Helani Galpaya presentation on “Network bottlenecks in South Asian broadband?”
Rohan Samarajiva and Abu Saeed Khan presentation on “Removing a broadband bottleneck: International connectivity”
Payal Malik presentation on “How do we avoid the spectrum bottleneck?”
Sriganesh Lokanathan presentation on “Teleuse@BOP4”

I was surprised the course was required. Guess this constitutes a significant achievement in terms of establishing ICT for development as a field of study.

here is the slide I started the session with. To view the video, you need to click here.

Poonam’s life has been transformed since she started using a mobile phone in 2007. It helped her to develop a small business as a beautician. She promotes herself and keeps in touch with her customers through the mobile. Her income – an average of INR 2,000 a month (approx USD 40)

Some of the insights of  ‘mobile as a tool’ are below.

• Mobile use by BOP women seem to be driven by practical, utility-oriented needs such as family coordination and emergencies rather than the desire to socialize and ‘chat’. This is also seen when looking at perceived benefits in LIRNEasia’s teluse@BOP4 quantitative study. Both ability to act or contact others in an emergency and ability to maintain relationships with family and friends scored over 4 on a scale of 1-5 in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

• Radio proved to be important as a kill-time feature of the mobile handset, an indication that greater emphasis should be placed on entertainment and infotainment services for women in addition to important life-enhancing services such as mHealth, mAgri, mobile money, etc. Looking at LIRNEasia findings, we can see that 6% of Indian women who are mobile owners listen to the radio via the mobile. The numbers are relatively higher in Sri Lanka (13%) and Pakistan (11%).Whilst the numbers may seem low, it is one of the highest uses of mobiles after voice and SMS. Games have scored higher, surpassing radio in India (12%), Bangladesh (18%) and Pakistan (17%). Taking photos and videos is also popular amongst women in Bangladesh (12%), Sri Lanka (13%), and Thailand (18%).

• BOP women had limited knowledge of VAS, including limited use of SMS. Looking at LIRNEasia results amongst women who did not use SMS, 51% in Bangladesh and 72% in India did not know what SMS is. Confusion in using SMS and difficulty in typing also scored high.

Detailed regional insights are expected over the next few weeks whilst full details about this article can be found here.

The survey found that Thai users spent more than any other nationality on mobile phones, $93 on average compared to $50 or less elsewhere.

Most of the phones they bought had radio connections, while 14 per cent had a Web browser and 5 per cent had touch-screens.

Ninety-one per cent of the Thais said they’d used a mobile phone in the previous three months, up from 77 per cent in 2008.

More than 90 per cent of the urban users made regular calls, compared to 80 per cent in the rural areas. Interestingly, 90 per cent of Thai females had a mobile phone but only 80 per cent of the males, a proportion reversed in the other countries.

The study in 2011 by the LIRNEasia think tank said found that the use of mobile phones for services other than the basic voice function was still sparse among the poorest users compared with a previous survey in 2008.

In Sri Lanka only six percent of users in the so-called bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) or poorest segment knew of banking services through mobile phones compared with 18 percent in India and 15 percent in Thailand.

But Sri Lankan users were the most aware in the case of health services, scoring the highest among all countries in the study at 22 percent compared with 16 percent in India and 17 percent in Thailand.

Use of mobile phones to fix appointments with doctors in private hospitals has caught on in the island where the health system is overloaded and patients face lengthy waiting times for consultations.

The researchers who did the study said more-than-voice services like health could be an important means of accessing the BOP market for services for mobile phone companies.

Presentation slides can be found here.

Some of the media coverage received from Thailand, India,  Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal.

The Financial Express (Phones a bare essential for bottom of pyramid: Study)

The Daily Star (Talk business on mobile)

The Hindu Business Line (More poor people own mobile phones, but productive use still a far cry)

Lanka Business Online (Mobile momentum)

The Bottom Line (Productive use of mobiles needed – LIRNEasia survey)

Republica (Low call charges within each network major reason for owning multiple-SIM)

What is even more worrisome is the lack of knowledge among all the parties about the available modes of communicating early warnings. No mention of cell broadcasting that is capable of delivering location-specific tailored information to all mobile handsets within the range of a base transceiver station. The journalist has done a good job except for repeating misinformation about poor communication infrastructure and access in rural areas.

Pradeep Koddippilli, the DMC assistant director-in-charge of early warnings, told IPS that the centre had not received any warning from the meteorology department tasked with assessing dangerous weather events. “We kept contacting them repeatedly through the 25th, but there was no warning,” he said.

Despite the millions spent on setting up early warning towers and networks, a recent assessment by the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs released in November said that the meteorology department, in fact, lacked the technical capacity to predict rainfall and fast moving weather patterns.

“The U.N. assessment confirms the technical capacity of the department of meteorology needs to be further developed in order to enable it to deliver reliable quantitative rain forecasts,” said the report titled ‘Disaster Response and Preparedness Assessment Mission to Sri Lanka’.

Experts told IPS that multiple dissemination systems are at the disposal of the DMC – ideal for a country where communication infrastructure is poor in rural areas.

In addition to the 67 warning towers set up island-wide, the DMC can also tap into the wide network of public officials at the village level, volunteers with the Sri Lanka Red Cross Society, secure satellite communications and, at least, one national mobile network to send out alerts.

“You cannot say what is the best system because each one has its own strengths and weaknesses. What is important is to have several systems to make sure vulnerable communities receive warnings in time,” Suranga Kahandawa, disaster management specialist at the World Bank, told IPS

The government’s own nationally and provincially representative Household Income and Expenditure Survey shows that more than 75 percent of households in the Southern Province (affected by the most recent early warning fiasco) have a telephone in the house (almost all being GSM and CDMA handsets capable of receiving cell broadcasts), clearly contradicting the claim of poor infrastructure in rural areas.

LIRNEasia’s Teleuse@BOP4 research (representative of those at the Bottom of the Pyramid; but not at the level of Province) showed that urban households has slightly higher (7%) ownership of phones, but that when it came to access to a phone within the household there was no difference between urban and rural households.

Findings of the research carried out in South Asian countries by regional ICT policy and regulation think tank LIRNEasia maintain cheaper on-net call is the main reason for multiple-SIM ownership. The research was conducted among bottom of the pyramid (BOP) in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Unveiling the findings of the report in Bangkok, CEO of LIRNEasia Rohan Samarajiva said that the research showed that the network coverage of mobile operators in this region was getting better and most subscribers said cheaper on-net calls are the major reason. The previous research conducted in 2008 had shown a better network coverage as the major reason for multiple-SIM ownership.

It was ironical that we had to listen to the speeches on digital Bangladesh phoneless, having been compelled to leave all electronics behind in the name of security. They announced the event was being tweeted, forgetting the very nature of tweeting,v a decentralized activity done by many without central control.

Then in the afternoon, I found myself stepping in to chair a session on broadband access that was to have been chaired by Mr Wazed. In a short period of 90 mts, we squeezed in eight speakers, two from equipment vendors, two from service providers, a representative of APNIC talking about IPv6, an IGO representative and myself. The Secretary of the Bangladesh Ministry of Post and Telecom gave summing up comments. And we had 25 mts of questions and answers as well.

It was not surprising that I found most interesting the proposal to enhance Asia’s backhaul capacity using terrestrial cables. It was in my talk, but Tiziana Bonapace of UNESCAP’s presentation dealt with in greater detail.

The MOPT Secretary said that BTCL’s fiber had been taken over by the Ministry and there were plans to give them over to a private operator to manage, on several conditions, including, one hopes, non-discriminatory, cost-oriented access for all operators. The devil is in the details, but one hopes this will be done properly (and quickly).

There were many questions, but the one I liked best was what one young man asked: what in all these was the opportunity for a young person to start a business?

This reflects the story Teleuse@BOP tells about Bangladeshis more than anyone else seeing ICTs as a way of making money.

We have open data sets, but they are just there. How can we make them more usable and truly open? This is something we need to grapple with once the Teleuse@BOP4 data are brought under control.

The mobile revolution was building up a head of steam from the 1990s, but really took off at the turn of the century, with massive growth occurring in South Asia since around 2004. That is when LIRNEasia started work, with a focus on South Asia. At the urging of Randy Spence we began the Teleuse@BOP demand-side survey. Its results have gained much media attention, but we were too busy communicating the results to policy makers and the media to put a lot of effort into scholarly publication, other than in our 2008 book and a few academic publications.

But now we have an entire issue devoted to analyses of Teleuse@BOP results in the leading journal in the ICT for Development field, Information Technology and International Development.

One thing I did not get from the writeup was relative cost. Convening a community meeting is not costless. Neither is the asset-based method. Also, the account refers to villages. Will this work as well in cities?

The field experiment, conducted in collaboration with the Indonesian government and the World Bank, offered a small amount of cash to households deemed below the poverty line. In one-third of the villages, the government used a proxy means test involving household assets to create an objective measure of wealth. Another third of the villages used the “community method,” as the researchers call it: With the assistance of facilitators from the research project, citizens from certain neighborhoods would gather at meetings and subjectively rank the wealth of the local inhabitants. The final third of the villages employed a hybrid of both methods.

The economists also used a research firm to survey all the citizens about their spending habits. Using this spending data as a baseline for wealth, the results show that the proxy means test is the best method for estimating wealth — but only by a slim margin.

On the other hand, the community method led to 60 percent fewer complaints among villagers about the results of the programs, compared to the proxy means test.

The report.