The new Competition Commission of Pakistan has entered into competition with the Pakistan Telecom Authority. If the FCC had sole authority over telecom in the US, we wouldn’t probably have the Internet in its present form. That’s a controversial statement, but one that can be defended. AT&T was broken up and space created for the efflorescence of multiple providers of communication services and products by the Antitrust Division of the US Department of Justice, not by the FCC. I state this upfront to indicate that I am not against telecom operators being regulated by multiple agencies.
LIRNEasia’s ‘Rapid Response Program’ is exactly what the name suggests. We react to immediate information needs of telecom regulators, at short notice. The response might not be lengthy and as comprehensive as we would like it to be, but nevertheless helpful, as Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) have realised. LIRNEasia saw BTRC’s move to issue three new Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) licenses a positive development, as Bangladesh is certainly not a country that can boast of quality and affordable broadband. This is what we learnt from our research: Exceptionally high cost of broadband remains a key barrier that prevents the development of the BPO industry in Bangladesh.
A series of four meetings were held between 03-Aug-08 to 05-Aug-08 at the Indian Institute of Technology – Madras campus on defining the project design and goals in relation to the real-time biosurveillance program pilot. The program brought together partners from North America (University of Alberta and Carnegie Mellon University) who joined the meeting through skype; while the Indian and Sri Lankan partners met, face-to-face, at IIT-M’s Rural Technology and Business Incubator. The meeting coined this operations research initiative to be a “unique project”. You can access the RTBP partner meeting report v1 Set of presentations Disease surveillance program in Sri Lanka Mobile phones for public health intervention Auton Lab algorithms and data structures for rapid detection Sahana health and messaging modules Mobiles for data entry Sarvodaya community health program RTBP work plan
From Sify.com Frederick Noronha (IANS) | Thursday, 07 August , 2008, 11:40 Bangalore: India is growing by leaps and bounds when it comes to mobile use, but it could be doing better, the authors of a new book on policy roadblocks to communication growth in South Asia have said. LIRNEasia executive director Rohan Samarajiva and researcher Ayesha Zainudeen, editors of the book ‘ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia: Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks’, told IANS in an interview that over the study period, India’s mobile connectivity was overtaken in per-capita terms by both Pakistan and Bangladesh. “There is still a large gap between rural and urban telephone growth, as highlighted in the book, due to flawed policy implementation (at the time of writing),” said Samarajiva.
Perhaps a phone call to the Pakistan Telecom Authority may help the TRC design a practical solution. Unregistered SIMs that are not connected to specific human beings/legal entities are a problem in any country. Operators should not issue such SIMs, in Pakistan or in Sri Lanka. Focused action on these SIMs, if any, will yield better results for security than taking photographs of millions of people, as Mobitel plans. State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan The initiative taken by Senate’s Standing Committee on Interior to curb unregistered Subscriber Identity Modules (SIMs) Card culture has resulted in blockage of eight million unidentified connections, said Senator Talha Mehmood, Chairman of the committee, here on Friday.
What is the correct computer literacy figure in Sri Lanka? Is there one figure? We ask this because we hear different answers. According to HE the President of Sri Lanka it is pretty impressive at 25%. This what he said in the 60th Independence day speech as reported by Daily News the next day: “We have given our nation every opportunity to link with the technologically developed world.
Instead of a either/or response, a thoughtful contribution from Vint Cerf, now at Google: Google backs ISP-guaranteed minimum data rates One side effect of the FCC’s recent move against Comcast’s P2P “delaying” technology has been to make discussions about the dark art of network management even more pressing (and they were pretty pressing before). If Comcast can’t use TCP reset packets to limit the number of BitTorrent connections a client can spawn, what legitimate techniques can ISPs use to deal with congestion ? Google’s Vint Cerf, one of the grandfathers of the Internet, today weighed in withn his answer: transmission rate caps.
Mobile payments provider, Obopay has inked a deal with Grameen Solutions to deliver banking services to a billion of the world’s poorest people by 2018. The Grameen-Obopay Bank A Billion Initiative will provide access to affordable financial services, including cross-border remittances, money transfer, payments, savings and credit accounts. Cellular-News reports more. The Economic Times of India questions: Do we need regulations for these payments or do we need technological standards than operational guidelines? In case we need regulations and guidelines for mobile payments; we also need regulations for internet and phone banking.
Emboldened by its recent legal victory over net bully Comcast, the San Francisco based digital right defence organisation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched a throttling detection tool aptly dubbed the “Switzerland Network Testing Tool” (Switzerland = neutrality). The software immediately lets users know if their ISP is throttling downloads, cutting VoIP calls or otherwise tampering with the unlimited, neutral broadband connection they are paying for. Read more.
Orwellian drama continues – with some mobile operators taking it to a level far beyond the expectations of the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka with the two magic words ‘National Security’ wining everyone’s blind approval. Now Mobitel wants a photograph of every subscriber – either to register or re-register. (Wasn’t it irresponsible for Mobitel in the first place to provide a connection to somebody not registered with them? – beats us!) They have shutterbugs ready for tasks at their outlets.
It is evident from Mobile Benchmarks south asia that Sri Lanka has low mobile prices, but not the lowest. Looks like the Sri Lankan operators are working on changing that. The OECD methodology that is the basis for the mobile benchmarking by LIRNEasia treats a minute as a minute, while the proposed pricing scheme differentiates. We will start working on a solution. The approach used by the operator makes sense within the budget telecom network business model that we are beginning to describe.
Two thousand and five hundred years ago, Gautama Buddha correlated tax collectors to bees. A righteous ruler, said he, taking the Liccavis as an example, collects tax without making it a burden on people, in the same was a bee collects honey from a flower (without damaging it). Such wise words were not always heeded. Four new levies, reported Financial Times today, will come into force this month under the Environmental Conservation Levy Act No. 8 of 2008.
Getting the issue of lowering intra-SAARC call charges into the agenda of SAARC was something we were told we could not do. We were too late to go through the technical committees, we were told. We appear to have succeeded not only in getting it into the agenda, but into the SAARC Chairman’s speech! The full text of the SAARC Chairman’s speech and the declaration are now available. Rather unusually, tariff proposal is mentioned as high as in paragraph 6 in a 41 paragraph declaration.
Someone called me to say that the President of Sri Lanka had spoken about lowering telecom tariffs within the SAARC region. So searched the web. Got no reference to that statement, but got this instead. Editorial | Online edition of Daily News – Lakehouse Newspapers Both countries should also contemplate providing cheaper telephone calls for their citizens between the two countries. We are not aware of the exact technical details but the authorities should consider the possibility of laying a dedicated submarine telecom cable along with the proposed power line.
In one of the two websites it runs, Telecommunication Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka (TRCSL) gives its mission statement – which is cut and pasted below: “To create the optimum conditions for the telecommunications industry in Sri Lanka by serving the public interest in terms of quality, choice and value for money; the service providers with equitable access to spectrum and other common resources; and the nation in its drive for socio-economic advancement through a skilled and ethical workforce.” We are surprised to see pornography not mentioned – considering the latest task TRCSL has been assigned – blocking porno. Lankadeepa reports only about blocking pornographic movies and video clips, not images. Assumed strict enforcement, this can lead to the ban of not just YouTube but Gmail and Yahoomail also, because pornography videos can easily be distributed via e-mail. For the record, except for few countries including Cuba and North Korea, which had restricted Internet access in full (not just porno sites) no country in general blocks porno sites.
The real-time biosurveillance program is a pilot on the broader concepts of mobile health data surveillance for unusual patterns. Mobile Health is best defined by Krishnan Ganapathy’s exclusive published on Mobileactive. A partner meeting will take place at the Indian Institute of Technology Rural Technology and Business Incubator on Monday (04-Aug-2008) to discuss the way forward on the multi partner m-Health project. This initial meeting follows the e-India event on e-Health in Delhi where stakeholders are coming together to discuss lessons on similar action research. The partner planning meet program will bring together the project partners and give everyone the opportunity to hear each other out in relations to their roles and responsibilities.