At the end of a long day at Telecoms World South Asia in Dhaka, I presented some of the preliminary results of the Broadband QoSE work being done with IIT Madras. I talked about the finding that the bottleneck in Chennai and Colombo appeared to be the international segment and that the first results from the testing done in Dhaka suggested the same applied to Bangladesh, with the ISPs using satellite (versus undersea cable) were suffering very high latencies.
The CEO of a Pakistan ISP, Mr Wahaj us Siraj, said that the situation in Pakistan was very different, with plenty of capacity available on the undersea cables and low contention ratios (1:4) being used. Prices of international capacity had come down radically in recent times,…
Rohan Samarajiva has been invited to speak at the 2008 Telecoms World South Asia Conference, to be held in Dhaka, Bangladesh from 7 - 9 October.
This event, designed for South Asia’s top telecommunication players interested in building and managing a business-focused telecommunciations organization, is intended to provide an important platform for information exchange through dialogue between serious players in the region. The event will feature keynotes, thought-leadership presentations, interactive discussion panels and real-world case studies on ‘hot topics’ pertinent to the South Asian industry.
Rohan will make a presentation entitled, ‘Introducing broadband: investment conditions, regulatory challenges and addressing QoS’ at a session entitled, ‘Exploiting technologies for future growth and development’. Rohan will also be among panelists at a discussion on ‘Leveraging on next generation technologies to extend the service offering’.
Other…
One of the key debates on broadband is between those who believe in “all you can eat” service packages and pricing and those who do not. Our research so far indicates that broadband can only be provided to the Bottom of the Pyramid using the same kind of business plans that were effective in providing mobile service to the BOP, that is, not all-you-can eat.
Comcast, a leading US ISP, has just announced caps on downloads. If this is the future for rich country users, can there be any doubt about what the future for BOP users in poor countries?
Ten years ago, pretty much all the traffic went through the US Internet backbone. Today, claims are being made that only 25 per cent of traffic is routed through the US system.
This may require changes in LIRNEasia’s (and Singapore’s) efforts to improve broadband quality of service experience through benchmark regulation or otherwise, using as one of the measures, Round Trip Time to the Internet cloud, defined as first point of landing in the US. An alternative will not be easy to come by, but we have faith in the wisdom of the many. Please contribute.
LIRNEasia’s ‘Rapid Response Program’ is exactly what the name suggests. We react to immediate information needs of telecom regulators, at short notice. The response might not be lengthy and as comprehensive as we would like it to be, but nevertheless helpful, as Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) have realised.
LIRNEasia saw BTRC’s move to issue three new Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) licenses a positive development, as Bangladesh is certainly not a country that can boast of quality and affordable broadband.
This is what we learnt from our research:
Exceptionally high cost of broadband remains a key barrier that prevents the development of the BPO industry in Bangladesh. This is apparent when the prices are compared with similar packages offered by the operators in neighbouring countries. The annual cost…
Tags: access devices, Bangladesh, Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission, Broadband, broadband services, broadband wireless access, DHAKA, European Union, Grameen Cybernet Ltd, India, Quality of Service, radio systems, Sri Lanka, Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Sri Lanka, USD, wireless access.
To an ordinary observer the image on left looks like some monkeys but to Nuwan Waidyanatha that is his complex Early Warning System. Monkeys act as sensors and detectors of hazards (aka a leopard) to deer – who would take immediate action for mass evacuation.
Again the image on top right look likes a damper to any engineering student, but to Nuwan that is mass evacuation. The figure below might explain it better with the blue line representing a quick but rough evacuation and the red line a smoother one.
What does this figure has to do with Broadband QoS? If the zero line is assumed to be the accepted level, this explains the change in QoS with the growth of markets. Initially it is the best with…
Broadband QoSE testing is generating interest. A news report on ‘Times of India’ yesterday (April 7) suggested the site www.speedtest.net to determine connection speed. This site, like many such others available on web, lets a user to ping to a selected server to check the throughput. (See above – A Sri Lankan user pings to a server in Hong Kong, one of the few available options)
This is fine as long as only the bigger picture will do, but as found in early stages of our research, it gives no clue about the point of bottleneck. Neither has it measured other metrics than the throughput which can be important depending upon the application.
The difference in AshokaTissa methodology proposed by LIRNEasia and IIT Madras is that it covers not only more…
At a well attended public seminar yesterday (March 18) at Institution of Engineers (Sri Lanka), LIRNEasia released its Broadband QoSE testing methodology (named ‘AshokaTissa’, after the greatest collaboration between India and Sri Lanka, the movement of Buddhism across the Palk Strait) and the preliminary test results of three of the most widely used broadband packages in Sri Lanka, SLT Office (2 Mbps / 512 kbps), SLT Home (512 kbps / 128 kbps) and Dialog (2 Mbps / 512 kbps) This was followed by the responses from SLT and Dialog Broadband. The event was jointly organised by LIRNEasia and Institution of Engineers. (Sri Lanka)
Speeches/Presentations available for downloading:
Comments from the Chair – Rohan Samarajiva
Introduction to broadband and Test Methodology – Timothy Gonsalves
Preliminary QoSE test results – Chanuka…
Video Road Hogs Stir Fear of Internet Traffic Jam - New York Times
For months there has been a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet. The threat, according to some industry groups, analysts and researchers, stems mainly from the increasing visual richness of online communications and entertainment — video clips and movies, social networks and multiplayer games.
Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital bits as they traverse the Internet’s pipes and gateways, requiring, in industry parlance, more bandwidth. Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.
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Quality of Service Experience (QoSE) of broadband was a topic that has been discussed in LIRNEasia blog for sometime and we find many readers share the view of the Australian cartoonist who portrayed information superhighway to a modern car with cart wheels - the infrastructure.
LIRNEasia’s on-going QoSE benchmarking project aims to find the answer to the question, based on evidence not perceptions, whether the users actually get what has been advertised by the operators.
A seminar presenting preliminary results of Broadband QoSE measures, with the participation of Professor Timothy Gonsalves of IIT Madras (who headed the team that developed the methodology) will be held in Colombo on the 18th of March. This is an open event, but prior registration is recommended. (Tel: 011 267 1160, 077 763 6821;…
Greeting people by text message (SMS) has become a general behavior. Cellular mobile networks are tolerant to processing such messages on birthdays, weddings and other personal events of their customers. But the networks get chocked when gigantic wave of messages hit the airwaves. New Year is one such event when the mobile phone networks continue processing billions of messages for quite a while. But all networks are not necessarily capable of handing the traffic of text even in the developed economies. Recently the Americans have faced trouble with texting in this New Year. They have also complained network congestion after 9/11 in 2001. Regulatory intervention to ensure minimum QoS of the mobile services has become imperative.
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