The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has said that mobile operators may be pushing consumers to give up fixed line telephone by charging a higher tariff for cell-to-fixed line calls. The regulator has asked the operators to stop the differential tariff as it was not justified. “The differential and higher charges levied by cellular service providers for calls to fixed lines do not have adequate justification. This can be viewed as an attempt to promote substitution of fixed line traffic by mobile traffic and may lead to forced substitution of fixed lines by mobiles, thereby reducing the target market for fixed line broadband,” senior TRAI officials said. Read the full story in ‘The Hindu – Business Line’ here.
This past Saturday at a conference organized by the Sri Lanka Institute of Marketing Harsha de Silva chaired a session with Hans Wijayasuriya of Dialog Telekom, Rohan Samarajiva of LIRNEasia and Keith Modder of Virtusa that addressed issues such as this. One point that ran through the discussion was the need for companies to develop self-regulation to safeguard the trust of their customers. China’s mobile network: a big brother surveillance tool? – LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE “We know who you are, but also where you are,” said the CEO of China Mobile Communications Corporation, Wang Jianzhou, whose company adds six million new customers to its network each month and is already the biggest mobile group in the world by users. He was explaining how the company could use the personal data of its customers to sell advertising and services to them based on knowledge of where they were and what they were doing.
The Coming Wave of Gadgets That Listen and Obey – New York Times Vlingo’s service lets people talk naturally, rather than making them use a limited number of set phrases. Dave Grannan, the company’s chief executive, demonstrated the Vlingo Find application by asking his phone for a song by Mississippi John Hurt (try typing that with your thumbs), for the location of a local bakery and for a Web search for a consumer product. It was all fast and efficient. Vlingo is designed to adapt to the voice of its primary user, but I was also able to use Mr. Grannan’s phone to find an address.
Sustainability First: Tapping the Bottom of the Pyramid According to Lirneasia research, 41% of the BoP in Sri Lanka, owns their own phones and 21% of them are mobile phones. Another 31% is planning to buy a phone. But 28% is not planning to buy, mostly because they cannot afford to buy. This can be a primary market for telecentres in Sri Lanka, according to Prof Rohan Samarajiva of Lireneasia. Powered by ScribeFire.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Wednesday (Jan 23) recommended guidelines for rolling out mobile television services to the Information and Broadcasting Ministry on various issues related to licensing and technology. TRAI has suggested that the choice of broadcasting technology should be left to the service providers but should be recognised by an authorised body. There are broadly two routes for providing mobile television services. One is operated by using the telecom network with spectrum already allotted to Unified Access Service License (UASL) and Cellular Mobile Telephone Service (CMTS) licensees, and the other using broadcasting method using separate spectrum. According to TRAI, telecom operators with CMTS or UASL licenses will not require any further licence or permission for offering mobile television services on their own network using the frequency or spectrum already allotted to them.
Competitors to SingTel in its domestic market have sharply criticised attempts by the carrier to gain regulatory relief in business, government and some wholesale markets. The IDA solicited industry feedback on the attempt by SingTel to shed various competition, wholesale supply and published tariff obligations on a range of business, data and wholesale products as well as to all business and government customers billing over $250,000 annually. That feedback has been uniformly negative.
Sri Lanka celco urges regulations to lower cost s – LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE “End-user taxation is very important in our market segment because it has been assessed that a one percent change in taxation generates up to 2-5 percent growth in usage and revenue,” Wijayasuriya said. “So we must bring down the minimum cost of ownership and even a single piece of legislation should not stand in the way of bringing down the cost of ownership. “When our penetration is still 35 percent, we should be driving the minimum cost of ownership down at every single opportunity with our economic policy.” Powered by ScribeFire.
The UK’s first “fibre town” could go online in the autumn, delivering speeds of about 100Mbps (megabits per second) to consumers’ homes. Fibre firm H2O provides super-fast broadband via the sewers and either Bournemouth, Northampton or Dundee will be offered the service first. For consumers, super-fast net connections could create a range of new applications including on-demand high definition (HD) TV, DVD quality film downloads in minutes, online video messaging, CCTV home surveillance and HD gaming services. Read the full story in BBC here.
LIRNEasia recently unveiled a painting by S. H. Sarath, the renowned Sri Lankan artist at its premises. It is untitled leaving ample room for one’s imagination. Photo shows LIRNEasia guest speaker of the day Robin Mansell and Executive Director Rohan Samarajiva doing the honours.
China on Tuesday started a public hearing to discuss lowering domestic mobile roaming charges, state media said, to address complaints from users. Hosted by the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top economic planner, the hearing discussed two proposed plans for roaming charges, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. Both proposals involve cancelling the existing roaming service fee of 0.2 yuan per minute, which users have criticized as being too high, according to local media reports. China’s mobile operators, China Mobile and China Unicom collect domestic roaming fees if the subscriber leaves the local service area.
NEW DELHI: The level of congestion among the networks of different cellular operators has come down considerably in the July-September period, according to telecom regulator TRAI. The performance of the Cellular Mobile Service Providers with respect to the congestion of Point of Interconnections has improved in September, 2007 with the number of POIs with congestion coming down significantly to 348 against 457 in June 2007, TRAI said in a statement. According to the benchmark notified by TRAI in the Quality of Service regulation, the POI should be less than 0.5 per cent of the the calls made from one network to another. Read the full story in ‘The Economic Times’ here.
TelecomTV – TelecomTV One – News Of course that’s not to say that everything is rosy and you can just lay it and the business will come. I was a little surprised at the hostile reaction I received in a panel session when I suggested that some of the builds on thinner routes were vanity projects based more on national prestige and political expediency than actual real business cases. A fair percentage of the industry is fanatically evangelistic about submarine cables and conveniently forgets the fact that you can’t fill those pipes if you don’t have favourable regulatory and investment reforms in the access network at the other end as well as basic preconditions such as mass PC literacy and affordable services. Powered by ScribeFire.
One of the most significant auctions of frequency spectrum in the world is about the start in the US. The process of moving spectrum-hogging broadcasters out of these valuable bands (a process known as spectrum refarming) began in the 1990s. How many Asia-Pacific spectrum managers have even got started on the job? How long will it be before the people of the region see the benefits of deploying 700 MHz spectrum for wireless broadband? Airwaves, Web Power at Auction – New York Times The radio spectrum licenses, which are to be returned from television broadcasters as they complete their conversion from analog to digital signals in February 2009, are as coveted as oil reserves are to energy companies.
Sri Lanka’s Tigo celco to sidestep price war – LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE Sri Lanka’s mobile service provider Tigo plans to rely on giving better value to increase market share and revenue and not wage a price war with rival local mobile operators, company officials said. “We do not believe that a price war will benefit anybody including the customer. There has to be a balance between price and the profitability of the company,” says Dumindra Ratnayaka, chief executive of Celltel Lanka which operates under the Tigo brand. “It is not a price war that we have in us, that is why we introduced per second billing rather than cutting headline prices,” Ratnayaka told reporters at the opening of Tigo’s new service centre called Tigo Zone. Powered by ScribeFire.
Economist.com – Cities Guide Singapore’s free Wi-Fi service, which since December 2006 has covered almost all public areas, has been extended to the place it was most notably lacking: the terminals at Changi Airport. Users of the airport, including those at the new Terminal 3 and Budget Terminal, can now log on to wireless@sg and access the internet free of charge. The download speed, 512 kilobits per second, is fast enough for most needs. Powered by ScribeFire.
Despite protests from broadcasters, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) next week will begin testing devices that will allow Internet service providers to utilize unused spectrum for wireless broadband service. The commission on January 24 will kick off a four-to-six week lab test of equipment that will allow ISPs to access this spectrum, known as “white spaces.” That will be followed by an additional six-week field test period, the FCC said. At issue is the transition from analog to digital TV signals. In an effort to free up spectrum for public safety use, Congress has ordered TV broadcasters to shift their signals from analog to digital by February 2009.