Her Majesty’s Government has enacted the Digital Economy Act last year. It seems to be another episode of Yes (Prime) Minister. Martyn Warwick wrote: The UK’s Digital Economy Act (DEA), passed with unseemly haste, minimal debate and with almost no parliamentary scrutiny in the dying days of a discredited, dispirited and increasingly corrupt Labour government, always was a massive and ill-conceived sledgehammer to crack a very small nut. Sounds quite familiar? Read his full report.
Much of Asia’s Internet traffic transits through Egypt. So far, no collateral damage from Mubarak’s attempt to silence his people. We would also note that there appear to have been no significant disruptions to other countries’ traffic passing through Egypt on fiberoptic cables such as SMW-4 and FLAG FEA. As we’ve noted before, the majority of Internet connectivity between Europe and Asia actually passes through Egypt. The Gulf states, in particular, depend critically on the Egyptian fiberoptic corridor for their connectivity to world markets.
I never expected an economy as advanced as that of Egypt to shut down the Internet. But it did. Not completely, as shown by the Figure in the Wired article that I have taken the excerpt below from. Egypt’s largest ISPs shut off their networks Thursday, making it impossible for traffic to get to websites hosted in Egypt or for Egyptians to use e-mail, Twitter or Facebook. The regime of President Hosni Mubarak also ordered the shut down of mobile phone networks, including one run by the U.
Connecting Asian countries is no longer the carriers’ headache; ensuring seamless connectivity is. In the recent past we have witnessed the emergence of Asia America Gateway and Google’s Unity followed by Southeast Asia Japan cable cables. Series of undersea earthquakes have been damaging the cables and disrupting the intra-Asian as well as inter-Asian voice and data connectivity. Now the Asian carriers have teamed up to roll-out another submarine cable called Asia Submarine-cable Express (ASE). It will bypass the earthquake-prone Taiwanese coast.
We had been using the app store, first introduced by Apple, as an easy-to-grasp model that Asia’s telecom operators should emulate. Reduce transaction costs; foster decentralized innovation, we said. We were pleased that Etisalat in Sri Lanka was one of the first to implement the idea. Sadly, it appears that Apple is reintroducing some elements of the discredited walled garden metaphor into the app store. The change may signal a shift for Apple.
As the owner of a G1, I can afford a little smirk about the ascendancy of Android. But really, the bigger story from the perspective of the people at the BOP who are our prime constituency, is the Gartner prediction that this is the cross-over year for those accessing the Internet through mobiles, though of course, one has to interrogate the basis of the prediction. Google’s operating system for cellphones has overtaken Nokia’s Symbian system as the market leader, ending the Finnish company’s long reign, a British research firm said Monday. In the three months through December, manufacturers shipped 33.3 million cellphones running Android, Google’s free, open-source cellphone operating system, up from just 4.
Information networks are the first casualties of anti-tyrant movements. And Egypt is not an exception. Following two articles of telecomtv.com have captured how the aspirants of freedom outsmart the tyrant: As Egypt begins to reinstate mobile services, Mubarak wants his mummy Egypt’s dial-up revolution