Hutch entered the Sri Lanka telecom market in 1998. Due to various reasons, the entry was not as successful as many expected, and it quietly settled into last place. But a sea change has occurred recently, with the BOI reporting that Hutch is just behind Dialog in investments in the telecom sector. The results are beginning to show, with rapid growth (below); innovation (they were the first to introduce mobile financial transfers between two Hutch customers; Me2U); and more than respectable EBITDAs. Living proof that there is a fortune to be made at the bottom of the pyramid.
Helani Galpaya and Payal Malik will be presenting their research at the Quello Center at the Michigan State University in East Lansing on the 4th of October. Michigan State University has long been a center of research on regulation, telecom policy and communication and development. Their presentations will be posted on the site shortly.
Cell phones double as electronic wallets in RP By Oliver Teves Associated Press Last updated 10:42am (Mla time) 09/30/2007 Philippine Daily Inquirer SAN MIGUEL, Philippines–It’s Thursday, so 18-year-old Dennis Tiangco is off to a bank to collect his weekly allowance, zapped by his mother–who’s working in Hong Kong–to his electronic wallet: his cell phone. Sauntering into a branch of GM Bank in the town of San Miguel, Dennis fills out a form, sends a text message via his phone to a bank line dedicated to the service. In a matter of seconds, the transaction is approved and the teller gives him P2,500 (US$54), minus a 1-percent fee. He doesn’t need a bank account to retrieve the money. More than 5.
Last updated 10:01am (Mla time) 10/03/2007, Philippine Daily Inquirer NEW YORK–In spite of its global popularity, Internet telephony (VoIP), which is almost free for users, has not become a gold mine for its pioneers such as Skype and Vonage. Popular online auction firm eBay, which bought Skype two years ago for $2.6 billion, affirmed that message in a costly way earlier this week when it devalued the once-darling firm, knocking $1.43 billion off its value. The accounting move was long anticipated.
New York Times TOKYO — The United States may be the world’s largest economy, but when it comes to Internet connections at home, many Americans still live in the slow lane. By contrast, Japan is a broadband paradise with the fastest and cheapest Internet connections in the world. Nearly eight million Japanese have a fiber optic line at home that is as much as 30 times speedier than a typical DSL line. But while that speed is a boon for Japanese users, industry analysts and some companies question whether the push to install fiber is worth the effort, given the high cost of installation, affordable alternatives and lack of services that take advantage of the fast connections. Powered by ScribeFire.
On October 1, LIRNEasia’s Director of Strategic Development Helani Galpaya made a presentation at the University of Southern California. Her title is a play on an old song celebrating the golden era of radio: “Video killed the radio star.” The slides she used are available here . USC Annenberg | Annenberg Research Network on International Communication Speaker Series: Helani Galpaya Join students and faculty for a presentation by LIRNEasia’s Director of Strategic Development, Helani Galpaya. Her topic: “Mobile Kills the Telecenter Star.
The colloquium which was conducted by Ms Natasha Udu-gama and Nuwan Waidyanatha was focused on the material to be presented at the Disaster management workshop to be held in Dhaka. The Colloquium started off with review of the sessions and programme of the workshop. Sujatha Gamage stated that the term ‘Last- Mile’ should be used in conjuction with the First Responder Action title for Session III to maintain consistancy. Nuwan argued that this is not the case as the term last- mile is more related to the concept of communication rather than the last respondent. Professor Rohan Samarajiva questioned if the message relay function can be seen to be as a seperate operation to ICT networks.
:The Daily Star: Internet Edition Sarvodaya, Sri Lanka’s largest community-based organisation, and LIRNEasia, a regional ICT policy think-tank, collaborated on a 32-village pilot project that sought to identify the best technologies for reaching villages; to identify the significance of organisational strength and training for risk reduction; and to assess the participation of women in these activities.The community-based approach implemented in the project is different from a public-warning approach, but has lessons for government communications with first responders and for community organisation and training as well. For example, the project field tested addressable and remotely activated satellite radios that have coverage over the entire Bay of Bengal region. Other equipment deployed included Java and Symbion enabled mobile handsets capable of generating loud alarms and multi-language alert messages. The Bangladesh Network Office for Urban Safety (BNUS) of the Department of Civil Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) is co-organising a workshop with LIRNEasia entitled “Sharing Knowledge on Disaster Warning: Community-based Last Mile Warning Systems” to discuss the findings of the Last Mile Hazard Warning System (Hazinfo) Pilot Project as well as share the lessons of community-based last mile warning systems in Bangladesh.
Cell phones double as electronic wallets – Yahoo! News Mobile banking services, which are also catching on in Kenya and South Africa, enable people who don’t have bank accounts to transfer money easily, quickly and safely. It’s spreading in the developing world because mobile phones are much more common than bank accounts. The system is particularly useful for the 8 million Filipinos — 10 percent of the country’s citizens — who work overseas and send money home, like Dennis’ mother, Anna Tiangco. Previously, she sent money via a bank wire transfer, which costs $2.
BANGALORE, India (AFP) — India remains the favoured technology outsourcing destination, an industry report said Sunday, amid concerns a rising rupee and soaring wages would blunt the country’s competitive edge. A study by industry publication Global Services and investment advisory firm Tholons put the Indian cities of Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune at the top of a list of 15 emerging outsourcing destinations for global companies. Kolkata at number five and Chandigarh at number nine were the other two Indian locations on the list, which contained three Chinese and two Vietnamese cities as well.
Dr Hans Wijayasuriya, the CEO of Dialog Telekom, Sri Lanka’s largest mobile operator, gave an illuminating talk on his company’s BOP strategy on the 27th of September, at the Central Bank lecture series. He claims that his company was the first in the region to move away from a focus ARPU to a profit-per-minutes focus as early as 1997-98. Here is another mobile operator who is doing well with a similar strategy. Telecoms in the Caribbean | The Irish are coming | Economist.com Digicel has prospered by introducing modern technology and innovative services into stodgy, uncompetitive markets.
Missed calling (also referred to as beeping, flashing and many other names) has been most talked about in Africa; Johnathan Donner has been talking and writing about it for some time now; his research provides interesting insights into what he calls the ‘rules’ of beeping. A recent Reuters article looks at the growing phenomenon in not only Africa but other regions too. LIRNEasia’s Teleuse@BOP survey findings also show that the phenomenon is considerably common among bottom of the pyramid (defined here as Socioeconomic Classification groups D & E) phone users in India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand. But what’s more interesting, is that the phenomenon was seen as being used more or less to the same extent in the ‘middle and top of the pyramid’ (defined in the study as Socioeconomic Classification groups A, B & C). This held true for phone owners in all five countries studied – Pakistan, India (with some of the lowest per minute call rates in the world), Sri Lanka, Philippines and even Thailand (the country with the highest per capita GDP among the set of countries studied).
The phone company has reversed its position on censoring content intended for their customers who have indicated their consent to receive the content, but continues to assert its right to decide what messages it will transmit. Public policy must ensure that the common-carrier principle be formally extended to text messages as well. Verizon Reverses Itself on Abortion Messages – New York Times Reversing course, Verizon Wireless announced yesterday that it would allow an abortion rights group to send text messages to its supporters on Verizon’s mobile network.“The decision to not allow text messaging on an important, though sensitive, public policy issue was incorrect,” said Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon, in a statement issued yesterday morning, adding that the earlier decision was an “isolated incident.”
Total broadband growth in the Philippines from 2005 to 2006 was at 157% while Greece’s was 168%, Ovum said. The Philippines had 127,942 subscribers in 2005 and this number grew to 329,216 as of end-2006. The cost of broadband in the Philippines is also expensive relative to average monthly disposable incomes of subscribers. The highest monthly fee in 2006 was $96.08, with the lowest at $17.
It has long been a staple of telecom law that telcos could not decide what went through the tube. According to the article below, this principle does not apply to text messages. One academic apologist goes as far as claiming that competition will look after the problem. He misses the point that under present arrangements there is only one way to reach a mobile user with a text message, though his/her operator (an equivalent condition does not exist in the Internet). Until that changes, the common-carrier principle must applied, be it for text or voice.
The break up of AT&T in 1984 led to a seismic shift in telecom policy and regulatory thinking worldwide and also created the conditions for the Internet boom. New Zealand is a small country quite unlike the US, but it has taken an unprecedented step that has the potential of changing policy and regulatory thinking again. As the excerpt below says, the split is on the lines of the BT reorganization in the UK. That is true. But the key difference is that BT reorganized voluntarily and NZ Telecom, not.