America’s 3rd largest cellphone provider, Sprint, is sending out letters to 1,100 of its subscribers informing them that their service will be summarily terminated by the end of this month. Because they make too many calls to Sprint’s customer service centres and helplines! The letters read, “Our records indicate that over the past year, we have received frequent calls from you regarding your billing or other general account information. While we have worked to resolve your issues and questions to the best of our ability, the number of inquiries you have made to us during this time has led us to determine that we are unable to meet your current wireless needs. Therefore after careful consideration, the decision has been made to terminate your wireless service agreement effective July 30, 2007.
Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) has opened consultations on a proposed interconnect and numbering regime for voice services provided over the city-state’s wireless broadband networks. Three operators—Singtel, iCell and Qalanet—offer wireless services in the 2.5GHz band as part of Singapore’s Wireless@SG initiative and the IDA says it is now time to formalise an industry regime to support voice services carried over those networks. The IDA adds that the move is needed as part of the global shift from discrete PSTN and wireless networks to a converged next generation network. However, the Agency stops short of harmonising the standard numbering range with IP addresses.
As LIRNEasia plans its future research plans, which will be centered on mobile as a “more-than-voice” mode of access to means of communication, information retrieval and publishing, as well as completion of transactions (including payments), we have come up against the need to critically examine current efforts on, and plans for, telecenters. Obviously, this is a discussion that will be Asia-Pacific-wide, like everything LIRNEasia does. However, we’d like to get this started with a provincial news report in a Sri Lankan newspaper, simply because it was posted on the website by a reader/writer. The comments and thoughts of all on the future of telecenters are welcome. :: Daily Mirror – Opinion :: The Nenasala Information Technology Training Centre in Ganewatta DS Division in Hiriyala electorate which was declared open by the Provincial Council Member (NWP) Laxman Perera ceased to function within days of opening.
IDRC New Delhi organized a visit by 10 colleagues from the MS Swaminathan Institute and related organizations to Sarvodaya for a knowledge exchange exercise. LIRNEasia and Sahana (Lanka Software Foundation) were among those invited to make presentations to the group. In addition, LIRNEasia also helped in organizing a demonstration of the alerting technologies from the Last-Mile Project during the field visit to Brahmanawatta in Balapitiya. LIRNEasia made presentations on the role of ICTs in disaster risk reduction and Early warning systems in disaster risk reduction. The discussion was lively and addressed issues of the nature of linkage with government early warning systems and the difficult problems of developing effective methods of communicating the message within the villages.
New research has found that even though the Asia Pacific region accounts for one third of the world’s online population, PC-based Internet usage there is lower than in the rest of the world The study covers 10 Asia Pacific countries and says that in May there were nearly 284 million people aged 15 or older accessing the Internet from a home or work computer, representing 10 per cent of the region’s population above the age of 15. Read more.
A new report from the North American research house, Instat, reveals that the US is way behind its European cousins in consumer Voice over IP (VoIP) adoption – and this despite the fact that 2006 was a particularly good year for the technology globally with the wordwide total of VoIP subscribers increasing by 34 million. The leading European VoIP adopters over the course of 2006 were France, Germany, and the Netherlands. According to Instat analyst, Keith Nissen, “The EU market increased by over 14 million subscribers last year largely due to local loop unbundling, the introduction of cable telephony and triple-play service bundles as well as operator consolidation.” By contrast the US added a mere four million new VoIP subscribers over the same period. Keith Nissen says US carriers “don’t seem interested in selling anything other than plain-old-telephone-service.
The Delhi High Court has upheld the powers of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to regulate the country’s broadcasting sector. The court also said that it was in the regulator’s powers to fix the terms and conditions of the interconnection agreement between broadcasters and service providers. Read more.
LIRNEasia is in the process of updating and fine-tuning its Mission Statement; this is being done in light of the rapid expansion–both in terms of research interests and geographical coverage. The process was kick-started at a planning meeting in Kandalama, Sri Lanka on 30 June, where LIRNEasians reviewed the current Statement, and came up with some suggestions as to how it can be improved to more accurately capture its mission.
Payal Malik, Senior Researcher, LIRNEasia was invited to the eleventh meeting of the Working Party on Indicators for the Information Society (WPIIS) of the OECD countries, held on Monday 21 May 2007, at the Department of Trade and Industry Conference Centre, London. She presented her report on “Documenting the Capabilities of Measuring ICT Statistics in India”. Her report raised great interest among the participants. In an extension to the LIRNEasia work on indicators this report profiled the institutions that collect ICT data in India , with some observations about the methodology and the limitations. The reference point for the exercise is the ‘metadata survey’, a global exercise to collect information from all countries regarding the statistical measurement of ICT (reported in “The global status of ICT indicators”) conducted by global Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development.
Deploying W-CDMA 850 to cannibalise the CDMA mobile as well as to launch 3G without having the so called “3G license” is on the move. Telstra (Australia) and Vivo (Brazil) have done it quite well. Now the French telecoms regulator has approved plans to allow the incumbent GSM network operators to reuse their 900Mhz bands for 3G services. ART has also announced that any 3G new entrant authorised following the application procedure for the fourth UMTS licence would also have access to the 900 MHz spectrum once it has been returned by the existing 2G operators. Read more.
The Aga Khan Foundation is the owner of Afghanistan’s first mobile operator, Roshan. It is surprising that this social investment has not received a quarter of the publicity received by Grameen Phone in Bangladesh. Do Business and Islam Mix? Ask Him – New York Times Roshan has 1.3 million subscribers and is adding 60,000 a month.
Is mobile SMS or mobile email more appropriate for consumers in emerging markets? SMS would seem to be the obvious answer. It’s easy to use, established and still growing in such regions. Thus Comverse vice president Dror Bin is unlikely to be alone in seeing huge demand for messaging platforms in emerging markets. He says: “In some emerging markets PC and internet penetration is so low that the only way for end users to have any kind of data services – even to check the price of goods – is to do it by SMS.
Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet now at Google, appears to see a key role for the mobile especially in developing countries. ACM: Ubiquity – Cerf’s Up Again! — A New Ubiquity Interview with Vint Cerf CERF: Well, certainly that has happened in the sense that the mobile telephony has allowed the provision of communication services, and let me include in that Internet access, in places where it was very difficult to obtain that service before. And so, I think roughly the number of telephone terminations has more than doubled in the last five years. It’s gone from a little over a billion to a little over 2.
More mobile innovations. This looks like a body blow to fixed telephony in high-income households. IPhone-Free Cellphone News – New York Times It’s called T-Mobile HotSpot @Home, and it’s absolutely ingenious. It could save you hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, and yet enrich T-Mobile at the same time. In the cellphone world, win-win plays like that are extremely rare.
Global telecoms heavyweights say microcredit may provide loan without collaterals but it does not meet the rural people’s total financial needs in the developing countries. Vodafone along with Nokia and Nokia Siemens Networks have urged for telecoms and banking regulatory reforms to encourage fund transfer by mobile phones instead. They believe it will transform access to financial services in countries lacking banking networks. Read more.
The survey below, commissioned by Samsung in the US, contrasts with LIRNEasia’s research on teleuse by women at the Bottom of the Pyramid, still in the process of being written up. Our Pakistan findings, being discussed on a PK focused blog, provide the starkest contrast. Survey Reveals Important Role Mobile Phones Play in Women’s Lives “A cell phone does much more than make calls for the Single Mobile Female,” said Randy Smith, vice president of channel marketing for Samsung. “The cell phone is an integral part of the SMF’s life, serving as a pocket-size detective, matchmaker, wing-woman and beyond. It is now officially a girl’s best friend.