As neither we nor most of our readers do not have access to the thread it was posted, we like to continue the discussion here.

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Hi people,

I come from one of the ten largest economies in the world, with nearly 200 million people, 8.5 million km2, and 5.564 municipalities, where 94% of the people do *not* have access to any form of broadband – the “B” in the famous BRIC acronym.

I am just coming out of the IGF workshop “Expanding broadband access for a global Internet economy: development dimensions”. I left the workshop a bit shocked with the concepts expressed, not by the AT&T representative (who not surprisingly said AT&T subdsidiaries countries other than the USA should be considered local companies because they employ local people), who as usual is just doing his job in defending the so-called “market”, but by other speeches which seemed to completely ignore that, in most of our contries, there is a de facto monopoly or cartel situation regarding the telco infrastructure, and that public policy ought to centrally take this into account if the aim is to universalize broadband access with quality to all families.

One of the speakers (from LIRNEasia) said that “lower prices require lower costs” and therefore one should just “phase out universal access levies and rationalize taxes”. I retorted that pricing per Mb/s of ADSL broadband in São Paulo might be 65 times higher than the same price charged by the same company in London — and therefore no amount of levies or taxes would justify such scandalous pricing difference, not to speak of the much lower QoS.

I suggested that, instead of eliminating the universal service funds (whose levies are a very small portion of price composition of broadband), we should insist on reforming policy regarding the use of these funds. The reply I heard was that it makes no sense to keep funds that are not used or are squandered (!!). Impact of the fund’s levy in Brazil is just 1% of the price of the fixed line telephone connection — its impact in the price of broadband (a separate bill even if the service is not unbundled) is zero.

There was also a recommendation that we should be “gentle on QoS” to facilitate things regarding universalization of access — fascinating. Again, examples abound in which telcos guarantee only 10% of the nominal contracted rate, and in practice this might be even less. Should we just agree with absurds like this in the name of “it is better to have something than nothing”???

And then there is the crucial question of unbundling, central to the policy debate in the developed countries as it directly impacts universalization through an effective reduction of prices for the final user. It is a major challenge for broadband public policy in developing countries, where regulators are usually in the hands of the telco cartels. The word was not mentioned (not a single time) by anyone in the panel, as if irrelevant to the development dimensions of broadband.

The speaker also mentioned that the “need” to reduce costs for the big telcos would require reduction of international bandwidth costs. One of the two big carriers in Brazil, a Brazilian conglomerate, owns redundant fiber running from Brazil to Miami in rings passing through countries in the Caribbean and Central America. They own their own international link, in summary. So do the other carrier in the de facto duopoly — a major operator from Europe. This does not make any difference in pricing for the final user, although it does contribute to their profits in Brazil being far higher than in Europe for example.

Finally, the fascination with mobile. Of course the AT&T speaker started his talk by waving a fancy iPhone to the audience — mostly natural for a commercial wireless giant. But the infoDev representative and others mentioned mobile as a “solution” for the poor, and not even bothered to separate the discussion in the two main topics here: first, the mobile phone as a connectivity device to enable the user to fully use the Internet through a friendly human-machine interface, be it a common PC or special equipment for people with disabilities; second, the phone itself as *the* alternative to the full user experience that a PC or similar might provide. It seems the agency bureaucrats are satisfied with having two castes of users: a small minority of the ones who can fully use the Internet as it evolves requiring more and more multimedia capabilities on both sides (server and client), and the ones relegated to a small device on which it is barely possible to type small messages.

In the first regional LA&C preparatory meeting for the IGF, in 2008, a representative of a major telco said we should not worry about bringing the next billion to the Internet — they have cell phones, so they are connected already, problem solved. I wonder if this executive would take the place of a carpenter looking for a job, who has to compose and send by email his CV together with images of letters of recommendation to his would-be employer, and had nothing but a cell phone (smart or not) to do it. Not to speak of comparing the executive’s thin-fingered hands of a pianist with the big callous hands of the carpenter.

fraternal regards

–c.a.

Vascular surgeon David Nott helped the 16-year-old while working 24-hour shifts with medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) in Rutshuru.

The boy’s left arm had been ripped off and was badly infected and gangrenous.

Mr Nott, 52, had never performed the operation but followed instructions from a colleague who had.

The surgeon, who is based at Charing Cross Hospital in west London, said: “He was dying. He had about two or three days to live when I saw him.”

Mr Nott knew he needed to perform a forequarter amputation, which requires the surgeon to remove the collar bone and shoulder blade.

He contacted a colleague who had performed the operation before.

“I texted him and he texted back step by step instructions on how to do it,” he said.

Read the full story in BBC here.

The survey, conducted by the Oxford Said Business School in London and the Universidad de Oviedo in Spain and released Friday, found that Canada is below the global broadband quality threshold, which measures the proliferation of high-speed internet in a country, as well as the speeds available and the reliability of connections.

While Japan was the only country to meet the study’s standards for future readiness, broadband networks in countries such as Latvia, Romania and Bulgaria scored better than Canada, which ranked 27th out of the 42 nations covered. The United States ranked 16th.

Researchers calculated a broadband quality score, or BQS, by testing download and upload speeds in each country, as well as latency, a factor that measures how instantaneously information travels over a broadband network. They found that in order to meet the demands of today’s internet traffic, broadband networks need to be able to deliver steady download speeds of 3.75 megabits per second and uploads of one mbps with a latency no greater than 95 milliseconds.

Read the full report in CBCNews here.

“Devices alone are not enough anymore,” Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, chief executive of Nokia, said last week in London as the company announced plans for a digital music store, a game service, social networking links and other mobile Internet initiatives, grouped under a new brand, Ovi. “People want more; they want the complete experience.”

Meanwhile, a Google spokesman declined to comment on reports that a “Google phone,” or “G-phone,” was imminent. Such a device would take the Internet company into a business that has long been dominated by Nokia, but that has been shaken up by the recent introduction of a high-profile newcomer, Apple’s iPhone.

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A crumpled note, delivered to a passing rock star-turned-philanthropist? No, Mr Sokor is a much sharper communicator than that. He texted this appeal from his own mobile phone to the mobiles of two United Nations officials, in London and
Nairobi. He got the numbers by surfing at an internet cafe at the North Kenyan camp. 

As Mr Sokor’s bemused
London recipient points out, two worlds were colliding. The age-old scourge of famine in the Horn of Africa had found a 21st-century response; and a familiar flow of authority, from rich donor to grateful recipient, had been reversed. It was also a  sign that technology need not create a “digital divide”: it can work  wonders in some of the world’s remotest, most wretched places. 

“Technology completely alters the way humanitarian work is done,” says Caroline Hurford of the World Food Programme (WFP), a United Nations body that is the single largest distributor of food aid. Once upon a time, when disaster struck, big agencies would roll up with grain, blankets and medicine and start handing them out. Victims would struggle to the relief camps, if they could. For aid workers (let alone recipients) there was no easy way to talk to head office. 

Now, when an emergency occurs, the first people on the ground are often computer geeks, setting up telephone networks so other aid agencies can do their stuff. Donors keep track of supplies on spreadsheets and send each other SMS messages: this road has been attacked by bandits, that village cut off by floods. Transport agencies announce helicopter flights by e-mail. Aid providers can find out where exactly on an incoming ship their medical supplies are, saving hours hanging round the docks. Aid donors find it easier to locate the victims of disaster; and victims queue as eagerly for mobile-phone access as they do for food. 

Read the full story: http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9546242

She presented her report on “Documenting the Capabilities of Measuring ICT Statistics in India”. Her report raised great interest among the participants. In an extension to the LIRNEasia work on indicators this report profiled the institutions that collect ICT data in India , with some observations about the methodology and the limitations. The reference point for the exercise is the ‘metadata survey’, a global exercise to collect information from all countries regarding the statistical measurement of ICT (reported in “The global status of ICT indicators”) conducted by global Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development. The report also provided a tabular concordance of the Indian ICT data with the core indicators as identified in the Partnership manual. Finally, the report critically analysed the status of measurement of ICT statistics in India in the framework provided by the OECD Guide for Measuring Information Society.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Switch on for Square Mile wi-fi

But is there really that much demand for open-air surfing? After all, staring at a laptop screen in the sunshine is not a great experience – especially in an area where so many cafes have wi-fi access.

The network’s backers think one of the big attractions will be the ability to use wi-fi enabled phones to make cheap calls using Skype or other internet telephony services.

It’s hard to see why well-paid City workers would bother with the extra effort needed to make a wi-fi call – but the City of London Corporation believes it will prove attractive to migrant workers on construction sites.

Public wi-fi networks, free and paid-for, are spreading quickly, but there are mixed reports on just how much they are being used. Some believe the more advanced Wimax technology is the real answer to open-air internet access.

So the City of London’s network will provide a major test of whether the public really wants to surf on the move – and whether there is any money to be made from it.

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In the aftermath of the 7 July bombings, people were understandably keen to talk on their mobile phones. Londoners wanted to assure friends, relatives and colleagues that they were OK; keep up to date with the latest news or find out whether anyone they knew had been caught up in any of the four explosions. Yet, while speaking on a mobile phone is a routine part of modern life, for a crucial eight hours on 7 July it became difficult, and for many, impossible. In some areas of London, the sheer number of people wanting to make phone calls was enough to bring the mobile networks to their knees.
This meltdown has been highlighted as one of the failings of 7 July and has left technologists wondering how to prevent the same thing happening again. Immediately following the four explosions, mobile company Vodafone saw a 250% increase in the number of calls and a doubling of the number of text messages sent. The company told the London Assembly investigation into what happened on the day that it had “never seen that volume of traffic for any event”. Other operators saw similar increases. Overall, the number of attempted calls rose from 30,000 every 15 minutes to 300,000. The nearest comparison, the networks said, was the telecoms flood experienced after 9/11 in the US.
Kristina was on the Piccadilly line train that exploded between Russell Square and King’s Cross, but a sporadic mobile network meant she could not let tell her family that she had survived. “If you can imagine, I did not get home until about 1430 that day. My family were absolutely worried back in Australia,” she told the London Assembly. “My mum thought she was going to have to come over and collect my body. I do believe there has to be some way to keep the mobile service going, keep access going, so we can find out if people are alive.”

Mobile networks have a finite ability to handle calls. They are like a motorway that can only hold a certain number of cars before becoming congested. “There comes a point when there are too many people trying to access a network, it just grinds to a halt,” said Dr William Webb, a researcher at regulator Ofcom and fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. The capacity to take calls is determined by the infrastructure of the network. Mobile operators divide the whole country into thousands of individual geographic areas known as “cells”. At the heart of each of these is a base station or mast, which communicates by radio with individual handsets within the cell.
In urban areas like London, base stations are usually built about 200 to 500m apart. A typical outdoor mast can handle about 100 to 150 simultaneous calls. The number of cells, and therefore the number of potential calls, is based on factors such as geographical location, population density and how the networks believe people will use their phones in the area. At specific events when the networks know they will be busy, such as at music festivals, the networks can increase the number of cells by adding temporary base stations on the back of trailers. At other times like New Year, when they know that people will send a large number of text messages, they can also tweak the network settings to get the most out of the system.
“The networks change all their parameters, hours or even days before,” said Jean Luc Jezouin of mobile infrastructure company Nortel. But on 7 July, none of this was possible. “The issue with unexpected events like an attack is that the networks have no time to engineer for a specific call profile,” Mr Jezouin added. Instead, on the day, the networks had to react to the sudden deluge using a combination of network sleights of hand to boost their capacity.
A simple trick to quickly double the number of calls in a cell is to use what is known as “half rate coding”.
This happened in many central London cells on 7 July and involves compressing the call in a way that allows two calls to be carried in the same bandwidth normally used for one. It causes some loss of quality but both people will still be able to understand one another. According to David Sutton, network continuity and restoration manager of operator O2, the system works, but only to a point. “When it is a major incident such as this, it makes a difference but not sufficient to solve the problem,” he told the London Assembly.
After all, when there is a tenfold increase in the number of attempted calls, even a doubling of capacity only begins to scratch the surface. Other network tweaks used on the day included diverting calls through neighbouring cells and in some instances barring people’s phones on a strict rota. A system known as Access Overload Control (ACCOLC) can also be used to shut down a cell. Although these tweaks increase the number of people who can make calls, they amount to little more than “tinkering at the edges”, said Dr. Webb.
To cope with increased demand on a day like 7 July, there must be a change to the network.
One quick fix would be to build new cells. But, said Dr Webb, increasing capacity was not a simple case of just buying more base stations. “When you build a network you trade off capacity against cost,” he explained. And networks were unlikely to put in that extra capacity on the off chance it might be used one day, he said. “It is not economically justifiable.” So to increase capacity, network providers must find ways of squeezing the most out of existing systems. They can do this by using new compression techniques for voice data, using the radio frequencies more efficiently or by using technology such as smart antennas.
Rather than flooding a cell with radio frequencies, these antennas focus a beam towards individual users and therefore use the available bandwidth more effectively. “It is like using a torch rather than a light bulb in a dark room,” said Dr Webb. Smart antennas are still in development but, according to Mr Jezouin of Nortel, they are “still clumsy and expensive”.

Other solutions on the horizon include a handset that is able to change between different networks, including local wireless hotspots. But while some phones on the market can already make calls over wi-fi networks, the technology is still not clever enough to be able to switch between networks seamlessly.

Another hope comes in the form of third-generation networks. 3G phones were not affected to the same degree as normal mobile phones on the day. This is in part because these networks are less popular and so have fewer people using them. But they also process calls more efficiently and have a higher capacity, built in to cope with video and other bandwidth-intensive data. A standard 3G network can handle three times the amount of voice calls as a normal network, although still far below the capacity needed on 7 July.
So even the systems being built now could not cope if there was another disaster tomorrow. Mobile operators and consumers would be in the same position as they were a year ago. If that is the case, the responsibility falls to government to subsidise the mobile operators or for the phone users themselves to use the networks more effectively.
A government spokesperson admitted state subsidy was unlikely. Education was the key, they said. People must understand that the mobile comfort blanket that surrounds them most of the time is relatively fragile and that the always-on, always-connected culture does not exist in extreme events. Vodafone advises customers “to avoid making unnecessary or lengthy phone calls and, preferably, send   text message” to cut congestion. That, said Dr Webb, was the best advice. In the short term, rather than waiting for technology to provide the answer we must adapt our habits. “It’s a bit like asking people to save water. There’s no apparent benefit to the individual, but if everyone does it, we all reap the rewards.”
[The views expressed by Dr William Webb are his own and do not represent the views of Ofcom]