Technocrats (and people like us who emphasize the rational) would prefer a rational, integrated solution. But we rarely get greenfield opportunities. In almost all cases vested interests dominate. So the reform that gets done is imperfect and messy. This is the message P Chidambaram, Minister of Finance seems to be giving to NYT.
We’re playing around with some ideas about connectedness. We want to use big data to see what real (as opposed to administratively mandated) communities are. Using Facebook’s analytics page, did some surface analysis of SAARC and ASEAN. It is very clear that India is the center of SAARC, being the country that most Bhutanese have friends in (value of 5 given) and the country with the second-largest number of friends for Bangladeshis, Maldivians, Nepalese, Pakistanis and Sri Lankans (value of 4). I guess the only surprise there is Pakistan.
Recently, I had to explain my aversion to Intellectual Property law, despite my PhD work being on copyright law and policy. I said it was the most inelegant and dishonest branch of the law. The central dictum is “ideas are free, only expression is protected.” Yet, even lists of addresses and telephones numbers were protected by copyright (this was subsequently changed in the US). There just did not seem to be an intellectual foundation; just a series of post hoc rationalizations.
LIRNEasia exploits the wisdom of the crowd, or at least of the informed crowd. Its launch, back in 2004, was at an Expert Forum that brought in knowledgeable regulators, policy makers, stakeholders and researchers to discuss seeds of research ideas and give ideas for new research. Keeping with that tradition, we brought in a number of experts to discuss some initial cuts on papers being developed in the context of the Ford Foundation funded project, “Facilitating and enriching policy discourse on increasing broadband access by the poor in India”. The meeting was attended by senior officials of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), Chairman Dr Rahul Khullar and Advisor Mr Sudhir Gupta. The topics covered included regional specificities of broadband development, contributions that could be made to an improved investment environment by licensing policies, the opportunities presented by the “digital dividend” repurposing of frequencies for broadband development and metrics to assess efficacy of broadband policies.
Robert Pepper is the vice president for global technology policy at Cisco. He has elaborated “a grave threat” in ITU’s “fatally flawed proposals to update” the way Internet would be regulated. While analyzing the impact of revising International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs), he said: It could break the global Internet into unconnected islands of national or regional networks, extend telecommunications regulations to computing, or lead to onerous government regulation of the Internet……….. Some proposals for the WCIT would control the routing of Internet traffic in the name of security but would balkanize the Internet and threaten Internet freedom.
One may wonder if the Afro-Asian thinkers are crying wolf while addressing SPNP doctrine of ETNO. They should listen to J. Scott Marcus, an accomplished researcher and consultant: “The interconnection proposals that are publicly known, specifically including the ETNO proposal, are ill-advised and should be rejected.” Marcus further said: Turning to the interconnection proposals in general, and the ETNO proposal in particular, we think that they are particularly ill-advised, both in terms of what they are seeking to do, and in terms of their likely consequences. The Sending Party Network Pays (SPNP) principle put forward by ETNO is likely to negatively impact social welfare, and not “just” by hampering innovation.
African scholar Dele Meiji Fatunla is respected beyond Africa. He has slammed ETNO’s proposal as a threatening element to the economic future of Africa as well as the developing world. And LIRNEasia CEO Rohan Samarajiva’s analysis on ETNO’s doctrine shines, along with OECD’s researcher Rudolf Van Der Berg, in Fatunla’s arsenal. A report, written by Rohan Samarajiva, former Director General of Telecommunications for Sri Lanka and CEO of Lirne Asia, an ICT think-tank, predicts dire consequences for the development of the internet and Africa’s prosperity if governments do shift to a “sending party network pays” model. The report says that a global agreement to move to a “sending party network pays” policy would have a detrimental effect on regions by providing a blank cheque to providers to raise prices for consumers.
Most people have heard of the Internet of things, where devices such as refrigerators would communicate with other devices or with people. But this is about sensors embedded in cows talking to the mobile phone of the farmer. When Christian Oesch was a boy on his family’s hog farm, cellphones were a thing of the future. Now, Mr. Oesch tends a herd of dairy cattle and carries a smartphone wherever he goes.
LIRNEasia has raised alarm after two camps have ganged up behind the ITU to command and control the Internet. It immediately drew the attention of Africa and CEO Rohan Samarajiva was invited to Ghana. There he explained how the authoritarian governments have planned to put fingers on the Internet’s on/off switch. And ETNO, a club of European state-owned telcos, foolishly aspires to be the robber barons of Internet. It received wide media coverage and we have posted them in this blog accordingly.
I recently presented LIRNEasia‘s methodology on measuring broadband quality of service experience (QoSE) at the Expert Group on Telecom/ICT Indicators (EGTI) meeting held on the 23rd & 24th of September 2012 in Bangkok, Thailand just before ITU’s annual World Telecom/ICT Indicators meeting. The methodology suggests tests are carried out on multiple times of the day and on multiple days of the week to account of peak / off peak variances and that throughput, latency, jitter and packet loss are measured. In addition to the proposed method, ideal and minimal requirements (such as the number of domains being tested, locations, operators, broadband plans etc.) were also presented. The use of a diagnostic tool (software) as opposed to equipment that sits on the network was proposed.
Hutchison Global Communications (HGC) has predictably bagged the first “permission” to provide international data and voice services with “an authorized representative” of state-owned Myanma Posts and Telecommunications (MPT). The HGC-MPT partnership dates back to 2007. Brushing aside the western sanctions, HGC kept transporting Myanmar’s overseas voice and data traffic using the Sino-ASEAN terrestrial link named GMS Network. And HGC has proudly publicized it. Now the government of Myanmar has blessed the corporate wedding of HGC and “an authorized representative” of MPT.
If the ETNO and related African group proposals to charge the networks sending information to Africa go through, those who will suffer will be users in Africa, particularly those with limited budgets and no internationally accepted credit cards. The European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association (ETNO), representing European telecommunication companies, is proposing that the “sending party network pays” principle be written into an international treaty. This proposal would force content providers to pay local telecom operators for the delivery of user-requested data. Users from countries not seen as having large revenue potential could even find themselves cut off from some content. Alternatively, attractive content may have to be moved behind paywalls, making them inaccessible for those without credit cards.