“The Future Telecom Leaders contest is a novel and exciting way to engage young minds on the question of Canada’s telecommunications future,” says Lorne Abugov, Founder and Director of Canada’s Telecommunications Hall of Fame. “The industry is looking for the creative ideas and raw talent of entrepreneurial youth to regain some of Canada’s glory in telecom.”

Read the full story in Market Watch here.

Ottawa opens up wireless industry to more competition

The Conservative government on Wednesday paved the way for new cellphone companies by announcing new rules for an auction of radio airwaves designed to spur competition in the wireless industry.

About 40 per cent of the spectrum will be reserved for new entrants, with the remainder open to all bidders, including Canada’s big three providers — Rogers, Bell and Telus. The government will also mandate roaming agreements, which will force existing carriers to share their networks with newcomers for five years, plus another five if the new entrants can build up their own networks nationally. If a new carrier is unable to reach a “reasonable” roaming agreement with an existing provider, an outside arbitrator will be brought in, Industry Canada said.

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The socioeconomic belief is that a CAP message relay is one way of effectively managing disasters, and that is what is envisioned in the Last-Mile Hazard Warning System (LM-HWS) Pilot Project. I will be talking about the current Workpackage of the LM-HWS project, which is developing the Hazard Information Hub (HIH). The general objective of the LM-HWS project is to evaluate the suitability of a selected set of ICT that can communicate CAP messages and alert the village first-responders. The Sarvodaya HIH was specifically built with the intension of providing structured risk information such as CAP messages to the local communities.

The objective of the project is to find optimal ICTs for issuing the last mile warnings in Sri Lanka, which can be extended to other developing countries. It is a community-based last-mile warning system, being tried out in a selection of Sarvodaya’s villages (http://www.sarvodaya.org) in Sri Lanka.

Different technologies will be tested in 32 of Sarvodaya’s Tsunami-affected villages; some are ‘organised,’ some are ‘less organised’ and some have received training, and some have not.

Five kinds of ICTs have been selected in this experiment:

1. Dialog Early Warning Network Remote Alarm Device Dialog Telekom & University of Moratuwa, SL)

2. Sinhala/Tamil SMS with alarm for Java compatible phones (Dialog Telekom & MicroImage)

3. Internet Emergency Public Alerting System (IPAS) with pop-up message (Solana Networks)

4.Disaster Warning Recovery and Response Addressable Satellite Radio (WorldSpace Global Data Solutions)

5. Fixed phone

All of these devices will function if they’re in standby mode when an alert is received. But, sirens will be set off in the case of 1, 2, 3 and 4. Conventional warning relies on TV and radio, which will if switched off, will be of no use.

Sarvodaya has a hazard informaiton hub, where hazard information is collected, and relayed out to the villages.

Common Alerting Protocol, cutting edge software, is being used in the project. By using CAP, large amounts of information can be relayed, in a standardised manner, which can be relayed to the village level.

A key issue is how to make it (CAP) effective , how to make it readble, in Sinhala and Tamil. Have a language tanslator on SAHANA. it makes use of standardised phrases that replace the english text. Once edited, the message has to be relayed. The CAP message can be translated into voice (developing this feature). A configurator informs ‘teleporters’ (e.g Dialog Telekom) which areas to alert.

Info is received from various agents (eg govt). an alert is received, then it is authenticated (with paper trail). CAP message is generated in software at the same time. But only after approval is recieved from Sarvodaya, the message is relayed to the relavant villages. Phone logs can be incorporated for reduncancy.

And now a live demonstration of IPAS by Solana…..

With some intro from Nabil Seddigh, Rupinder Singh, Dr. Gordon Gow and Biswajit Nandy (in Ottawa, via Skype): Solana has carried out field trials for public alerting using Television, the Internet and Telephone Dialers.
Users subscribe to receive certain alerts, they can choose the geographical area for alerts, the alert type (public security, health, etc), and the severity of the alert.

IPAS (internet emergency public alerting system) consists of alert servers (responsible for sending out alerts), public alert client software (resides on computer of end users), public official web portal (to issue alerts) and system admin tools.

This system was trialed three times – first in July 2004, then in November 2004 and finally in February 2005. The key objectives of the trials were to assess technology, to get feedback from public officials, and to get feedback from end users on the usability of the system. Seven Canadian municipalities participated, and included a diverse group of users (students, municipal staff, general public, officials, etc).

After almost ten months of research and activities, UNDP-APDIP’s Open Regional Dialogue on Internet Governance (ORDIG*) has produced a two-part report entitled, “Voices from Asia-Pacific: Internet Governance Priorities and Recommendations” – consisting of 1) the ORDIG Policy Brief and Executive Summary, and 2) the ORDIG Input Paper for the UN Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) and the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

These documents stem from months of consultations involving stakeholder groups from the public and private sectors, as well as civil society.

ORDIG consulted over 3,000 stakeholders through sub-regional meetings, jointly organized with UNESCAP and others; a region-wide online forum that allowed for open and candid discussions on the issues; and a region-wide, multi-lingual, issues-based online survey that looked at the Internet governance priorities of the region.

The resulting two reports are the synthesis, consolidation, and reading of the voices from the Asia-Pacific region. They outline the principles and dimensions that make up the framework for building recommendations, which are provided in the documents at two levels – general and specific recommendations.

Issues and recommendations covered in the Infrastructure dimension are access costs, VOIP, and wireless networks. Issues and recommendations covered in the Logical dimension are DNS management, IP address management, and technical standards. Issues covered in the Content dimension are content pollution (spam, viruses, spyware, etc.) and cybercrime. Issues covered in the Social/Developmental dimension are culture diversity and participation.

The “Voices from Asia-Pacific: Internet Governance Priorities and Recommendations” documents were shared with and endorsed by delegates at the High Level Asia-Pacific Conference for the World Summit on the Information Society, in Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran (31 May-2 June 2005).

Furthermore, these reports will be provided to the WGIG at their upcoming Fourth Meeting (14-17 June 2005), as the Asia-Pacific input for the Working Group’s deliberation.

For all documents, please go to:

ORDIG Policy Brief

http://igov.apdip.net/ORDIG_Policy_Brief.pdf

ORDIG Input Paper

http://igov.apdip.net/ORDIG_Paper.pdf

ORDIG Survey Report http://igov.apdip.net/ORDIG.Survey.Report.pdf

ORDIG Forum Summary http://igov.apdip.net/undp-apdip%20forum%20summary.pdf

Contact:

Phet Sayo, UNDP-APDIP Programme Specialist, phet@apdip.net

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* ORDIG is an initiative of UNDP’s Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (UNDP-APDIP), in collaboration with the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), and the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC). It was carried out with the aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.