LIRNEasia HazInfo project partner Nalaka Gunawardene has written an excellent piece on ICTs and disasters, referring in some detail to the ongoing HazInfo project. Bridging the long ‘last mile’ in Sri Lanka / 2006/4 / Media Development / Publications / Home – World Association for Christian Communication While the countries of South and Southeast Asia were largely unprepared to act on the tsunami, it was not really a complete surprise. As the killer waves originating from the ocean near Indonesia’s Sumatra Island radiated across the Indian Ocean at the speed of a jetliner, the alert about the impending tsunami moved through the Internet at the speed of light. Scientists at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre (PTWC) in Hawaii, who had detected the extraordinary seismic activity, issued a local tsunami warning one hour and five minutes after the undersea quake. That was a bit too late for Indonesia – which, being closest to the quake’s epicentre, was already hit – but it could have made a difference in countries further away, such as India, Sri Lanka and Thailand.
CPRsouth Chair and LIRNEasia international advisory board member, Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala was on a blue-ribbon panel discussing ICTs and rural access last night on NDTV. CIOL : .NET & Windows : Make bandwidth available to all, says Kalam NDTV’s Prannoy Roy moderated a discussion in which Ballmer, N R Narayana Murthy, Ashok Jhunjhunwala and Manvinder Singh of Ranbaxy participated. He started off by asking Ballmer about the contrasting personalities of the top two at Microsoft: small, shy and geeky versus flambuoyant and six feet six. Opposites make for the best partnerships was the reply.
Looks like we have a virtuous cycle of investment going on. Not only the mobiles, but the fixed operators too are engaging in significant investment. Possibly the unusual predilection of the Sri Lankan consumer for fixed phones, over mobile, keeps Suntel going. For those not from Sri Lanka, 1 USD = 106 LKR, just lopping off two zeros will you a good sense of what is being discussed. LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE – LBO Telecom operator Suntel, a unit of Sweden’s Overseas Telecom AB, plans to spend 3.
Dhaka, Nov 9 (www.bdnews24.com) – The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report for 2006, launched globally Thursday, revealed that Bangladesh had shown impressive gains in water and sanitation sector although Asia’s emerging giants were lagging. “Income matters, but public policy shapes the conversion of income into human development,” said the report, entitled “Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis.” “India may outperform Bangladesh as a high growth globalisation success story, but the tables are turned when the benchmark for success shifts to sanitation: despite an average income some 60% higher, India has a lower rate of sanitation coverage.
As part of the Six Country Indicators Project, Divakar presents the interim findings from the Indonesia country study. The study assesses Indonesia’s telecom sector and regulatory performance. It employs the common methodology and list of indicators adopted for the Six Country study.
A Wi-Fi Express Lane – New York Times IT’S axiomatic in the computer world that nothing is ever fast enough. And so it goes with popular wireless Wi-Fi networks, which already seem overcrowded and slow. The growing interest in video sites like YouTube and streaming TV programs online has served to underscore the problem. Naturally, the wireless manufacturers are happy to step into the breach with a new, faster Wi-Fi standard. Well, almost.
Maldives is a country with a population of around 300,000, around 32,000 fixed phones and around 232,000 mobiles [this has to level off, because pretty much the entire population is now using mobiles]. It has a lot of high-end hotel rooms, but the USP of the tourist industry there is not business travel, it is utter and complete relaxation. And relaxed people are not known to generate lots of data and voice traffic. All this is relevant to the question of what will go through the two cables landing in Maldives by 2007. Reliance/FLAG is already live, I believe.
Massive mobile growth is reported from Bangladesh in 2006, with over two million being added in September alone, according to the BTRC. The question now is whether Pakistan still leads the pack. Mobiles Net addition/month Jan-06 10,275,869 Feb-06 10,543,898 268,029 Mar-06 10,954,285 410,387 Apr-06 11,781,560 827,275 May-06 13,440,836 1,659,276 Jun-06 14,190,606 749,770 Jul-06 14,798,440 607,834 Aug-06 15,510,000 711,560 Sep-06 17,647,537 2,137,537 Bangladesh’s GrameenPhone tops 10 mln subscribers | Reuters.com Bangladesh’s top mobile phone operator GrameenPhone Ltd. said on Sunday the number of its subscribers has passed 10 million, rising more than 80 percent since January.
Sri Lanka‘s first outdoor wireless computer network is now up and running. Surprisingly, it is not in Colombo. It is not even in any of the other key places. It was installed in Mahavilachchiya, a little known village, 40 km from the nearest town Anuradhapura, and surrounded three sides by the Vilpattu jungle. Most of the villagers are either farmers or labourers with a monthly income of about Rs.
Dhaka, Nov 3 (bdnews24.com) – GrameenPhone’s coverage beyond Bangladesh’s boundary has forced the Indian government to deploy cellular mobile network in the neglected northeastern states, reports Kolkota-based The Telegraph Friday. The Indians along the Bangladesh border in Meghalaya and other north-eastern states “are forced to use prepaid cards of GrameenPhone, the largest cell phone service provider of Bangladesh, paying ISD call rates.” People without mobile phones cross the border and use Bangladeshi phone booths and they pay hefty amounts of international tariff to call own country, the report alleges. Villagers have complained to the Telegraph correspondent that the Indian government does not provide them basic telecoms facilities on the pretext of security.
An international committee tries to answer the question of why we don’t do more to reduce the risks of disasters (prevent hazards from becoming disasters). They lay the blame on all governments, but comparative data on the loss of life from disasters in the developing versus the developed world, shows that our government are more to blame. This was discussed in a publication that came out last December. BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | World ‘lacks will’ on disasters Lives saved through risk reduction are invisible to the media, whereas people pulled from the rubble are highly visible
Sri Lanka’s infrastructure industries are in very bad shape, with reforms postponed, billion-rupee losses in electricity and petroleum and predictions of power cuts in 2007. In the blog of one of the business publications we read regularly, the following comment had been made by a reader. What is interesting is that she/he points to the good conditions in the telecom industry, no strikes, lower prices, etc. LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE – LBO If you had more competitive markets, without the government trying to control everything, you would have immediate price reductions. The producer that passes on the benefits to the consumer will have higher sales, if he beats his competitiors to the price-cut.
LIRNEasia along with its research partners conducted a needs assessment and gap analysis of local capacity for ICT policy and regulatory, research, training, expert assistance and advocacy in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific Islands.
Dialog Telekom took a courageous step in 2002, deciding within weeks of the Cease Fire Agreement being signed that it would supply telecom services to the people of the North and East who had been excluded from the country’s telecom revolution for so long, because of the conflict and the military’s prohibition of service in conflict areas. The services thus provided were, without question, the most important dividend that the people of Jaffna saw from the path of peace, followed by the mobility allowed by the opening and restoring of the A9 highway. Now, Dialog and the people of the North are paying the price of the path of war. For two months, the mobile networks have been shut down in the North, with service being allowed intermittently in the East. This means that approximately 220,000 families are unable to communicate with their loved ones in the North and that another 200,000 or so families are not sure their phone will work when they most need it.
South Asian mobile companies are showing the world how to make good profits with low prices and the resultant low ARPUs. BBC NEWS | Business | Demand for mobiles boosts Bharti In addition to Bharti, Sri Lanka’s Dialog also announced major profit increases yesterday.
Creation of new knowledge by universities is typically assessed in terms of publications and citations in scholarly venues, and the same measures are used to assess capacity for future contributions. As the production and dissemination of knowledge becomes increasingly mediated by the Internet, the Internet presence of researchers is becoming a more valid and relevant measure of knowledge capacity than the conventionally used publication and citation data. This article proposes a methodology that includes the use of the scholar.google.com search engine to supplement the conventional indices for knowledge capacity in a policy-relevant field of knowledge.