Worldwide mobile messaging grew nearly 10 percent in the third quarter compared to the second quarter of the year, fueled by new trends in the messaging market, according to VeriSign, which provides Internet infrastructure services and delivers messages on behalf of carriers and content providers.
The company reported Tuesday that VeriSign enabled more than 58.3 billion messages per day during the third quarter of 2008. This was up from about 52 billion messages sent during the second quarter of 2008.
On average, this means that VeriSign facilitated the delivery of about 634 million messages per day during the third quarter, compared to 572 million messages a day in the second quarter. In the third quarter of 2007, the company helped move 280 million messages per day across…
In 1998, the principal journalist organizations of Sri Lanka agreed on the Colombo Declaration on Media Freedom and Social Responsibility. That served as a roadmap for some interesting and innovative reforms including the creation of a self-regulatory mechanism for print media in 2003. Of course, the reforms were not completed.
In the hope of revising the text and energizing the reform effort, the Sri Lanka Press Institute organized a workshop, at which I was asked to speak. In light of the 15 minutes I was assigned, I decided to focus on SMS and cell broadcasting within the larger context of mobiles, a subject we are deeply interested in, rather try to cover the waterfront.
In my presentation, I contrasted the connectivity and new media availability in 1998…
Last month at the GSM Asia Pacific conference in Colombo, LIRNEasia’s Helani Galpaya presented some evidence on the way roaming charges have evolved in the region. She showed that overall South Asia’s roaming charges were higher than those in South East Asia and that South Asian operators also seemed to discriminate among visitors from different countries more. This research has, finally, been picked up and publicized, along with a statement from Rohan Samarajiva that bringing down intra-SAARC international voice telephone charges is a higher priority. This same statement was made at a SAARC Chamber of Commerce seminar, where LIRNEasia offered to provide the data to the national Chambers of Commerce so that they could increase the transparency of the roaming market, one of the most…
The number of voice calls being made has remained steady over the past two years, but text messages sent and received have increased by a staggering 450 percent.
At the end of 2007, text messaging had just overtaken voice calls 218 to 213. But by the end of the second quarter of this year, an average mobile phone subscriber placed or received 204 calls, compared with sending or receiving 357 text messages.
Teens between the ages of 13 and 17 now send or receive 1,742 messages per month, compared to the second-highest age group, 18 to 24 year olds, who send and receive about 790 messages.
Read the story in Wired News or New York Times.
The war against porn continues – at full throttle. We are just twelve kilo meters away from porn-free net. Stay tuned. You may hear the good news anytime.
Meanwhile ‘National Child Protection Authority of Sri Lanka’, which claims keeping an eye on your child even when you are sleeping, wants to keep an eye on your mobile too. According to what Lakbima published today, you are not supposed to receive any porn material through SMS (sic – guess this should be MMS) or host any porn sites in your mobile. (We did not even know this was possible. All these days we thought websites are hosted on high capacity web servers, not on mobile phones. Guess this will not be good news for the server manufacturers.)
So…
LIRNEasia’s Lead Economist presented the findings on the percieved benefits of telecom access at the bottom of the pyramid at ‘The Global and Globalizing Dimensions of Mobile Communication: Developing or Developed‘ a pre-conference program at the ICA 2008 conference in Montreal on 20-21 May 2008.
The paper presented, ‘Perceived economic benefits of telecom access at the Bottom of the Pyramid in emerging Asia‘ takes a look at what BOP phone owners gain from telecom access from their own perspective. One of the most interesting findings here, is that although they see efficiency gains stemming from phone access/use, they don’t relate these to economic gains. This is puzzling, because we know from macro-level studies that a positive relationship exists between phone penetration and national income; additionally, theory suggests…
After two decades of mobile voice services through mobile phones, and nearly a decade of mobile data usage through SMS services, mobile data services (MDS) of a more traditional Internet style is finally on the up in a big way.
The m.Net and University of Adelaide study notes that: “It has taken a while, but mobile data services (MDS) use is now disseminating beyond a small number of high level users to the wider market, according to the Wireless data services study 2007.”
The study is done on an annual, international basis, and “investigates mobile phone user engagement beyond voice and looks at the current type and levels of MDS, the influencing factors and barriers to the use of MDS, and the use of MDS across global…
Mobile Benchmark Studies in South Asia and Latin America | L I R N E . N E T
DIRSI’s study on mobile price and affordability also adapts the OECD price baskets to compare the monthly costs of using mobiles in six Latin American countries. The Latin American baskets take into consideration call and SMS volumes and usage data as specified in the OECD methodology,[5] but excludes initial connection charges. The DIRSI study also does not report data on postpaid or indicate whether different MoUs have been applied to prepaid and postpaid.
Despite differences in methodology, it is interesting to note the rather large differences in the monthly costs between users in South Asia and Latin America; even though the former takes into account a broader set…
According to LIRNEasia’s latest comparative study of price and affordability indicators in eight South Asian countries, Bangladesh emerges as having the lowest average monthly cost of using a mobile at all levels of use (low, medium and high) for different tariff plans (prepaid and postpaid). Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka follow closely, while Bhutan, Maldives and Afghanistan are seen to have significantly higher average monthly mobile costs.
The study compares mobile tariffs in South Asia using price baskets, derived from those used by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The baskets are calculated for low, medium and high users for pre- as well as postpaid tariff plans, factoring in usage charges (voice and SMS), line rental, connection charges (depreciated over a three year period), and…
Many of us have our own stories how SMS helped in an emergency. Here is mine.
I was at the National Book Exhibition at BMICH on September 12, 2007 evening when a tsunami alert was broadcast. It created instant chaos. I did not have access to a TV or a radio. By then the mobile voice channels were congested.
So it was SMS that I used to:
(a) Find accurate updates about the alert
(b) Make sure my family members are safe and
(c) Inform my family that I am safe
All above was critical for me to decide on my next steps. I did that within 10 minutes, learnt it was low risk, decided to shop for some more time (anyway they closed early on that day) and went home…
It is well known that China polices the Internet content that its citizens can access. The story below talks about a growing movement within China that seeks to challenge these arbitrary restrictions on simple information retrieval and publishing actions. A 17-year old girl’s comment “I don’t know if it’s better to speak out or keep silent, but if everyone keeps silent, the truth will be buried,” seems particularly powerful to me and motivated me to write this post.
Several months ago, the government of Sri Lanka blocked access to Tamil Net, a website used by many, including almost all the important journalists, to find out the other side of our one-sided news stories on the war. Of course, this was easily circumvented by those who wanted…
Tags: Burma, CDMA, China, Congress, Faces Online Rebels - New York Times, firewall, Guangdong Province, Internet content, Kangxi, Pan Liang, phone networks, SMS, Sri Lanka, Web site operator, YouTube.
Campaign tools | A-twitter | Economist.com
Twitter imposes a 140-character-limit on all tweets. The choice is technical, not aesthetic; most mobile-service providers won’t carry text messages longer than 160 characters. This limit, as with any restricted poetic form, is a strength. Foreign correspondents in the first half of the 20th century learned to write in cablese, a series of abbreviations demanded by news organisations that had to pay by the word. Twitter, according to Ms Cox, forces the writer to think economically. “If I strip out the padding,” she says, “what’s my real point?” Twitter, she says, works best when puncturing a candidate’s own narrative. From Michigan she tweeted “Mitt [Romney] has so many things ‘in my bloodstream’ (cars, Michigan, business), you could make a v…
Telecom Cook Islands Ltd, the sole provider of telecommunications in the Cook Islands, has completed commercial deployment of ADC’s UltraWave GSM softswitch. Telecom Cook Islands, which has been in operation since July 1991, is a private company owned by Telecom New Zealand Ltd. (60%) and the Cook Islands Government (40%).
The new softswitch - which upgrades Telecom Cook’s core wireless network to more efficient, IP-based technology in order to reduce costs and enable value-added services such as integrated SMS, voicemail, GPRS and pre-paid calling, has been in deployment since September 2007, and the final network cutover was accomplished last week. The UltraWave solution includes an overall expansion of the network’s capacity to 15,000 from 8,000 GSM subscribers.
Read the full story here.
(Background info: This group of islands…
Tags: ADC, Britain, Central Intelligence Agency, Cook Islands, Cook Islands Government, GPRS, GSM, Hawaii, integrated SMS, IP-based technology, New Zealand, Of GSM Softswitch Telecom Cook Islands Ltd, pre-paid calling, SMS, South Pacific Ocean, Telecom Cook, Telecom Cook Islands, Telecom New Zealand Ltd., telecommunications, voicemail, Wireless Network.
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.
Consumers across Asia are the most prolific users of mobile messaging and are forecast to further drive message volume in 2008, a research firm said on Thursday.
Nearly 1.5 trillion mobile messages were sent in the Asia-Pacific region over the past 12 months, accounting for 78.9 per cent of all SMS traffic globally last year, said a Gartner’s report.
Nearly 2.3 trillion SMS messages are expected to be transmitted in 2008, a 19.6 per cent increase from the 2007 figure.
The usage of text and picture messaging is also forecast to increase across Asia, Gartner said, but growth rates are likely to slow down as the mobile market becomes increasingly saturated.
Read the full story in ‘The Age’ here
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