LIRNEasia » The Associated Press

Afghan cell-phone use booming

Abu Saeed Khan — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 07:32:23 +0000

About 150,000 people subscribe to cell phone service each month in Afghanistan and there’s “no end in sight” to the growth, the country’s communications minister said Tuesday.

Afghan economy is predominantly rural, and trade and industry are badly hampered by crumbling roads and chronic electricity shortages. Not including the illicit trade in opium, the nation’s few exports include dried fruit and carpets.

But like in other developing nations, cell phone service providers have been doing brisk business, bringing communication to poor villagers who until four years rarely, if ever, used a telephone.

“In Afghanistan, the majority of our people will be connected through mobile phones,” Sangin told The Associated Press. “… We have gone straight into the age of personal communication.”

Calling rates are currently about 10 cents a minutes, with the cheapest phone cards on sale for the equivalent of $1. Coverage is generally available in all the country’s 34 provinces. Read more.

India adds record 6.6m mobile phone subscribers in October

Abu Saeed Khan — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 05:14:00 +0000

(Associated Press via NewsEdge) Cellular phone subscribers rose in India by a record 6.6 million in October, keeping the country’s place as the world’s fastest-growing mobile phone market, according to data released over the weekend.
Subscribers for the GSM network grew by 4.7 million in September, while the number of mobile phone subscribers using CDMA technology increased by 1.9 million.
The Cellular Operators Association of India, which includes mobile phone companies offering services on the GSM network, said the country now has about 96 million GSM-based phone connections.
CDMA phone service providers say they now have about 40 million subscribers.
The total number of mobile phones in the country stands at about 136 million at the end of October.
However, India still lags far behind China, which has more than 420 million mobile phones, the most in the world.
T.V. Ramachandran, CEO of the Cellular Operators Association of India, said New Delhi topped Indian cities with just over 10 million subscribers.
The introduction of mobile services in India in the 1990s coincided with a period of rapid economic growth. Intense private sector competition, coupled with falling tariffs and ease in getting a connection, led to a surge in subscriptions.

India has one of the world’s lowest revenue rates for mobile phones.
© 2006 The Associated Press
© 2006 Dialog, a Thomson business. All rights reserved
Source: http://www.telecomasia.net/popup_article.php?type=article&id_article=2612

Indonesians die again without official warning

Rohan Samarajiva — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 10:21:42 +0000

What will it take?

2004 December 26th

2005 March 28th

2006 July 17th

Three tsunamis within less than two years; and the clueless Indonesian government can’t still get its act together.

And faraway India is supposed to have issued a warning when there was no chance of a tsunami hitting India. CYA bureaucrat, I guess. A different error.

Sri Lanka radios are supposed to have carried the story within about 30 mts. If true, this is very good.

AP Report
Science and Technology Minister Kusmayanto Kadiman said Indonesia received the bulletins 45 minutes before the tsunami hit but did not announce them because they did not want to cause unnecessary alarm.

\”If it (the tsunami) did not occur, what would have happened?\” he told reporters in Jakarta, noting that there was no effective way to spread a warning without a system of sirens or alarms in place.

He said Indonesia now planned to speed up plans for a nationwide warning system.

Indonesia was hardest hit by a 2004 tsunami that killed at least 216,000 people in a dozen Indian Ocean nations _ with more than half the deaths occurring in Sumatra island\’s Aceh province.

Though the country started to install a warning system after that disaster, it is still in the early stages. The government had been planning to extend the alert system to Java _ which was hit by a quake in May that killed more than 5,800 people _ in 2007.

Answering reporters\’ questions as to why no warning was issued on Monday, Vice President Jusuf Kalla claimed there was no need because most people had fled inland after the earthquake, fearing a tsunami.

\”After the quake occurred, people ran to the hills … so in actual fact there was a kind of natural early warning system,\” he said. However, of dozens of people interviewed by The Associated Press in Pangandaran on Tuesday, only one person said he felt a slight tremor. None said there was a mass movement of people to higher ground before the tsunami, though some residents recognized the danger when they saw the wall of water approaching.