Nicholas Negroponte said, in the context of the United States, that all that was carried on wireguides would shift to wireless (e.g., telephony) and all that was carried by wireless (e.g., television) would shift to wireguides. Wireless was better at connecting people who were inherently mobile; while wireguides made better sense for hauling large amounts of data needed to give people high-quality entertainment experiences. George Gilder called this the Negroponte Switch.
The US market, of course, was heavily wired to start with: twisted-pair copper from the phone company and co-ax from the cable company coming to most homes and offices. In this context, the Negroponte Switch made eminent sense. The refarming, for mobile uses, of 700 MHz frequencies that were inefficiently used for television, earlier in…
Click on the links to see the full articles covering LIRNEasia’s book, ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia: Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks.
‘BSNL’s monopoly over infrastructure a hindrance to growth’ - Financial Express (India)
Rural connectivity is now the focus of every telecommunication player in the country. Almost all stakeholders, from handset manufacturers to service providers, believe that the next wave of growth is in the rural areas.”However, India’s roll out (of telecom services) in rural areas has been slow. BSNL has the backbone infrastructure but is not yet ready to share it with private players,” he added.
Tags: access networks, Ashok Jhujhunwala, Asia, ATM, Ayesha Zainudeen, backbone infrastructure, Bangladesh, cellular telephone, Chennai, Department of Telecommunications, Financial Express, GSM, Harsha de Silva, IDRC, India, Jhunjhunwala, LIRNE asia, Madras, mobile phones, Pakistan, Rohan Samarajiva, rural telephony, Social Science Research Council, Sri Lanka, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, telecom services, telephony, Yahoo Tech Group.
In the remote agricultural province of Lao Cai in Vietnam a few shared community phones are being replaced with high-speed WiMAX broadband connections and VoIP telephony for thousands of residents.
In rural Cambodia, a new 3G/UMTS mobile network is being deployed for delivery of high-bandwidth wireless services, including live streaming of mobile TV channels.
In rural India, farmers can monitor crop prices and place orders for goods electronically by visiting broadband “community centers” that are taking root around the country.
All are examples of a “rural revolution” enveloping less-developed countries in
Asia and around the world, made possible by advanced telecommunications technologies such as Wi-Fi, WiMAX and 3G.
This revolution is bringing high-speed Internet access and next-generation telephony to millions of users who previously had little or…
Tags: 3G, Asia, basic telecoms services, Broadband, Cambodia, high-bandwidth wireless services, HIGH-speed Internet access, India, telecommunications technologies, telephony, Vietnam, VOIP.
It was only in 2005 that Bangladesh got connected to the world through an undersea cable. It is being claimed that this link has been sabotaged, at the same time as the government ordered the shut down of mobile networks, serving multiple millions of customers.
:: bdnews24.com ::
Dhaka, Aug 23 (bdnews24.com) – International telephony, internet and private international data circuits went down when the submarine cable link was “sabotaged” at 00:05am Thursday, a senior BTTB official confirmed.
It cut off Bangladesh from the rest of the world and intensified panic and confusion at home and abroad amid widespread violence across much of the country for days.
Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board (BTTB) has been trying to restore the country’s only terrestrial overseas communication lifeline.
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The government will auction three international gateway (IGW) and two interconnection exchange (ICX) licences among private operators in October, a top official said Monday. But no foreign company or foreign joint venture will qualify to apply for IGW or ICX licence. Even the non-resident Bangladeshis’ business outfits are not eligible either. Only the companies fully owned by resident Bangladeshi citizens are qualified for these international telecoms licences. Private fixed or mobile phone operators also cannot contest in this race. But the state-owned Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board (BTTB) gets the IGW and ICX licences by default being the incumbent international monopoly. Read more.
The Drum Beat is a weekly electronic publication exploring initiatives, ideas and trends in communication for development, published by The Communication Initiative. This week’s issue (# 399) focuses on mobile telephony, and is relevant for planning LIRNEasia’s next research cycle. Some of the articles include:
Pocket Answer to Digital Divide (Jo Twist)
Telecommunications: A Dynamic Revolution (David White)
New Trends in Mobile Communications in Latin America (Judith Mariscal and Eugenio Rivera)
From Matatu to the Masai via Mobile (by Paul Mason)
Wireless Communication and Development in the Asia-Pacific: Institutions Matter (Rohan Samarajiva)
The Real Digital Diversity (Seán Ó Siochrú)
Must Haves: Cellphones Top Iraqi Cool List (Damien Cave)
UK Children Go Online: Final Report of Key Project Findings (Sonia Livingstone and Magdalena Bober)
Read more on The Drum Beat
…
Tags: Asia-Pacific, Damien Cave, David White, Eugenio Rivera, Jo Twist, Judith Mariscal, Latin America, Magdalena Bober, mobile telephony, Paul Mason, Rohan Samarajiva, Sonia Livingstone, telephony, Wireless Communication.
Bangladesh government seems to be convinced to open its last monopolistic area of telecommunications; international telephony. This is a good initiative, which needs to be supported as it would bring quality and cheap international telecoms services. However looking at the on-going debate on various aspects of this subject in the name of “VoIP Licensing” no one seems to focus on the most important area: Whether Bangladesh will come out as winner or loser after liberalization in terms of valuable foreign exchange? Pakistan’s Regulatory Consultant M. Aslam Hayat writes.
Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, Associate Professor at Harvard’s John F Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachussetts, has criticised the increasing global tendency for everything on the Web, in telephony and in computing to be recorded, archived and kept forever.
He said, “In March 2007, Google confirmed that since its inception it had stored every search query every user ever made and every search result ever clicked on. Like the Soviet state, Google does not forget. Google remembers forever.”
He adds, “If whatever we do can be held against us years later, if all our impulsive comments are preserved…our words and actions may be perceived years later and taken out of context…the lack of forgetting may prompt us speak less freely and openly. Regardless of other concerns we may have,…
CDMA has been a major force in helping drive down per-line costs of telephony. Has this been possible even with excessive royalties extracted by Qualcomm?
Qualcomm Under Scrutiny by Korean Antitrust Agency - New York Times
The South Korean antitrust agency has formed a task force to investigate the licensing and business practices of the wireless technology company Qualcomm, the latest in a string of legal battles for the company, officials said on Tuesday.
In Japan, Europe and the United States, Qualcomm, which is based in San Diego, faces accusations by rivals that it has abused its market dominance in wireless technology to demand excessive royalties and block fair competition.
Qualcomm is known for developing code-division multiple access, or CDMA, wireless technology, which is a rival standard to…
Tags: CDMA, Europe, GSM, Japan, Korean Antitrust Agency - New York Times, mobile communications, money by selling chips, Qualcomm, San Diego, telephony, United States, wireless technology.
The Hindu Businessline, Thomas K Thomas, New Delhi , July 13Increasing usage of broadband and Internet-based services has prompted Indian international bandwidth providers to raise their capacity by 95 per cent over a one-year period.
According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, bandwidth owned by various gateway service providers such as VSNL, Reliance Communication and Bharti has gone up to 12.7 Giga bytes in March 2006 compared to 6.5 Giga bytes at the end of the previous financial year.
Explaining the growth, Mr Kiran Karnik, President, Nasscom, said: “Bandwidth requirement is largely being driven by the IT industry, particularly the BPO sector, and also rapid Internet adoption at homes. In addition, it is being fuelled by requirements of a growing economy. Everything is moving towards data…
Tags: Bharti, Broadband, broadband services, dial-up Internet users, India, Internet Service Providers Association of India, Internet services, Internet Telephony, Internet-based services, IP telephony, Kiran Karnik, leased line Internet services, Nasscom, New Delhi, rapid Internet adoption, Reliance Communication, sample product, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, telephony, Thomas K Thomas, VSNL.
From LankaBusinessOnline
Extended Family
05 June 2006 14:23:29
Sri Lanka opens the door for fifth mobile phone operator
June 5, 2006 (LBO) – Sri Lanka plans to expand its mobile phone market to five players, in a bid to bring down costs of telephony, the telecom regulator said Monday.
Sri Lanka’s mobile market had grown 53.5 percent to 3.34 million customers as at end 2005, according to TRC figures.
The island’s cellular penetration is expected to increase to 20.0 percent in 2006, from 17.3 percent last year, according to industry analysts.
“Mobile phones are one of the fastest growing segments in the economy now, and it is showing potential to grow further,” notes Ratwatte.
Dialog Telekom, currently dominates the market with over 2-million subscribers.
…
Tags: 3G, Celltel Lanka Ltd, cellular telephone, Dialog Telekom, generation mobile phone network, high speed wireless services, HIGH-speed Internet access, Hong Kong, Hong Kong\'s Hutchison Telecommunications International, mobile phones, Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka Telecom, telephony, USD.
Avanti Moonesinghe, Harsha de Silva, Neluka Silva & Ayoma Abeysuriya
April 2006, Version 2.2 Version 3.0
The latest in the series of Teleuse on a Shoestring papers is now available for comment.
It is often claimed that access to telecommunication facilities is a propeller of economic prosperity in developing countries. Mobile phones in particular are considered pivotal in encouraging growth. Prahalad (2004), in Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid asserts that defining change in the world’s poorest economies will be led by access to communications and not through the evolution of IT as was the case in the advanced countries of the world. A study by the London Business School has also found that, in a typical developing country, an increase of 10 mobile phones per 100 people…
NEW DELHI, APRIL 13: The government is in the process of amending the Indian Telegraph Act to extend the Universal Service Obligation (USO) fund support to cellular mobile services (both GSM and CDMA).
As of today, the government is giving USO fund support to only the fixed line operators offering services in the rural areas.
“We are looking at amending the Telegraph Act to accommodate the cellular services and CDMA-based services to reach the rural areas. We are looking at sharing of the passive infrastructure with the cellular service providers,” communications and information technology (C&IT) minister Dayanidhi Maran told reporters.
Besides covering the villages, the minister is of the opinion that the wireless services should also provide connectivity to the Railways and highways especially in rural areas. When…
Tags: ADC, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, CDMA, Cellular Operators Association of India, cellular services, China, Dayanidhi Maran, fixed line services, Germany, GSM, India, information technology, Japan, mobile telephony, New Delhi, passive infrastructure, Rs, rural telephony, telephony, United States, WIRELESS SERVICES.
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