Ministers making statements outside their areas of competence without consulting appropriate authorities is no way to govern. But that apparently is what the Pakistan Interior Minister has done by announcing the end of prepaid mobile in his country, according to Dawn: In a meeting on Friday the operators took strong exception to Rehman Malik’s statement and declared it uncalled for. “The statement has created panic in the industry and it appears that it might have been given purposely to target the telecom industry,” an official of a leading operator told this correspondent. He said in the meeting the operators had also decided to see the PTA chairman in this regard.
Bangladesh is a big country and a coastal country. Yet it was very late in getting connected to a cable. SEA-ME-WE 4 became operational only in 2006. Then it was the largest country without redundancy,having to rely on SEA-ME-WE 4 even to communicate with India, the country that surrounds it. Now all that is over.
In 2007 Smith Dharmasaroja, the former disaster czar of Thailand, pointed to the dangers posed by mountains of mud deposited by the Ganges in the Bay of Bengal. What the research below raises is the danger of soft material combined with earthquakes. Are these not high priority research areas for our scientists? In a paper published today (24 August 2012) in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Professors Dan McKenzie and James Jackson of Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences describe for the first time the added factor that may have made this tsunami so severe: a huge collapse of soft material on the sea bed resulted in a far greater movement of water than would have been caused by the earthquake alone. Full report.
The Economist carries a good piece on the innovation/entrepreneurial boom in Kenya centered around the mobile. There should be such a place in developing Asia. Where? In 2002 Kenya’s exports of technology-related services were a piffling $16m. By 2010 that had exploded to $360m.
Hard truth about why the successful mobile payments model pioneered in Kenya has failed to spread. However Kenya’s success has yet to be replicated much elsewhere. More than half of all the world’s mobile-money transactions are handled by Safaricom. Mobile money is popular in one or two chaotic countries, such as Sudan and Somalia, but barely used in most places where it could do immense good, including India and China. Not all countries need mobile money, of course.
I have heard many absurd proposals related to the mobile industry, but this about takes the cake. Pakistan’s government is considering a radical plan which could dramatically alter the mobile phone industry in the country – as it mulls proposals to ban Prepaid SIM cards from sale. The Interior Minister Rehman Malik said that the government is considering a phased ban on all prepaid SIM cards in an effort to clamp down on terrorism in the country. However, with something in the region of 97% of the entire mobile subscriber base on PrePay tariffs, the impact on the industry would be huge. In addition to the costs of upgrading billing systems to cope with the surge in contract customers, and having facilities in retail stores to cope with the migration – the networks would also face a hole in their finances as payments switch from in advance, to monthly in arrears.
Badalkumbura is located in the Moneragala District, one of the most impoverished in Sri Lanka. But it is located in the midst of a smallholder boom in rubber. Here, the key advantage is the weather. In contrast to the traditional rubber districts where rain prevents tapping of the trees for latex sometimes for half the month, rainy days are an exception in Moneragala. Thus new rubber is expanding rapidly, all with smallholders.
Asia is the world’s biggest seamless landmass. Yet the Asian countries have been interlinked by submarine cables. As if Asia is an archipelago. That’s why the undersea earthquakes have emerged as the serial killer of international connectivity. It disrupted Asia’s telecom services in 2006 and thereafter.
LIRNEasia is sending its Senior Research Manager, Sriganesh Lokanathan to participate in a short course on Visual Analytics at Middlesex University in the United Kingdom. The course if of high relevance to LIRNEasia’s 2012-2014 research agenda.a A big part of the upcoming research cycle involves the use of Big-Data analysis, partly to try and answer some social science research questions. Middlesex University is part of the UK Visual Analytics Consortium (UKVAC), which is a partnership of UK universities with a shared interest in establishing a multi-disciplinary scientific community in the UK dedicated to promoting and contributing to the visual analytics research and development agenda in the UK. The UKVAC Visual Analytics Summer School 2012 (VASS2012) is jointly funded by the US Department of Homeland Security via the US Centre for Visual Analytics for Command, Control and Interoperability Environments (VACCINE) and the UK Home Office.
ASEAN citizens don’t need to obtain visa while traveling within the region. They receive visa on arrival. It is an important benchmark of successful regional cooperation. Indonesia’s Communication and Information Minister, Tifatul Sembiring, wants to take it another step ahead. He has proposed to abolish mobile roaming charges withing ASEAN by 2014.
A book that I co-authored with C.J. Amaratunge was launched last week. An excellent summary and review by W.A.
In 2008, I was presenting the results of Teleuse@BOP2 at the University of Salzburg, when a member of the audience wanted my response to his assertion that the Sri Lanka’s telecom reforms had contributed to rising income inequality. I said I did not see a relation, but he went on to publish a paper on the topic. Internally, we had a few conversations about responding to this piece, but competing demands on our time put that task on the backburner and finally took it off the agenda. Income inequality is a serious problem, no doubt. Many people have studied this problem, looking at education levels, welfare polices and so on as possible explanations but without reaching a conclusive finding.
Yesterday, I was talking with an Indian colleague who was involved in improving the Indian weather information system based on INSAT while working for the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). The trigger had been the devastating cyclone that hit Andhra Pradesh in 1977. This was also related to initiating my interest in disaster early warning because that cyclone was supposed to hit the East Coast of Sri Lanka, but veered away at the last minute. I remember tracking news of its journey while working at the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation. One year later the cyclone did not change track and we lost over 900 people on the East Coast.
Botswana is a landlocked country. It invested in the West Africa Cable System (WACS) which it connected to through Namibia. It is now reaping the benefits. Internet prices are expected to go down as the Botswana Telecommunications Corporations (BTC) Group has slashed its wholesale internet bandwidth prices by 59 percent due to the commissioning of the West Africa Cable System (WACS) undersea cable. There is a lesson here for other landlocked countries.
ITU has joined more than 70 sources of Public Data to give away its treasure trove of statistics through the Google Public Data Explorer (PDE). ITU said, “With Google PDE users can now explore and visualize ITU’s key ICT statistical indicators from 1960 to 2011 (where data exists) for about 200 economies worldwide. Key indicators include fixed telephone, mobile cellular, fixed (wired) Internet, fixed (wired) broadband subscriptions and penetration, as well as the percentage of individuals using the Internet.” The database can be accessed from here.
I am not one for tradition, but we followed tradition to some extent, with the lighting of the lamp (associated with knowledge) and the general format of a book launch. One thing I insisted on was the need to open up for discussion. And discussion we had: This was a faculty member from the University of Colombo who wanted to know whether I was peddling discredited neo-liberal (neo-classical is what he actually said, but I think neo-liberal is what he meant) prescriptions. I responded in concrete terms, showing that the government did not have apply tax-payer funds to stanch the losses of the “national” airline when it was semi-privatized (and actually earned dividends) while after renationalization we are losing more money in a year than the entire welfare budget. So now the debate is joined.