Permanent Secretary for Public Enterprises, Communications, Civil Aviation and Tourism Ms. Elizabeth Powell was the Chief Guest for officially opening of PIRRC.

The distinguished guests at the launch included Regulators and representatives of Pacific Island Countries, Representatives of World Bank, Pacific Islands Telecommunications Association, International Telecommunications Union, Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat and Japan International Co-operation Agency and the Vice Chancellor and representatives of USP.

The PIRRC is hosted by USP at Level 4 of its Japan-Pacific ICT Center in Suva, and is funded by World Bank and managed by LIRNEasia. The launch of the Centre was followed by two-day working session. Rohan Samajiva CEO of LIRNEasia shared his experience with the Pacific Regulators challenges of Broadband, Alternate Dispute Resolution/Alternate Regulatory Practices. He also presented ICT indicators of the region.

The role of Centre is to collect key industry statistics and issue periodic reports on the state of telecommunications competition in Pacific Island countries, develop information packages on priority regulatory topics including those where technical skills may be required in analyzing industry trends, provide advisory services in response to country requests and to identify additional sources of expertise and issue best practice statements on telecommunications policies, laws, implementing rules and regulatory instruments.

Aslam Hayat talking to the media

This forum will cover the strategies on how to align technology investments with agency priorities – to create necessary infrastructure and establish the enabling environment for the implementation of e-government services, thus, creating an effective and efficient e-Governance.

Rohan will speak at the session “Digital inclusion”. The talk will discuss the projects that effectively and sustainably bridged the digital divide. He will also take part as a panelist in “Mobile as a main Channel of Government Service Delivery”.

Click here,  for the brochure on the event.

For more info visit: http://www.futuregov.asia/events/futuregov-forum-sri-lanka-2011/

He argues that while it is true that electromagnetic radiation from handsets does pose a potential threat, studies by the Indian government  and the WHO argue that:

to date, no adverse health effects have been established for mobile phone use; that studies are ongoing to assess long-term effects of mobile use; and that there is increased risk of traffic injuries when drivers use mobile phones while driving.

However, we, as responsible consumers, need to take the necessary precautionary measures such as buying safe handsets, among other things.

Click here to read the full article.

While noting that Bangladesh boasts of the some of the lowest tariffs in the world, largely a result of budget telecom network business model, Rohan argued that the government’s vision for a “digital” Bangladesh can only be met “by extending the budget telecom network model to broadband, building wireless access networks capable of handling data cost-effectively, backed up by non-discriminatory, cost-oriented access to backhaul, including redundant capacity, and offering applications that are of value to consumers, giving them reason to use broadband.”

Click here to read the full article in the Daily Star. More coverage will be tracked here in the coming days.

Click here to download the full presentation.

LIRNEasia has been involved in broadband quality of service testing in the Asian region for a while now.  The most recent tests using the AT-tester, a diagnostic tool developed by IIT-Madras and LIRNEasia, were conducted in October 2010.

Rohan argued that delivered speeds with the local domain were above those advertised, the opposite was true in the international domain. Furthermore, broadband services in Asia offer lower value for money than in North America,  likely largely  in part due to high international backhaul costs.

Click here to download the full presentation.

His presentation examined Korea’s benchmark model of broadband access and adoption, its success factors, and the extent to which it could be replicated in Asia. He contrasted it with Hong Kong’s market-centric approach that had achieved the same results, faster and with less resources.

Click here to view the full presentation.

More on the conference can be found, here.

Click here to download presentation slides.

The number of users is still small: even among young people in South-East Asia (a tech-friendly lot) only 8% had used “more-than-voice” services, according to a poll by LIRNEasia. But the potential is exciting. Mobile phones are the world’s most widely distributed computers. Even in poor countries about two-thirds of people have access to one (see chart 1). As a result, such devices and their networks, though mainly still much simpler than in the rich world, have become a platform on which many other services can be built. This boosts innovation—just as smartphones and faster wireless data networks have led to an explosion of mobile applications (“apps”)”

Read the full article here.

Rohan Samarajiva, an expert on telecom policy in South Asia, has studied the mobile-phone market in Bangladesh. There, too, investigations revealed hundreds of cases of spectrum sold and resold in “non-transparent” transactions. Nevertheless, Bangladesh has nearly 100% phone coverage and some of the lowest prices in the world. “How the [phone market] entry was created has not harmed it,” Samarajiva says. “The effects are not really in that industry.”‘

Partha Mukhopadhyay, LIRNEasia International Advisory Board Member and Senior Fellow at the Center for Policy Research, India, was also quoted.

A better policy would, for example, unbundle spectrum in cities and villages to encourage carriers to reach underserved rural areas. Increasing the price paid for spectrum (which is, in any case, passed on to consumers) without improving policy “would be a failure,” Mukhopadhyay says. “The fear is, we will not take the lessons from this particular deal and improve the way spectrum is allocated.”

Click here to read the full article.

Organized by the IIMA IDEA Telecom Centre of Excellence (IITCOE), the workshop brings together several key senior executives from the corporate, government and non-for-profit sectors in India.

The PPT presentation is available for download here. More information on the event can be found here.

In September 2009,  LIRNEasia Chair and CEO, Rohan Samarajiva, participated in the second Harvard Forum on “Connection and human development” held at Harvard University, USA.

Harvard Forum II was convened by Nobel Laureates Amartya Sen and Michael Spence, in collaboration with Randy Spence and theInternational Development Research Centre. Its aim was to bring together leading thinkers in the area of development to discuss how ICTs could contribute to poverty reduction in developing countries, both now and in the future. It was a follow-up to the Harvard Forum I held in 2003, where several needs in the ICT for development (ICT4D) area were identified (including ICT governance and regulatory reform, especially in the telecommunication sector).  One of the outcomes of Harvard Forum I was the funding of organizations such as LIRNEasia that seek to remove policy and regulatory barriers to the use of ICTs. This time, the focus was on “what next?”. Implicit was the question of whether such organizations need to shift their focus to applications, since the access problem has been more or less solved. One of the key takeaways was the need to concentrate on incentives, rather than on interventions.

Rohan’s paper on “Leveraging the Budget Telecom Network Business Model to Bring Broadband to the People” has been published in a Harvard Forum II Special Edition of Information Technologies & International Development (ITID) journal. It is available for download here.

Click here to view presentation slides. More information on the event is available here.

Reading between the lines, it appears likely that TRAI will desist from setting ambitious but meaningless MBps targets as is the fashion in many countries.  TRAI will recommend a focus on spectrum refarming, in addition to quick action on releasing the 700 MHz “digital dividend” frequencies, identification of new ranges of frequencies, and actions to improve spectrum efficiency.  The forced resignation of Minister Raja, which was also announced today, appears to rule out any further assignments other than through auctions.

The second keynote address was delivered by LIRNEasia Chair and CEO Rohan Samarajiva.  His presentation assembled evidence from a range of LIRNEasia research to argue that the transition to a data-dominated world would best be achieved in South Asia through multiple paths that included wireless platforms and the extension of the successful Budget Telecom Network Model to broadband.  His presentation reinforced the message in Dr. Sarma’s address that South Asia’s broadband plans had to be inclusive, serving to bring the world’s largest concentration of poor people out of poverty in the process.

The well-attended SAARC CEO Conclave drew the regulators of Bhutan, the Maldives, and Nepal in addition to India and CEOs from a large number of companies.

Presentation slides can be downloaded here.

Presentation slides from the talk will be posted shortly.