LIRNEasia’s preliminary round of mobile broadband quality testing in selected locations in Western Province unveils both hopes and issues. The good news is that the quality of both key pre-paid mobile broadband services is satisfactory, in majority of locations. However, unusual quality drops in several places indicates that this performance is not always a certainty. In general, a mobile broadband user in Western Province can expect a reasonable quality unless a rare issue like the distance from a tower or a higher number of simultaneous users hinders it.

LIRNEasia tested the broadband quality of the popular pre-paid High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) broadband connections of the two key providers. Packages offered by the third provider were not tested only because the operator prevented pinging from outside the network. Mobile test applications newly developed and released by Zamsana PLC, were used on mobile handsets for testing. To further simulate the true conditions the tests were done on public transport.

We saw little reason testing mobile broadband quality from fixed locations. It should be done on the move as that is how it is used. We could have done it from a car, but purposely did it from a bus to examine how conditions beyond our control can affect the performance.

Testers used mobile test applications developed for Symbian and Windows CE, the two most popular mobile operating systems used in Sri Lanka. They took both stationary and on the move readings at key points along four main roads from Colombo to Kalutara, Negombo, Avissawella and Nittambuwa. Apart from the download and upload speeds, the two most common parameters the tools recorded Return Trip Time or RTT (the time taken by data packets to reach a destination server and return), Jitter (the variation in RTT), Packet Loss (what percentage of packets were lost on the way) and the availability. The actual values were compared with the promises of the operators or, if no operator specifications were available against international standards.

Mobile broadband quality testing is a part of LIRNEasia’s broadband Quality of Service Experience (QoSE) benchmarking work. With its partner organization‐ the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, LIRNEasia has been testing broadband quality since the beginning of 2008. The first tests were conducted manually. Later the test methodology was standardized and a software application was developed to get more accurate results. First round of testing was done only in Colombo and Chennai, but now the scope is expanded to cover New Delhi, Dhaka, Mumbai and Bangalore.

A direct approach to monitor Quality of Service Experience (QoSE) would be for the regulator to reach deep into the innards of the telecom network to install monitoring equipment and take remedial actions as per the licenses or the governing statute whenever the data indicate below‐standard performance, says LIRNEasia. Dearth of financial and human resources can be a key challenge for such an approach. The second approach is based largely on user activism. Educated users are expected to voluntarily contribute their time and computing resources towards building a performance database which in turn will be used in creating the bigger picture.

A comprehensive methodology to benchmark Broadband Quality of Service Experience (QoSE), based on the latter approach has been developed jointly by LIRNEasia and the TeNeT Group of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT‐M). While there is no barrier for regulators to use it, the methodology is largely user centric. Instead of depending on one time pinging, this methodology uses AT‐Tester, an open source software tool to monitor all crucial QoSE broadband metrics over a longer period, on both weekends and weekdays, covering peak as well as off‐peak traffic. The traffic is also monitored within segments, ISP, local and international.

(The figure above shows the average peak time download speed to an international server offered by the pre‐paid mobile broadband packages of the two key mobile broadband providers on a selected date. The ceiling is the promised speed of 1 Mbps. Speeds may vary depending upon the type of the handset, time of the day, number of simultaneous users connected to a tower and the weather conditions. Please click on image for an enlarged version.)

The latest issue features an e-interview with LIRNEasia’s CEO Rohan Samarajiva, but it is not the only reason why we thought of highlighting the issue. The content is interesting and very readable. We publish two e-interviews from July 2010 issue here fully, as they are not available on public domain.

Apart from Samarajiva, This issue carried e-interviews with Alison Gillwald, Indra de Lanerolle, Christoph Stork and Muriuki Mureithi.

If you are interested in future issues please register at http://lists.apc.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/chakula

The need for competitive research for policy influence
e-interview with Alison Gillwald

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“High quality, rigorous research…is required to compete and complement with each other for policy influence… In mature economies researchers from multiple universities would be debating and refining the positions governments should be taking on everything from regulating next generation networks to demand stimulation for broadband.”
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Alison Gillwald is Executive Director of RIA. She is also Adjunct Professor at the UCT Graduate School of Business, Management of Infrastructure Reform and Regulation, and a member of CPRafrica’s organisation and selection committee.

CHAKULA: You have just held the CPRafrica conference in Cape Town. What are you hoping to achieve through the conference?

ALISON GILLWALD [AG]: There is almost no scholarly research being undertaken in the field of ICT policy and regulation on the continent. A Google scholar search on the subjects throws up around five scholars on the continent who are published in peer reviewed or accredited journals. It is this kind of high quality, rigorous research that is required to compete and complement with each other for policy influence. In mature economies researchers from multiple universities would be debating and refining the positions governments should be taking on everything from regulating next generation networks to demand stimulation for broadband. Although there are pockets of applied research being undertaken there is no tradition of critical intellectual engagement in this area on the continent. The purpose of CPRafrica is to provide a forum for nurturing and showcasing research in the area of ICT policy and regulation on the continent and enhancing its quality through rigorous academic review and debate. The conference is complemented by a young scholars programme to expose young scholars who may be excluded from such peer-review, paper-acceptance-only style conferences without such a category. Some of these are part of the IDRC- [International Development Research Centre] funded PhD programme to encourage doctoral research in ICT policy and regulation. The idea here is to build a cadre of policy intellectuals on the continent able to critically engage government on the basis of relevant research and contribute meaningfully to research and policy excellence. This will further enhance Africa’s standing in international research and governance fora, in which its participation has historically been suboptimal.

CHAKULA: Reviewing some of the papers presented at the conference, it strikes me that there are a couple of threads that are emerging. Two in particular stand out: the notion of “innovation” in the telecommunications space, and the challenges around convergence and policy when two distinct sectors with different ways of doing things are brought into conflict with each other. I also went back to Research ICT Africa’s 2008 M-banking policy paper, which raises similar themes, and I would like to use that as a starting point. First, on the issue of ‘innovation’. In the M-banking paper, the following assertion is made: “Policy-makers and regulators need to ensure that evolving systems serve the broader objectives of economic growth and development as well as protect consumer interests, while creating an environment that encourages and rewards innovation”. In what ways can policy inhibit or encourage innovation in the telecommunication’s sector?

AG: Indeed, providing certainty to investors and operators while retaining the levels of flexibility to enable innovation in a fast-changing environment is one of the most difficult balancing acts that policy-makers and regulators have to perform. I think the linkages and catalysts between technology, market and regulatory innovation are becoming clearer all the time. New technologies and service offerings have prized open markets and the entry into less policy and regulatory constrained markets has made taking certain technologies to market more viable. This has triggered further possibilities across historically distinct platforms, not only between broadcasting and telecommunications, but between fixed and mobile services and even entirely separate sectors such as telecommunications and banking. The challenges to the expansion of such services are really regulatory now rather than technological – and that is not to say that one does not want or need public interest regulation either in the telecommunications or banking sector, but it has to be done in new, innovative ways that enable to extension of these services to those who currently don’t enjoy them. Once these various forces are unleashed they are able to intersect and create new opportunities and innovative ways of doing things that have not been done before.

CHAKULA: Innovation here seems necessarily to be tied to market gain – the objective is to increase or capture market share. In both your M-banking paper, and the case study of the mobile operator One Network in Kenya, preconditions exists that facilitate innovation. With M-banking there are low-income earners who are ‘unbanked’ and who could benefit from some kind of low-cost transactional instrument, and with One Network, there is a significant level of cross-border traffic that makes a seamless network attractive.
AG: It is true that innovation is often driven by market forces and pursuit of profits, and, traditionally, with new technologies have focused on high-end markets. But much of the ICT innovation we are witnessing in developing markets is focused on what has been referred to as the ‘gold at the bottom of the pyramid’ – very profitable turn-over of high volumes of sometimes minuscule margins on products that, by breaking them up or making them available at cost, the masses at the bottom of the economic and social pyramid can enjoy things like pre-paid phone vouchers, or transferable airtime vouchers. And many of these products have been commercialised innovative practices by the poor in order to access and affordably use communications services – such as missed calls, multiple sim card usage that allows for same net rates, or ‘plastic roaming’.

CHAKULA: If we consider Indra de Lanerolle’s fascinating case study on the South African convergence scenario, we see two sectors (broadcast and telecommunications) in conflict with each other because policy decisions are made according to different frameworks: simply put, economic versus public interest. In fact, Indra does seem to suggest that these are in competition with each other, and resolves this in an interesting way. It feels hard to believe that ‘consumer interest’ is the same as ‘public interest’?

AG: I think with the shift from public utilities to competitive markets many of the public interest objectives of delivery and service are met through serving the consumer interest. Nevertheless there is public interest regulation that is required to improve wider and collective consumer welfare – to provide access to ‘uneconomic areas’ for example – though with new more cost-effective, rapidly deployable wireless services, this concept in markets that enable competitive entry is regularly not proving to be the case. But as long as we have the large number of poor that we do, we will need some level of social regulation – even though a lot of the current pent-up demand could be met with greater market efficiency (more competitive markets offering better prices). And then there are the more traditional content regulation issues either to restrict certain ‘harmful’ content or activities or to enable it, such as local content regulation. That too may be found to be highly profitable, but may need either protection or encouragement.

CHAKULA: Indra’s paper, like your M-banking policy paper, shows that regulating convergence is tricky because of the ‘convergence’ of two or even more sectors; whether broadcast/telecommunications or telecommunications/banking etc. What are some of the key challenges that policy-makers can expect to face in Africa?

AG: The key challenge for African regulators is that they are still trying to deal with legacy regulation around first and second-generation infrastructure and access. At the same time, if they do not want the agenda to be set for them in international fora, they need to deal with next-generation issues, not only of converged IP [internet protocol] networks and services and the next-generation regulation issues of network and service-neutral regimes, but of cross-cutting issues of electronic commerce frameworks, intellectual copyright rights, security and privacy issues, and so on. And you have to do it all or be left behind…

CHAKULA: One frustration is that when one reads a good paper that seems to offer a solution to a problem, one is also met with the feeling that those with decision-making powers are probably not going to read that paper, or seriously consider its arguments. Do you feel the same? If so, how do you think CPRafrica picks up on this challenge? Is it just a case of repeating issues until policy-makers take them on board?

AG: No. CPRafrica is one of several strategic strands towards having evidence-based ICT policy on the continent. This is about organic and indigenous knowledge creation and contribution, at the national level, at the level of regional association and continentally, and also about global engagement and influence. For too long have the solutions come from the developed world. Of course, there are lessons to be learnt and we don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but we also have different challenges and Africa has demonstrated remarkably innovative responses to these when they are informed by sound policy, effective regulation or thorough and appropriate business plans. The indicator research done by RIA and its analysis in order to assess policy and regulatory outcomes is fed into several initiatives, globally and locally. RIA provides the only comprehensive public domain demand-side data on ICT access and usage on the continent. This is used in national, regional and continental meetings on ICTs, and in the database and reports of multilateral agencies such as the OECD and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), to better inform their understanding of developments in Africa. It is true that sometime decision-makers do not like to hear of the widespread policy and institutional failure on the continent, but many do – especially those that are rapidly improving and beginning to see the rewards of their reforms. This research is also used to develop training curricula that address the needs of policy and regulators in a developing country context. So, for example, as part of the global research and training collaborative LIRNE.net we conduct a professional development course on alternative regulatory strategies at the UCT Graduate School of Business Infrastructure Reform and Regulation Programme to build institutional capacity on the continent. So CPRafrica is just one arm of a multi-pronged strategy of research and education, institutional capacity building and technical assistance and dissemination and advocacy, through our website database, policy papers and workshop and public presentations.

CHAKULA: What is the way forward for the conference? Will there be more?

AG: Yes, in order to build and sustain this much-needed capacity we will have to find a way for CPRafrica to become an annual institution.

Related links:

M-Banking the Unbanked: RIA Policy Paper No. 4:

http://www.researchictafrica.net/new/images/uploads/RIA_Mobile-banking.pdf

CPRafrica conference details: http://www.researchictafrica.net/index.php/news/38-cprafrica-looking-back-at-a-decade-of-communications-reform-looking-forward-to-2020
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Innovation through competition: the budget telecom network model
e-interview with Rohan Samarajiva

Paper link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1564529

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“The status quo must be unbearable.”
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Rohan Samarajiva is the Chair and CEO of Lirnasia. His paper, “How the developing world may participate in the global Internet Economy: Innovation driven by competition” was presented at a workshop organised by the OECD and InfoDev in Paris, 10-11 September 2009.

CHAKULA: In your paper, you talk about the Budget Telecom Network Model (BTNM), which is brought about by competition allowing operators to reduce the transaction costs of low-end clients. This, as you point out, is different to the standard Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) model. How does it make the ARPU model redundant?

Rohan Samarajiva [RS]: ARPU is a short-hand that outside observers use to see if the firm is doing well, whether its prospects are good, etc. It is, like any indicator, imperfect. You get it by taking total revenue (preferably without extras like roaming) and dividing by number of subscribers. Of course no one really knows what a subscriber is any more, with even poor people holding up to five SIMs, foreigners having SIMs, no agreement on what an active SIM is and so on. You can get better results by looking at revenue per minute. Take total revenue (less roaming and other stuff) and divide by Average Minutes of Usage per User per Month (MOU). This is a better indicator. But investment analysts are still not used to this and it would require disclosing MOUs to calculate.

CHAKULA: Can ARPU be used as a business model?

[RS]: Operators do not actually do much with the ARPU. It is not a business model as such, just an indicator. But getting more from each subscriber (if this is known) is not a bad idea. Just that it does not predict whether the company will make money or not. The best indicator for that is EBITDA [Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization] margin. Sri Lanka in 2007 had an operator with LKR311 (approximately USD3 at the time) ARPU making close to 50% EBITDA margin. In the end, the success of a business model lies in whether it generates profit.

CHAKULA: What is your understanding of ‘innovation’ in the telecommunications space? You talk of “business innovation”, rather than, say, technological innovation?

[RS]: Tech innovation is important, but it is not the only thing. Pure tech innovation is done by manufacturers of network equipment and handsets. That is good. Business process innovations (e.g. lowering the costs of base stations through software) are done by operators. These include technical aspects, but are not limited to them. Shifting from one business model to another (discovering the latter) is also innovation, but it may or may not not have a tech aspect at all.

CHAKULA: What are the preconditions for innovation, do you think?

[RS]: The status quo must be unbearable. The BTNM innovation occurred when competition got so intense that there was no way to gain market share or even survive without doing something new.

CHAKULA: Does BTNM have implications for increased access to broadband internet for the majority of people on a continent like Africa?

[RS]: Yes. The latter part of the paper is entirely on the extension of BTNM to broadband. Some headlines are that operators must have enough money from voice that can be invested in the 3G plus networks. Once the overlay network is built out the operators have to offer low prices. Prepaid sachet pricing is best, where one buys packages of connectivity in minutes or in capacity. Here, because of lower transaction costs and prices there should be an influx of new customers. This is already on offer in Asia. Africa has to lower prices. Access will be over mobile networks, using dongles or built in modems, for laptops and other devices, including phones. ADSL will be a niche product. Wireless access is the future.

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One of the most controversial of the recommendations that came out of this work is that which said one should go gentle on regulating quality. The main reason we said that was because we believed that the poor needed access in the form of different price-quality bundles; that if high quality standards were imposed by fiat, the only victims would be the price-sensitive consumers who would get priced out. While we did not take an explicit position on net neutrality those days, we now have to, based on what we have learned. We do not believe net neutrality is appropriate for emerging economies, especially for the BOP.

Major decision has come down from the US courts on the Obama appointees’ attempt to mandate net neutrality by law:

A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that regulators had limited power over Web traffic under current law. The decision will allow Internet service companies to block or slow specific sites and charge video sites like YouTube to deliver their content faster to users.

The court decision was a setback to efforts by the Federal Communications Commission to require companies to give Web users equal access to all content, even if some of that content is clogging the network.

The cuts will likely please fixed operator BT and small mobile operator 3, who both teamed on a campaign to get the rate either cut or dropped entirely. Smaller mobile operators tend to pay more in mobile termination rates as their users are likely to spend more time communicating with other networks than their own. The UK’s larger operators – Vodafone, O2, Orange and T-Mobile – face losing out on up to £1 billion in revenue according to reports. Ian Scales of Telecom TV demands, “Why not take it to zero?”  But the Guardian is skeptic, “This is only a proposal from Ofcom so there will be an awful lot of lobbying from the four big networks, not least of the potential Conservative government, to reduce the severity of the price cuts.”

Here is his key question:

Or to put the question another way—what do we lose if we (or rural Sri Lankans) only have mobile communications with optional access to the Internet and we by-pass the personal computer completely? What happens if that becomes the communications paradigm for a range of countries such as Sri Lanka who, having not managed to effectively respond to the digital divide to this point, decide basically to give up the fight and leave it all to the ambitions and creativity of the mobile operators.

We can say more, much more (and have, with more evidence than casual observation), but here is the comment I left on his blog:

“Give up the fight and leave it all to the ambition and creativity of the mobile operators?”
Well, isn’t that a smooth rhetorical move? Ceasing to repeat a futile and wasteful act is giving up the fight, and who would want to be labeled a wimp? And which of the critics of the telecenters said anything about the ambition and creativity of mobile operators as being the only alternative?

To talk of mobile networks connecting people to each other and to information and giving them the ability to engage in transactions and remote computing is not to limit the discussion to mobile handsets. The extraordinary takeup of mobile dongles in the developing world suggests that the mobile networks will be used to connect to the Internet by users from various devices: Chanuka has documented that telecenters that do not connect through dongles affixed to desktop computers are throwing money away. Netbooks on the one hand and smartphones on the other are converging the functionalities of computers and mobile phones while also bringing down the costs of connectivity to levels unimaginable just a few years ago. The creativity of more actors than the mobile operators is at play here.

The mistake that is being made is to imagine a highly constricted version of mobile-based connectivity when the manner by which one connects to the Internet via mobile networks is changing very rapidly. This is like trying to discuss travel on an expressway solely in terms of what is feasible on a dirt road.

The other sleight of hand is to say that the aspects of computer use that are not dependent on the Internet (such as typing up resumes) will all be irretrievably lost should the government-subsidized telecenters shut down. Peter Benjamin showed years ago that indeed most S African telecenters ended up as disconnected computer training shops. If there is a demand for resume preparation or whatever, the market will meet it, using subsidized or other computers. And has the writer not heard of OLPC and other low-cost computer solutions that will allow young people to use computers more normally than in virus infested common use settings?

It is highly wasteful to keep pouring millions into subsidized telecenters that people do not use, simply to ensure that young people have the opportunity to type up resumes. If the writer had kept his eye on the roadside signboards in Sri Lanka more closely he would have seen the proliferation of computer skills training centers and courses. Do these establishments not have computers? Do they not allow those computers to be used for a fee?

The opposite of “giving up the fight” is to continue to pour money into telecenters. Seems to me that Einstein describes this behavior well: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Join the debate. Here or on Gurstein’s blog. Those whose children will have to repay the loans taken to subsidize telecenters (low interest or other) are especially welcome.

“Google, indeed, appears to be playing a chess game,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “If they can create an even mildly credible commitment to offer superfast broadband to the home, it could strike fear in the hearts of cable and telcos, stimulating an arms race of investment — just as they did in the auction for spectrum a few years ago.”

In a post on its corporate blog, Google said it planned to build and test a high-speed fiber optic broadband network capable of allowing people to surf the Web at a gigabit a second, or about 100 times the speed of many broadband connections. Thase trial could be offered in several communities and extend to as many as 500,000 people.

In an interview, Richard S. Whitt, Google’s Washington telecommunications and media counsel, said Google was not entering the broadband or Internet service provider business, but rather was using the test to push the industry into offering faster Internet access at lower cost. “This is a business model nudge and an innovation nudge.”

The NYT today carried a story that says many of the things we have been talking about for the past two years.

Tracking the speed of Internet service is becoming more and more important as everyone asks the Internet to do more than handle e-mail messages and Web pages. A few lines of text can take its time arriving, but applications sending voice calls or streaming video become unusable if there is too much delay in delivery.

Some Web sites and software packages let users test the speed of data through their Internet service provider, or I.S.P. All the providers offer a glimpse at the quality of the connection, but that information is just one bit of data; each new request for a Web site or a file involves dozens of computers, and any of them could be a weak link.

“Even in Web browsing, pages are getting more complicated,” Professor Odlyzko said. “You click on a link and you end up setting dozens of connections. Ads are being served. You end up doing a database lookup. Any extra latency gets compounded because you have many, many stages.”

The difference between the QoSE problem in the US and the rest of the world is that they live practically inside the Internet cloud. The entire discussion about what the ISP is responsible for does not apply in our parts, where the ISP has to get us to the Internet cloud through Singapore or wherever. ISP’s responsibility is not limited to the ISP domain, but extends to the first landing in the continental US (a point we took from the Singapore IDA). When we used the AT Tester in N America, we tested it using sites in Europe.

As people increasingly rely on powerful mobile phones instead of PCs to access the Web, their surfing habits are bound to change. What’s more, online advertising could lose its role as the Web’s primary economic engine, putting Google’s leadership role into question.

“The new paradigm is mobile computing and mobility,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “That has the potential to change the economics of the Internet business and to redistribute profits yet again.”

In recent decades, the power of industry giants like I.B.M. and Microsoft, which once seemed unassailable, waned as computing shifted from big mainframes to PCs, and from PCs to the Internet. Many analysts say it is now Google that is faced with a less certain future in the face of another shift.

Alison is the featured dinner speaker at CPRsouth4 in Negombo, Sri Lanka, on December 7th. I am sure she will speak to this court case and the challenges facing policy intellectuals in environments like ours. The relevant excerpt of the judgment is given below.

Three principal grounds for the alleged perception of bias are relied upon. First, the Link Centre received funding from some of the complainants in the SAVA complaint. This is disposed of quite easily. The Link Centre is a research and training body in the field of information and communications technology, policy, regulation and management. It is the only major organization in South Africa that focuses on these matters. It has published internationally and presented papers at conferences. While it is correct that the some of the complainants funded the Centre, the Link Centre also received funding from the government and from Vodacom, a company in which Telkom had a 50 percent shareholding. Its largest funding during the time of the investigation was from Vodacom. Telkom was approached for funding as well but declined to contribute. The donations from industry participants were less than a fifth of local donor contributions and a fraction of the multimillion Rand foreign donor contribution from the Canadian Independent Development Research Centre. The second ground is that, the advisory board of the Link Centre included various people who were closely involved with the complainants at the relevant time, in particular, the co-president of SAVA and the co-president of ISPA. Thirdly, the authors of the Link Centre report made statements and pronouncements that were highly critical of Telkom prior to being employed to prepare the report. These statements are to the effect that Telkom’s profits were outrageous; that ICASA’s decisions were regularly overturned because of Telkom’s influence; and that Telkom by using its monopoly power sought to retard growth of the value-added network and internet sectors and so interfered with the effectiveness of South African business. For example, Ms Gillwald, one of the authors of the Report, stated that ‘a consequence of Telkom’s unchecked dominance has also had a chilling effect on the partially-liberalised value-added services segment of the telecommunications market, which includes the internet service providers.’ None of the statements or publications ascribed to the authors of the report was denied: however, all claims of bias were rejected, and Ms Gillwald deposed that the views of the authors of the report were founded on research.

As neither we nor most of our readers do not have access to the thread it was posted, we like to continue the discussion here.

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Hi people,

I come from one of the ten largest economies in the world, with nearly 200 million people, 8.5 million km2, and 5.564 municipalities, where 94% of the people do *not* have access to any form of broadband – the “B” in the famous BRIC acronym.

I am just coming out of the IGF workshop “Expanding broadband access for a global Internet economy: development dimensions”. I left the workshop a bit shocked with the concepts expressed, not by the AT&T representative (who not surprisingly said AT&T subdsidiaries countries other than the USA should be considered local companies because they employ local people), who as usual is just doing his job in defending the so-called “market”, but by other speeches which seemed to completely ignore that, in most of our contries, there is a de facto monopoly or cartel situation regarding the telco infrastructure, and that public policy ought to centrally take this into account if the aim is to universalize broadband access with quality to all families.

One of the speakers (from LIRNEasia) said that “lower prices require lower costs” and therefore one should just “phase out universal access levies and rationalize taxes”. I retorted that pricing per Mb/s of ADSL broadband in São Paulo might be 65 times higher than the same price charged by the same company in London — and therefore no amount of levies or taxes would justify such scandalous pricing difference, not to speak of the much lower QoS.

I suggested that, instead of eliminating the universal service funds (whose levies are a very small portion of price composition of broadband), we should insist on reforming policy regarding the use of these funds. The reply I heard was that it makes no sense to keep funds that are not used or are squandered (!!). Impact of the fund’s levy in Brazil is just 1% of the price of the fixed line telephone connection — its impact in the price of broadband (a separate bill even if the service is not unbundled) is zero.

There was also a recommendation that we should be “gentle on QoS” to facilitate things regarding universalization of access — fascinating. Again, examples abound in which telcos guarantee only 10% of the nominal contracted rate, and in practice this might be even less. Should we just agree with absurds like this in the name of “it is better to have something than nothing”???

And then there is the crucial question of unbundling, central to the policy debate in the developed countries as it directly impacts universalization through an effective reduction of prices for the final user. It is a major challenge for broadband public policy in developing countries, where regulators are usually in the hands of the telco cartels. The word was not mentioned (not a single time) by anyone in the panel, as if irrelevant to the development dimensions of broadband.

The speaker also mentioned that the “need” to reduce costs for the big telcos would require reduction of international bandwidth costs. One of the two big carriers in Brazil, a Brazilian conglomerate, owns redundant fiber running from Brazil to Miami in rings passing through countries in the Caribbean and Central America. They own their own international link, in summary. So do the other carrier in the de facto duopoly — a major operator from Europe. This does not make any difference in pricing for the final user, although it does contribute to their profits in Brazil being far higher than in Europe for example.

Finally, the fascination with mobile. Of course the AT&T speaker started his talk by waving a fancy iPhone to the audience — mostly natural for a commercial wireless giant. But the infoDev representative and others mentioned mobile as a “solution” for the poor, and not even bothered to separate the discussion in the two main topics here: first, the mobile phone as a connectivity device to enable the user to fully use the Internet through a friendly human-machine interface, be it a common PC or special equipment for people with disabilities; second, the phone itself as *the* alternative to the full user experience that a PC or similar might provide. It seems the agency bureaucrats are satisfied with having two castes of users: a small minority of the ones who can fully use the Internet as it evolves requiring more and more multimedia capabilities on both sides (server and client), and the ones relegated to a small device on which it is barely possible to type small messages.

In the first regional LA&C preparatory meeting for the IGF, in 2008, a representative of a major telco said we should not worry about bringing the next billion to the Internet — they have cell phones, so they are connected already, problem solved. I wonder if this executive would take the place of a carpenter looking for a job, who has to compose and send by email his CV together with images of letters of recommendation to his would-be employer, and had nothing but a cell phone (smart or not) to do it. Not to speak of comparing the executive’s thin-fingered hands of a pianist with the big callous hands of the carpenter.

fraternal regards

–c.a.

And wireless phone carriers might well start calling them something else entirely as they race to begin selling laptops with bundled data plans directly to consumers.

“We have been flying the carriers around the world,” said Michael Rayfield, the general manager of mobile products for Nvidia, one of many chip companies producing parts for these new laptops. “They all want to meet the manufacturers and come up with their own look and feel.”

A 30-person company called Mobinnova worked with Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn for just four months to make what amounts to the thinnest, most power-efficient laptop for the carriers. Called the Elan, the Nvidia-based device can run for up to 24 days on a single charge if it is just playing music or run for 10 hours straight playing high-definition video.

Mike Holland, Mobinnova’s vice president for business development, said that one telecommunications company, which he declined to name, will start offering the product before the Christmas shopping season at a price of $49 to $99.

The full story.

But is this optimism justified? Are cheap and portable devices like mobile phones and PDAs enough to make a real social and economic difference? Will these technologies draw Africa to and beyond the tipping point where development becomes self-sustainable? Or does more work need to be done?

Alison Gillwald welcomes the huge strides made in African telecommunications, but warns that the extension of networks and services in recent years has been “sub-optimal.”

Gillwald directs Research ICT Africa (RIA), a continent-wide partnership of specialists dedicated to building ICT policy and regulatory research capacity. The network, launched with seed funding from Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), is
hosted by The EDGE Institute in Johannesburg.

African telecommunications, says Gillwald, have been undermined by many countries’ own policies, governance arrangements, and market structures, and by the absence of institutional capacity and regulatory competence. The continent lags behind the rest of the globe in four key areas: access, quality of services, pricing, and regulatory environment.

Africans, in other words, remain disconnected from one another and from the wider world. As Gillwald puts it, “I don’t think we can talk about the ‘democratization of technology’ because we don’t have the essential ingredients.”

Full interview is here.

As a result, I’ve acquired quite a bit of knowledge on satellites along the way.  So when I heard that the government was going to name a LEO (Low Earth Orbital) satellite for Sir Arthur C. Clarke (the originator of the concept of the exact opposite, Geostationary or High Earth Orbital satellites), I was intrigued.

Before large amounts of taxpayer money are committed to this project, it would be good to have a broad debate on the pros and cons.  I have not been able to identify any pros, but that was not for the lack of trying.

Here is my effort to get the debate started:

Speaking of the second geostationary satellite, Mr Kariyapperuma had stated that “the ‘geo’ can be used for broadcasting, communications and high speed Internet.” It can indeed be used for the first two, but one wonders whether a LKR 11,500,000,000 (11.5 billion) satellite is the highest priority for this little island which seems to be doing pretty well in terms of TV, radio and telecommunications. Satellites are usually required by large continental or archipelagic countries like India and Indonesia.

The Civil Aviation Minister Jameel who announced that the bill was being sent for legal review at a press conference said that the country is now at a stage where such legislation is urgently required. The bill covers all aspects of postal services, telecommunications and info communications including licensing, establishing standards and implementation.

The Minister also stated that the government will establish a Communications Authority of Maldives for the purposes of regulating and implementing the Communications Act.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said China’s biggest mobile operator, China Mobile, was awarded a license for TD-SCDMA, the domestically-developed 3G standard.

The other two main carriers, China Telecom and China Unicom, received licenses for the US-developed CDMA2000 and Europe’s WCDMA, respectively.

The 3G high-speed networks can handle faster data downloads, allowing handset users to make video calls and watch TV programs.

Read the full story in China Daily here.