Alexander Graham Bell and/or Elisha Gray invented conventional telephony, most people know. Marconi is generally recognized as the father of radio, but many know that people like Tesla did most of the heavy lifting. Bell and Marconi are more or less household names, possibly because the prominence achieved by the companies named for these men.
Who invented the mobile? Here is the obituary of Amos E. Joel, Jr., one of the men who contributed to the emergence of mobile telephony as we know it. But what about the others? Who made the critical breakthroughs?
Last Friday, I was invited to speak at an awards ceremony for the winners of Colomba Wate, a mobile game in Sinhala. The young entrepreneur had given up a cushy university job to start the company, Gamos Technology Solutions. That was perhaps the main reason I agreed to speak at his event within hours of returning to Sri Lanka.
The slides that I used to illustrate my talk are here. The basic thesis was that the mobile is now becoming more than voice, or even an Aladdin’s Lamp, to use Muhammed Yunus’ phrase. I was followed by two speakers, Daya Rohana Athukorale and Arisen Ahubudu.
The former claimed that of the eight reknown hackers in Australia, seven were Sri Lankans. The latter said that King Dhatusena, 5th…
The debate over Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) spectrum auctions and internet telephony comes at a time when international organizations and analysts are painting a starkly contrasting picture of the Indian telecom and IT sectors.
Recent International Telecommunication Union (ITU) data reveals that the success of India’s telecom revolution is restricted to mobile voice with very little to showcase in fixed line and internet access, or high-speed broadband. For a country that is the global IT and ITeS capital or the world’s back office, its own internet penetration remains one of the lowest in the world. Forecasts are equally uninspiring, projecting high-speed internet access to remain abysmal till 2012.
Internet broadband penetration will limp along to eventually reach a measly 3.9 connections for every 100 citizens by 2012.…
Tags: Broadband, broadband wireless access, high-speed Internet, HIGH-speed Internet access, high-speed internet subscribers, India, International Telecommunication Union, Internet access, Internet broadband penetration, Internet penetration, Internet Telephony, Internet users, IP telephony, mobile telephony, The Times, wireless access.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Thursday (Jan 3) recommended open bidding process for granting licences for mobile television service in the country. Allocation of spectrum to mobile TV licensees should be automatic for successful bidders and should not require any further selection process. The FDI limit for mobile television service providers should be 74 per cent, it said.Releasing its recommendations on issues relating of mobile TV service here, TRAI said there were two routes for providing the services — one by using the telecom network with spectrum already allotted, and the other using the broadcasting method — and both can be used for launching the service.
Telecom operators, having the Unified Access Services License (UASL) or the Cellular Mobile Telephony Service (CMTS) License,…
Swami is an employee of My Mobile store in Noida can tell how the mobile business at his store has been dwindling in one of the most popular markets in New Delhi region for mobile phones and its accessories. Before January, My Mobile would sell goods worth about Rs 2.5 lakh on any given Sunday but sales started dipping about four to five months ago and the Sunday before Christmas, which should have been a busy period, with sales being down in the range of Rs1 lakh. “Our future is in danger,” Swami says pointing to a Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications’ service centre that doubles as mobile phone retail store located bang opposite My Mobile outlet. The Sony store opened a year ago.
Several of the…
Tags: cellular telephone, Christmas, mobile phone retail store, mobile phones, mobile retail, mobile telephony, My Mobile, New Delhi, Rs, Sony, USD.
LIRNEasia researchers will be among panelists at the 3rd Global Knowledge Conference organized by Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP).
Two sessions will be based on the LIRNEasia’s study on Teleuse at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP), which is to presented in the form of an interactive quiz show. The background paper is available here.
A session titled ‘Making Communities Disaster Resilient’, hopes to highlight issues related to developing a robust solution for strengthening community resilience in the face of natural disasters. The background paper is available here.
LIRNE researchers will also be among panelists at a session on regulatory transparency and effectiveness. The session, entitled ‘Hello Regulator’, hopes to explore how having easy access to regulatory information and processes can support community and public agendas, access to ICT and so forth.
Click here for further information available on the…
Informa Telecoms & Media reveals that worldwide mobile penetration will hit 50 per cent - or around 3.3 billion subscriptions - on Thursday, just over 26 years since the first cellular network was launched.
Since its birth in 1981, when the first mobile telephony network was switched on in Scandinavia, the mobile phone has become one of the world’s great success stories.
As of the end of September there were operational networks in 224 countries around the globe, a figure that has increased from 192 in 1997 and 35 in 1987.
Informa estimates that mobile networks covered 90 per cent of the global population by mid-2007. This means that some 40 per cent of the world’s inhabitants are covered by a network, but not connected, and leaves…
Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet now at Google, appears to see a key role for the mobile especially in developing countries.
ACM: Ubiquity - Cerf’s Up Again! — A New Ubiquity Interview with Vint Cerf
CERF: Well, certainly that has happened in the sense that the mobile telephony has allowed the provision of communication services, and let me include in that Internet access, in places where it was very difficult to obtain that service before. And so, I think roughly the number of telephone terminations has more than doubled in the last five years. It’s gone from a little over a billion to a little over 2.3 billion. And the 1.3 billion of the 2.3 billion are mobile telephones. So, it has had…
Tags: Broadband, broadband wireless capabilities, cellular telephone, coaxial cable, communication services, Google, GSM system, Internet access, Internet Vint Cerf, Internet-capable, mobile phones, mobile telephony, mobile telephony deployment, optical fiber, physical infrastructure, telephone terminations, These devices, Ultra wideband radio, universal tool, Web surfing, with these increasingly complex systems.
The Drum Beat is a weekly electronic publication exploring initiatives, ideas and trends in communication for development, published by The Communication Initiative. This week’s issue (# 399) focuses on mobile telephony, and is relevant for planning LIRNEasia’s next research cycle. Some of the articles include:
Pocket Answer to Digital Divide (Jo Twist)
Telecommunications: A Dynamic Revolution (David White)
New Trends in Mobile Communications in Latin America (Judith Mariscal and Eugenio Rivera)
From Matatu to the Masai via Mobile (by Paul Mason)
Wireless Communication and Development in the Asia-Pacific: Institutions Matter (Rohan Samarajiva)
The Real Digital Diversity (Seán Ó Siochrú)
Must Haves: Cellphones Top Iraqi Cool List (Damien Cave)
UK Children Go Online: Final Report of Key Project Findings (Sonia Livingstone and Magdalena Bober)
Read more on The Drum Beat
…
Tags: Asia-Pacific, Damien Cave, David White, Eugenio Rivera, Jo Twist, Judith Mariscal, Latin America, Magdalena Bober, mobile telephony, Paul Mason, Rohan Samarajiva, Sonia Livingstone, telephony, Wireless Communication.
Rohan Samarajiva chaired the Universal, Ubiquitous, Equitable and Affordable session at the ITU World 2006 that raised some fundamental questions about Universal Service Obligation (USO) programs around the world. Rohan introduced the topic [PDF] drawing from LIRNEasia’s recent Shoestrings II study on telephone use at the “bottom of the pyramid.”
The first Keynote speaker, Zhengmao Li, VP China Unicom, described the efforts of the Chinese govt and his company in building a harmonious digital society. Thanks to the govt’s policy to provide access to ICTs on an equitable and affordable basis, more than 97 percent of administrative villages in China have a phone.
The second Keynote speaker, Tom Philips, Chief Regulatory Officer at the GSM Association forcefully argued that USO programs in most parts of the world have not…
Tags: Broadband, broadband wireless, cellular telephone, China, communication services, GSM, GSM Association, incumbent carrier, Martin Hilbert, mobile technology, mobile telephony, Motorola, Penn State University, Rob Frieden, Roger Marks, Rohan Samarajiva, technology neutral, telephone use, Tom Philip, Tom Philips, ubiquitous telephone service, United States, USD, voice services, years wireless service, Zhengmao Li.
Ambar Singh Roy, The Hindu Business Line
Habarana (Sri Lanka) , Sept 17
It would be imperative for India to replicate the urban competitive model in its mobile telephony segment in the rural areas with a view to improving the country’s ranking in the global digital opportunity index (DOI), according to LIRNEasia, a regional information and communication technology policy and regulation research and capacity-building organisation. Read full story at The Hindu Business Line online.
Arab Mobile Phone Subscriptions Jump 70% in 2005
Source: www.cellular-news.com/story/18589.php
The number of mobile phone subscriptions in the Arab world has grown by a whopping 70 percent in 2005, underlining a strong consumer demand coupled by increased liberalization and competition in Arab telecom markets, according to a recently published Madar Research study. The study also reveals that Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have achieved mobile phone penetration levels among their population that are comparable with those prevalent in Europe and Pacific Rim countries.
Mobile subscription in the Arab world - total of 18 countries covered by Madar Research excluding Somalia, Mauritania, Djibouti and Comoros - grew from 51.19 million by end 2004 to 87.06 million by end 2005, exceeding all expectation and forecasts.
This resulted in an average…
Tags: Abdul Kader Kamli, Africa, Bahrain, cellular telephone, communication technology-savvy countries, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Europe, fixed telephone service, Gulf Cooperation Council, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Levant, Libya, Mauritania, Middle East, mobile phones, mobile telephony, Morocco, North Africa, Pacific Rim, Palestine, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, United Arab Emirates, www.cellular-news.com/story/18589.php, Yemen.
LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE - LBO
The above column presents evidence to the effect that:
“Given enough time and competition, reformed infrastructure does reduce disparities among regions.
The reforms that started to have effect in the mid 1990s, with the licensing of the fourth mobile operator and the two fixed entrants in 1995-96, the partial privatization and managerial reform of Sri Lanka Telecom in 1997, and improvements in regulation starting from 1998, did result in allowing the rural people of this country greater access to telecom services.
Of course, it must be noted that the dazzling growth in the Northern Province (Jaffna and Vavuniya districts) was only made possible by the cease fire agreement of 2002, the lifting of the nonsensical ban on mobile telephony in conflict areas, and the…
Link to full story
Motorola selected to supply affordable and robust handsets for second phase of programme to ‘connect the unconnected’
Singapore 27th September 2005: The mobile industry has driven the wholesale cost of mobile phones to below US$30 as part of the GSM Association (GSMA) programme to make mobile telephony affordable for people in developing countries.
“To get below US$30 per handset is a milestone achievement,” said Craig Ehrlich, Chairman of the GSMA, the global trade association for the world’s GSM mobile operators. “Today’s news cements the formation of a whole new market segment for the mobile industry and will bring the benefits of mobile communications to a huge swathe of people in developing countries.”
At the 3GSM World Congress in Singapore, Rob Conway, Chief Executive and…
Tags: Bangladesh, Craig Ehrlich, Erik Aas, Globe Telecom, GrameenPhone Ltd., GSM, GSM Association, mobile communications, mobile phones, mobile telephony, Motorola, Orascom Telecom, Rob Conway, Singapore, USD, World Congress.
NEW DELHI, APRIL 13: The government is in the process of amending the Indian Telegraph Act to extend the Universal Service Obligation (USO) fund support to cellular mobile services (both GSM and CDMA).
As of today, the government is giving USO fund support to only the fixed line operators offering services in the rural areas.
“We are looking at amending the Telegraph Act to accommodate the cellular services and CDMA-based services to reach the rural areas. We are looking at sharing of the passive infrastructure with the cellular service providers,” communications and information technology (C&IT) minister Dayanidhi Maran told reporters.
Besides covering the villages, the minister is of the opinion that the wireless services should also provide connectivity to the Railways and highways especially in rural areas. When…
Tags: ADC, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, CDMA, Cellular Operators Association of India, cellular services, China, Dayanidhi Maran, fixed line services, Germany, GSM, India, information technology, Japan, mobile telephony, New Delhi, passive infrastructure, Rs, rural telephony, telephony, United States, WIRELESS SERVICES.
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