2007 — Page 6 of 32 — LIRNEasia


Redundancy, redundancy

Posted on November 13, 2007  /  0 Comments

What is with Bangladesh?   Haven’t they heard of rings, which is the normal configuration of fiber? LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE – LBO Bangladesh on Tuesday launched an investigation after the country’s Internet link was sabotaged, disrupting communications nationwide for most of the day. Officials said cables were also severed twice last week causing massive disruption to businesses in the impoverished country. “We are investigating the cable cutting incident which took place today (Tuesday) with high priority,” said Ziaur Rashid Sofder, general manager of security at the Bangladesh Telephone and Telegraph Board.
In yet another blow to the existing GSM operators, the Communication Ministry has decided to auction spectrum for third generation (3G) mobile services and wireless broadband services through technologies such as Wi-Max. The auction will be open to new companies wanting to foray into the telecom sector as well as established foreign telecom players. The existing operators had wanted the auction for 3G services to be limited to the licence holders. The Ministry’s decision to open up the bidding to all players is also a move away from the telecom regulator’s recommendations that it be restricted to existing operators. The move gives a chance to the likes of Deutsche Telecom, AT&T and new Indian players such as Unitech and Hindujas, which may not get spectrum in the 2G band given the huge rush, to enter the high growth telecoms market.
The first phase in a trial of an evolved version of today’s mobile phone radio access technology designed to deliver much higher wireless data rates has proven a success. The LTE / SAE (Long Term Evolution/System Architecture Evolution) Trial Initiative (LSTI) launched in May this year has reported the successful delivery of the first in a series of test results aimed at proving the potential and benefits of LTE, which is being standardized by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) as a next generation mobile broadband technology. The Initiative was founded by leading telecommunications companies Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, France Telecom/Orange, Nokia, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nortel, T-Mobile and Vodafone, and was recently expanded with China Mobile, Huawei, LG Electronics, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung, Signalion, Telecom Italia and ZTE joining as new members. As mobile devices become increasingly sophisticated and handle more and more complex multimedia applications, the LTE/SAE technology is designed to give end users wireless access to growing levels of data throughput on the move.3GPP LTE is specified to enable downlink/uplink peak data rates above 100/50 Mbps in initial deployment configurations.
The simmering tension over spectrum allocation among Indian telecom companies has erupted into a public spat with warring mobile phone operators leaving no stone unturned in their battle to acquire more air waves. The fight is so intense that Vodafone chief executive Arun Sarin too jumped in, dashing off letters to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and communications minister A Raja, complaining against the stiffer spectrum allocation norms proposed by the Telecommunication Engineering Centre, an arm of the department of telecommunications. Reliance Communications chief Anil Ambani, whose company uses CDMA technology, too wrote to the Prime Minister. He accused some “large GSM players”, a reference to Vodafone and Sunil Mittal’s Bharti Telecom, of spreading “misleading and false propaganda” to block fresh competition in telecom, hoard spectrum and indulge in “anti-consumer practices like cartelisation”. Read the full story in ‘The Times of India’ Other related stories: Anil Ambani takes telecom rivals to PM – Hindustan Times Telcos sweat under spectrum deadlock – Business Standard Telecom tussle engulfs all major players, Ambani writes to PM – The Indian Express quoating PTI
Does not compute | Economist.com “PROLIXITY is not alien to us in India,” admits Amartya Sen in his essay “The Argumentative Indian”. “We do like to speak.” He supports his contention with quotations from India’s classical texts, but it is also borne out by India’s phone habits. The average owner of a mobile handset spends 471 minutes (almost eight hours) on the phone each month, and sends 39 text messages.
Was the title of a talk I gave to the Colombo West Rotary Club today.   Was reinvited after 9 years.  Then we had less than 300,000 phones in the country.   Now close to 9 million.  Doing better; but can do much better.
Strange is the day I come out in support of taxes; and today is very strange.   But please read this in context:  we wish the 10% tax had not been imposed on mobiles; but there was absolutely no reason to tax mobile while exempting fixed; that is why I support the extension of the tax to fixed CDMA.   But for some reason the government seems to have difficulty in doing anything right the first time.   Why, for God’s sake protect fixed wireline?   These are most privileged people in the country.
Not everyone is convinced that Indian telecom market is developing fast. “In Beijing I see everybody having a mobile in hand, male or female, old or young and rich or poor..”. says one Chinese participant at WWRF, “…I do not see Indians using mobiles like that” (He is surprised to learn in South Asia not every user owns a mobile phone!
In the great tradition of banning everything that moves, Minister Sumedha Jayasena has stated that the government is considering banning the use of mobile phones by children.   Isn’t this an unjustified intrusion by government into a decision best left to parents?   And doesn’t Mrs Jayasena have more important things to do, like enforce existing (and ignored) prohibitions on child labor?   In a country where law and order is deteriorating, the government has no business trying to take away the right of parents to be in touch with their children. Ethalaya බාලවයස්කරුවන්ට සෙලියුලර් තහනම් වේද ?
At Wireless World Research Forum meeting currently held in Chennai, there were two presentations on Mesh Networking. While Chanuka Wattegama of LIRNEasia spoke about the Sri Lankan experience, Sharad Jaiswal of Bell Labs, India presented a similar initiative in Bangalore. There were many similarities between the two on the approach. VillageNet, the Bangalore initiative, is a low cost IEEE 802.11 WiFi based mesh network designed for connecting villages in rural India, providing low-cost broadband Internet access for wide regions.
Paper titled: Challenges of Optimizing Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) for SMS based GSM Devices in Last-Mile Hazard Warnings in Sri Lanka (authors N. Waidyanatha – LIRNEasia, D. Dias – University of Moratuwa, and H. Purasinghe – Microimage) was presented at the 19th Meeting of the Wireless World Research Forum (WWRF), in Chennai, India, 5-7 November, 2007. The paper was discussed in Working Group 1 – Human Perspective and Service Concepts (WG1).
The Colloquium that was a follow-on from the discussion held in Kandalama regarding KPIs was conducted by Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara and Shamistra Soysa. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are those that help in measuring the success of the day to day activities of an organization. This means that the KPIs would lead to KRIs. First the mission statement was reviewed, with comment on the structure to highlight the important areas. Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara noted the critical success factor that would feed into the strategies and thereby facilitate the mission statement.
Chennai, Nov 6. Perhaps not surprisingly, the messages from most of the speakers are the same at the Wireless World Research Forum, currently held here. Asian telecom markets are booming; (Where else you see one country adding 7 million new mobile customers per month?) this is the right time to take ICTs to rural and less privileges sections of the society; affordability too, not just technology is a key issue, and wireless, not wired  is perhaps the sure solution that can make the transformation. More or less, that is the bottom-line emerging.
Given that Asian countries are taking the lead in mobile software applications (in Sri Lanka, already using open source), this is a very exciting development. LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE – LBO A Google-led international alliance announced Monday it is releasing open-source software that will free developers to bring the full power of desktop computing to mobile devices. The Open Handset Alliance bills “Android” as the first comprehensive mobile operating platform that software developers are free to adapt in any ways they wish for video, audio, social networking and other features. “We are developing a very open system and will distribute all the codes to allow people to innovate on mobile devices,” Google co-founder Serge Brin said in a conference call with the press and other alliance members. “I’m really excited about this and I can’t wait to see what the next generation of innovators is able to do with these tools.

Brits texting like crazy

Posted on November 5, 2007  /  0 Comments

Asian evidence says the best explanation for the take up of texting is the ratio of price of a voice call to cost of a text.   Is this also the explanation for the UK? BBC NEWS | Technology | Britons sending 1bn texts weekly Britons are now sending more than one billion text messages per week according to the latest figures from the Mobile Data Association (MDA). The figure is 25% higher than a year ago and is set to shatter forecasts for how many text messages have been sent to and from handsets this year. That weekly total is the same as the number sent during the whole of 1999.
UNCTAD has released “Manual for the Production of Statistics on the Information Economy” which it claims to be a reference for national statistical offices and other producers of official statistics on business use of information and communications technology (ICT).   The Manual provides a guide to data collection and analysis, international standards, and definitions.  It also offers model questions for surveys on ICT use, and it reviews important institutional issues related to compiling ICT statistics. Download it free.