artifact of the RPP [Receiving Party Pays] regime that remains only in Sri Lanka among the countries surveyed.

Only one per cent at the BOP used the Internet. Seventy percent had heard of the Internet but never used it, a much higher number than India (28 percent).

So this is the portrait of teleuse at the BOP. These people appear to be using the phone most frugally and intelligently, though they do spend a higher proportion of their limited income on telecom services.

So what could be the concern about gold and waste?

Obviously, the rapid growth of telecom is pulling time (attention) and money away from other industries. But why do officials in one case and a journalist in the other think that money and time spent on telecom is misdirected?

It could be that the critics consider telephone calls, lacking tangibility, as ephemeral and lacking in value. But they should just look at the Stock Market and the entertainment industries: ephemeral products, but a great deal of value changing hands.

It may not be the phone that is drawing their ire, but the users. In the “bad old days” of government-owned integrated monopoly, one had to be somebody to get a phone; either you knew the right people or had a lot of money.

This is no longer the case with over 5 million mobiles in use and almost 2 million households connected; nobodies are using mobile phones think the self-appointed somebodies. The phone is no longer a factor that differentiates somebodies from nobodies.

The objection to phones could be a remnant of paternalistic thinking. Perhaps the thinking goes that a call from a mother in the Middle East to the children left behind is not the best use of limited Dirhams. Better to use that money to buy gold to bring home and bury in the garden for use in a time of need.

These people have obviously not heard of consumer sovereignty. The poor, as much as the rich, have a right to spend their money as they see fit.

The fact remains that the BOP in the Asia Pacific (South Asia in particular) is teaching the whole world about the value of connectivity. They are talking and texting more for less, forcing the adoption of new business models that allow profits to be made with very low average revenues per user.

In India, a mobile is used for over 400 minutes a month (incoming and outgoing) and generates around USD 7 in monthly revenue. In Sri Lanka the equivalent numbers are 200 minutes and USD 6.

In the rich countries represented in the OECD, the minutes of use per month is as low as 65, for a much higher payment. And yet, the companies in emerging Asia are investing massively and making more than respectable profits.

Globalization and mismanagement of national economies are making all people more mobile. Even those at the bottom of the pyramid have been compelled to abandon their settled ways and migrate to distant parts, within and outside their countries. Telecom provides an invaluable link with loved ones in this turbulent time. 

Relationships are more valuable than gold. They are built and sustained by talk, on the phone and in person. Talk of this kind is definitely not a waste. 
 
 
 

30 January 2007

Internet facilities and 8,000 telephones cut off in Jaffna Peninsula

The Free Media Movement (FMM) is deeply disturbed to learn that basic communications facilities to the Jaffna Peninsula have been blocked from 28th January 2007. Internet facilities and around 8,000 landline telephones of Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT) are dysfunctional to date. SLT, jointly owned by the Sri Lankan Government and Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corporation (NTT) of Japan, is the sole Internet provider in Jaffna Peninsula with a population of around 600,000 according to official statistics.

The FMM was told that there is no official decision by the Telecommunication Regulatory Authority to block communications in this manner in the Peninsula.

However, a number of citizens in Jaffna and journalists confirm that there is no Internet access in Jaffna for the past 3 three days, when contacted through mobile phones. SLT Jaffna office told FMM that for security reasons SLT link to Jaffna has been disconnected form Anuradhapura, a north central city.

Two Tamil newspapers, Sudaroli and Thinankkural told FMM that they are unable to receive or send any news and photos to their other newspapers in their media group by email since Sunday. Freelance and independent journalists based in Jaffna also cannot send any photos by email or access Internet.

FMM notes that the freedom to receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers is enshrined as a fundamental right in Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We also note that given the context of uncertainty and fear, access to and the dissemination of accurate information through the media is of paramount importance in securing human rights and human security in the Peninsula.

Accordingly, the FMM strongly urges the relevant authorities to take immediate steps to reconnect the Jaffna peninsula by unblocking access to the Internet and facilitating unrestricted access to basic telephony in the region.

for more information – (+94) 777 315665 Spokesperson- S. Sivakumar 0777 315665

Convenor – Sunanda Deshapriya ( 0777 312457) – Secretary – Sunil Jayasekara ( 011 2851672/3)

No. 237/22, Wijeya Kumaratunga Road, Colombo – 05., Email : fmm@diamond.lanka.net,

www.freemediasrilanka.org

Now, Dialog and the people of the North are paying the price of the path of war.  For two months, the mobile networks have been shut down in the North, with service being allowed intermittently in the East.  This means that approximately 220,000 families are unable to communicate with their loved ones in the North and that another 200,000 or so families are not sure their phone will work when they most need it.  

Dialog, a company that has been the darling of the stock market since its successful IPO is looking at the loss not only of a significant number of subscribers, but also of a higher proportion of revenues because these are high-spending customers, as documented in the sample survey LIRNEasia conducted in the Jaffna district before the window of opportunity closed in 2005.  It is noteworthy that they are continuing to maintain their commercial relationship in the region, optimistic that they will be allowed to restore service soon.    

LIRNEasia believes that communication is a basic right.  We have shown that in many conflict areas the phones continue to work, Israel and Palestine being the classic examples.  We hope that the leaders of the government of consensus will do the right thing by the people of Jaffna and the East, who are today unable to communicate with their loved ones.    

A study of ‘financially constrained’ telecom users in Sri Lanka has shown that compared to similar users in other areas of Sri Lanka, users in Jaffna exhibit markedly different patterns in their telecom use. The study, released today by LIRNEasia, an Asian research organization based in Colombo looks at telecom use amongst people whose monthly incomes are below LKR 10,000 in the Badulla, Colombo, Jaffna and Hambantota areas……

English press release: Jaffnaites spend up to 12% of their monthly regular income on telecommunications

More information about the project: Jaffnaites spend up to 12% of their monthly regular income on telecommunications