Tag Archives: Mobile
Applications now open for LIRNEasia Young Scholar Tutorials, hosted by NUS, Singapore. Click here for info on how to apply.
Mobile booms remittance boon in Bangladesh
Bangladesh exported 50 percent less manpower in 2009. Thousands of jobless workers also returned home as their employers went broke after the Wall Street collapsed. Yet inward remittance grew by 20 percent ($10.72 billion) in 2009. How could fewer workers send the highest-ever remittance? The mobile networks covering nearly 100 percent of the population as [...]
Explaining mobile behavior: Latitude, culture, economics?
One expects the Economist to give weight to economic explanations. But not in fluff pieces written over the holiday break. According to the Economist, heavy mobile use is explained by latitude, not the ultra-low prices that are the result of the Budget Telecom Network Model.
Yet these global trends hide starkly different [...]
Iraqis love their mobiles & payments, but there’s a downside
When we asked the people of Jaffna what good came of the ceasefire of 2002-05, they said phones and the opening of the road connecting them to the rest of Sri Lanka. Looks like the Iraqis are similar. I love my mobile like a baby, says on Iraqi mother. De facto m-payments [...]
Telecom access rankings in South Asia
According to the ITU ICTeye, which is now carrying 2008 data, Pakistan’s surge to overtake Sri Lanka has petered out, leaving the Maldives (143 active SIMs/100 people) as the undisputed leader in mobile connectivity (apparently all adult Maldivians carry two active SIMs; there are only two operators in the Maldives), and Sri Lanka second with [...]
Mobiles afflicted with Galapagos syndrome
What does mobile handset design and Darwin’s theory of evolution have in common. Read the full article for an answer.
At first glance, Japanese cellphones are a gadget lover’s dream: ready for Internet and e-mail, they double as credit cards, boarding passes and even body-fat calculators.
Competition is fierce in the relatively small Japanese cellphone market, [...]
LIRNEasia research used to justify telecenters in Bangladesh
Interesting how research gets used. We draw the conclusion that mobile is the path to the information society or digital Bangladesh or whatever it’s called. In the Dhaka Mirror article, the Bangladeshi experts draw the conclusion that what is needed are more telecenters.
M Faizullah Khan, president of the Bangladesh Computer Samity, disagrees with [...]
Britain to tax fixed lines 6 pounds a year for broadband: expect more mobile-only households
To many people’s surprise, the UK has decided to tax every fixed line 6 pounds a year to build “next generation broadband” throughout the country.
But Virgin’s network is limited and fibre-optic cables are expensive. The two firms can profitably reach only around two-thirds of the population, reckons Matt Yardley of Analysys Mason, a consultancy [...]
More radios than TVs and phones?
Until recently, I believed, with Richard Heeks quoted below, that radio is found in more homes (at the BOP or all) than phones and TVs. Survey data from the BOP at three countries that account for the world’s greatest concentration of poor people (Pakistan, India and Bangladesh) tell a story that contradicts the [...]
Ideas for maturing mobile markets: Sex info for teens
Voice is becoming a commodity. Mobile operators have to think of new services that people will pay for. Here is one. It’s not porn. It’s intervention from a government agency to prevent teen pregnancies.
THE special cellphone, set on vibrate, begins to whir. Throughout North Carolina, anonymous teenagers are texting [...]
India’s urban-rural telecom gap?
An AFP story published today talks about the Indian boom in mobile connections, despite all round economic gloom: a record 15m new connections were added in India in January 2009 according to the article.
India’s “mobile revolution” is still mainly seen in the cities, but the real prize for phone companies is the vast rural market, [...]
Mobile broadband is it
Just liked everything else in telecom, the signs were visible in Asia first, Indonesia and Sri Lanka in particular. The debate in the blogsphere is all about HSPA and HSDPA, no one cares about tired old ADSL. We do, of course, and will continue to work on fixed, nomadic and mobile broadband [...]
Mobile in the toilet: What to do
It could happen to anyone: you dropped your cellphone in the toilet. Take the battery out immediately, to prevent electrical short circuits from frying your phone’s fragile internals. Then, wipe the phone gently with a towel, and shove it into a jar full of uncooked rice.
This is not the kind of thing we post everyday, [...]
India has most competitive mobile market in the world
In the course of her research on India’s telecom policy and regulatory environment, LIRNEasia Senior Research Fellow Payal Malik calculated the HHIs for different circles in India and found them to be very low. Drawing on other TRE research and the literature, she has made a comparative assessment of the level of competition in India [...]
India Telecom: The ringtone is loud and clear
Everyone is betting big on the telecom growth story as it is steadily gaining traction amidst the global financial turmoil. This sector has emerged as a big contributor to the GDP and has recorded a 42.2% growth in the quarter ended Sep ‘08.
Telecom is being seen as a significant contributor to the country’s foreign direct [...]
Recent Comments