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,…
An article entitled, ‘Teleuse at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Beyond Universal Access’, co-authored by Harsha de Silva and Ayesha Zainudeen, has been published in Telektronikk, a leading telecommunications journal, published by Telenor, Norway.
Appearing in the journal’s second issue for 2008, aptly titled, ‘Emerging Markets in Telecommunications’, the article explores the extent to which “universal access” to telecommunications has been achieved in Asia, based on findings from LIRNEasia’s five-country study of the use of telecommunication services at the ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’, namely in India, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand.
Very high levels of access, but low levels of ownership are found. The paper then looks at the potential benefits that these non-owner users are missing out on, and then goes on to look at the key barriers to ownership…
Tags: Ayesha Zainudeen, BOP, Bottom Of The Pyramid, Harsha de Silva, India, Norway, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Telektronikk, Thailand, universal access.
In a fullpage advertisement that will be published in the Sunday papers on October 5th, Tigo, Sri Lanka’s “third” mobile operator (not that we place that much stock in market share calculations based on numbers of active SIMs), will effectively end the unloved receiving-party-pays regime in Sri Lanka. Its tariff scheme is about the simplest I have seen in a long time: all incoming calls free; offnet outgoing 10 LKR cents a second (roughly USD 0.001); onnet outgoing 5 LKR cents a second (roughly USD 0.0005). No time periods.
This is a case of the market responding to what the customer wants in the face of regulatory failure, or a work around of the type we discuss in our book. From 1999, the Telecom Regulatory Commission…
Tags: calling party pays, fixed operators, interconnection, mobile operators, origination services, receiving party pays, retail price, Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka Telecom, Telecom Regulatory Commission, Telecom Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka, termination services.
Mark Wood, who among other things coordinates the group that is working harmonizing the address space for cell broadcasts on mobiles at ITU-T, had an intensive discussion with representatives of Sri Lanka mobile operators at a meeting organized at very short notice by LIRNEasia on 2nd of October 2008. He was on his way back from a successful visit to Male to speak at a cell broadcasting workshop co-organized by LIRNEasia and the Telecom Authority of Maldives.
Why is harmonization important? Coastal areas are vulnerable to rapid-onset, broad-spectrum hazards such as tsunamis and cyclones. Coastal areas also attract large numbers of tourists. Therefore, these disasters affect not only the nationals of the countries they occur in, but also tourists. For example, Sweden, which far from the…
According to TelecomTV, TeliaSonera is acquiring controlling interests in Spice Telecom, the second mobile operator in Nepal and Applifone, the fourth largest operator in Cambodia.
This is an intriguing development from a company many thought was withdrawing from the South Asian region. A few years ago there were well publicized negotiations to sell its stake in Sri Lanka’s Suntel, which is believed to have failed for the lack of a high-enough bid.
TeliaSonera and its predecessor entities have not shown the nimbleness of its Nordic competitor, Telenor which has strong positions in South and South East Asian countries. One hopes it will. Both Nepal and Cambodia need investment and innovation.
Results for Indonesia in LIRNEasia’s Telecom Regulatory Environment survey show an interesting trend. Unlike their counterparts in other countries (Bangladesh, India, Maldives Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand) Indonesia telecom experts have given marks so low for different aspects of their regulatory environment that none of the categories, in any three sectors, meet the average of 3. (The options were from 1 to 5, 1=extremely unsatisfied, 5=excellent service) The one comes nearest is the score for Market Entry in the mobile sector (there are nine players in the market – eight national, one regional) but that too miss the average by 0.05 points.
The results do not show a change from the previous (2006) scores. The score for the fixed sector remains same as it was in 2006,…
Tags: 2008, Bangladesh, Broadband, Colloquium, fixed, India, Indonesia, LIRNEasia, Maldives, Mobile, Sri Lanka, Telecom, Telecom Regulatory Environment survey, Thailand, TRE survey.
Exactly seven years from yesterday (still today to some), early in the morning on September 11, 2001, nineteen hijackers took control of four commercial airliners en route to San Francisco and Los Angeles from Boston, Newark, and Washington, D.C. The hijackers flew two of the airliners, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center. Another group of hijackers flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. A fourth flight, United Airlines Flight 93, whose ultimate target was either the United States Capitol or White House, crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The rest, as we say, is history.
What 9/11 was to the West, ‘the’ tsunami was to the South. Caught unaware, more than 225,000 lives…
Tags: Alberta, Asia, Boston, Boxing Day, Colombo, communication technologies, conventional fixed wireless telephones, Gordon Gow, hazard alert systems, India, Indonesia, International Development Research Centre, Java, LIRNEasia, Los Angeles, mobile phones, Newark, Pennsylvania, Pentagon, Peter Anderson, public network, remote alarm device, SAN FRANCISCO, satellite radio, satellite technology, Shanksville, Simon Fraser University, South Towers, Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan government, Thailand, United States Capitol, University of Alberta, Very Small Aperture Terminal, VSAT, west coast, White House, World Trade Center.
Telecom major Bharti Airtel today said the company hopes to start operations in Sri Lanka within this calendar year, despite the delay in getting interconnection from the local operators there.
“Discussions are going on with the Sri Lankan telecom regulator and the existing operators there relating to the interconnection issue. It should be sorted out shortly,” company’s CEO Manoj Kohli told reporters here.
“We should be in a position to start our operations there before 2008. It is as per our schedule,” he said.
Earlier a Senior Executive of Bharti Airtel, Sanjay Kapoor said the incumbent operators in Lanka are not giving interconnections to the company, which is anticompetitive in nature.
Responding to that four Sri Lankan operators had issued a joint statement yesterday terming Bharti’s allegations as false.
The…
Last Friday, I was invited to speak at an awards ceremony for the winners of Colomba Wate, a mobile game in Sinhala. The young entrepreneur had given up a cushy university job to start the company, Gamos Technology Solutions. That was perhaps the main reason I agreed to speak at his event within hours of returning to Sri Lanka.
The slides that I used to illustrate my talk are here. The basic thesis was that the mobile is now becoming more than voice, or even an Aladdin’s Lamp, to use Muhammed Yunus’ phrase. I was followed by two speakers, Daya Rohana Athukorale and Arisen Ahubudu.
The former claimed that of the eight reknown hackers in Australia, seven were Sri Lankans. The latter said that King Dhatusena, 5th…
Rohan Samarajiva, Executive Director, LIRNEasia argues mobiles (and other ICT tools) play a definite role in the climate change – or rather preventing it. That will decide whether the future generations will see Elephant Pass or not. Irrespective of the outcome of the war, it might be six foot under water soon unless global warming is stopped.
Extracts:
I will not get into the debate about who should cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, conceding that what little Sri Lanka does will not affect the outcome decisively. Instead, I will simply look at one small area that will help us to reduce our carbon footprint (a good thing to do in any case) and also improve the quality of our lives. Even if it makes no measurable…
Even Udurawana, the local version of the legendary not-so-bright Sardarji, will not let it go without having a hearty laugh at the expense of new CDMA laws of Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (TRC).
Imposed few weeks back, they specify CDMA phones can be used only at the address it is issued to. (CDMA technology is used in Sri Lanka for fixed wireless and not mobile)
How on earth a CDMA phone can be restricted to one address, asks Udurawana, when you sometimes even have to climb to your neighbour’s wall to receive signals.
We hope the Sri Lanka rural users who have faced similar problems would readily empathise. (We hear once the mother-in-law of a former Director General of TRC too had to take her phone to a particular…
While some Asia-Pacific economies are world leaders in information and communication technologies (ICT) where broadband access is ultra-high speed, affordable and close to ubiquitous, in most of the region’s poorer countries Internet access remains limited and predominantly low-speed.
This is what ITU’s Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Report for the Asia-Pacific region 2008 says. It was released at ITU TELECOM ASIA 2008, Bangkok, Thailand yesterday (Sept 2, 2008).
The Report finds evidence that ICTs and broadband uptake foster growth and development, but the question remains as to the optimal speed that should be targeted in view of limited resources.
The area in which the region really stands out is the uptake of advanced Internet technologies, especially broadband Internet access. The Asia-Pacific region is the world’s largest broadband market with a 39…
Tags: 3G, Asia-Pacific, Bangkok, Bangladesh, Broadband, broadband access, broadband and triple-play services, broadband Internet access, broadband Internet subscribers, broadband technologies, Cambodia, China, communication services, communication technologies, continuous high-speed Internet access, desirable and valuable online services, Distance Learning, fibre optic, Fixed and mobile broadband technologies, HIGH-speed Internet access, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Internet technologies, Internet Telephony, IP telephony, ITU TELECOM, Japan, Laos, Maldives, mobile phones, Myanmar, poorer countries Internet access remains, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Philippines, Tonga, ubiquitous Internet access plan combining, ultra-high speed Internet applications, USD, Wi-Fi.
Barack Obama stands for Net Neutrality while John McCain sternly opposes. Internet should be open space, says Obama, for anyone to use any application of his/her choice without discrimination.
That is like saying the roads are free for anyone to drive any vehicle they like at any time. It sounds good in theory. However, in practice it is a different story.
Can we let the container-trucks to move during peak hours congesting roads? Can we let bullock carts in a high way?
In spite of the tech-savvy image he tries to cultivate, perhaps Obama has not heard about the broadband quality issues. Perhaps he assumes at the zenith of developed world USA does not face bandwidth issues. He is wrong.
Net Neutrality comes with a price tag attached. If…
Babar Bhatti, who maintains an interesting website on Pakistani telecom developments, has written an interesting post where he calls for simpler tariff plans. Having seen the graphical presentation of Dialog Telekom’s tariff plans in their nice new publication, 077, I am convinced that there is a need for simplification in Sri Lanka too. Surprisingly, I cannot find the publication, or the graphical presentation of the tariff plans, on the Dialog website.
Informed consumers exercising consumer sovereignty are the basis of competitive marketplaces. If they cannot figure out the prices they are paying, how can they be sovereign?
Sri Lanka will build a state-sponsored 250 metre tall common broadcast tower for television, radio and telecom firms, information minister Anura Yapa said.
“The building of towers in a haphazard manner cannot be allowed,” Minister Yapa said.
“The tower will be a national icon, like those in China, Kuala Lampur (image) and Tehran.”
Sri Lanka’s telecom regulator Priyantha Kariapperuma said the tower will be located in Peliyagoda in the greater Colombo area and will have a public observation gallery and a restaurant.
The tower will be built at state cost, but a private investor may be attracted later, he said.
Source: Lanka Business Online
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