March 2013 — Page 3 of 3 — LIRNEasia


Just before WCIT, Hosuk Lee and I did a rush job that looked at the possibility that the ETNO-inspired efforts to extract rents from OTT players such as Facebook may violate GATS commitments. Now the issue has bubbled up on another front: When China and other nations block the websites of U.S. companies but the United States doesn’t respond in kind there’s a strong argument that creates an unfair trade barrier, said Andrew McLaughlin, former White House deputy chief technology officer. He cited the example of Facebook, which is blocked in China, and Renren, a Chinese social networking service colloquially known as the “Facebook of China.
This is so different from the stories coming out about companies bidding low for 4G. In an unusual move, CTU, the Czech telecoms regulator, suspended the country’s spectrum auction because bids were escalating too far beyond the reserve price. CTU set a minimum price of CZK7.4 billion ($377m) for the three frequency bands under the hammer – 800MHz, 1800MHz and 2.6GHz – but overall bidding climbed to CZK20 billion before the regulator decided to pull the plug.
Total Telecom gives details of the licenses that will be issued in Myanmar upon the completion of a three-stage process. Technology neutral is good. How much spectrum per license is not stated. If it is 5 MHz, as the rumor mill says, it is unlikely that the government’s objective of 80 SIMS per 100 people can be achieved. After the 4 April deadline, the Committee said it will reveal the applicants that have qualified for the next phase of the licensing process, stage three, which will decide which two companies will be awarded the licences.
The liberalization process in Myanmar is chugging along, with an arrest or two, bad advice from the ITU Regional Office and so on. Hope things will get better. In a poor country like Myanmar, it is hard for grassroots people to get a cell phone. The price has dropped to 150,000 kyat but there are just 1.24 million mobile phones in a country with a population of over 60 million.
Smith v Maryland was a 1979 US case that permitted relatively easy access to phone records. Fixed phone records, because that’s all there was, back then. Mobile phone records yield a lot more information. But US law enforcement has been using the old rules to get the call records. But that may be about to change, at least in Texas.

How much is the Internet worth?

Posted on March 9, 2013  /  0 Comments

The Economist has an interesting discussion of several academic papers addressing aspects of the question. Shane Greenstein of Northwestern University and Ryan McDevitt of the University of Rochester calculated the consumer surplus generated by the spread of broadband access (which ought to include the surplus generated by internet services, since that is why consumers pay for broadband). They did so by constructing a demand curve. Say that in 1999 a person pays $20 a month for internet access. By 2006 the spread of broadband has lowered the real price to $17.
Having just finished teaching a course for regulators from five South Asian nations, this para from Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s column on state capacity in India resonated with me. The second black hole of the state is regulatory certainty. The biggest regression over UPA 2 was that it continued to multiply regulators, while at the same time moving away from principled regulation. It got into trouble in sector after sector because it could not stick to regulatory frameworks with credibility; even in PPPs, it was amenable to arbitrary discretion. This also created openings where other institutions like courts could compound uncertainties.
I have given versions of this lecture in many forms at SAFIR over the years. The difference this time was that it was the foundation for a series of units based on the research on customer-relations management conducted across Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka by LIRNEasia and presented by Helani Galpaya and Rajkiran Bilolikar. Their slidesets will be put up shortly. Mine are here.
Another big news story from Barcelona was about Mozilla entering the OS wars. Mozilla is not alone in believing that other systems can thrive. In October Microsoft, which has never had more than a minuscule share of the phone business, brought forth Windows Phone 8. Most Windows smartphones are made by Finland’s Nokia, which dropped its own plans for a new system when it threw in its lot with the American software giant. BlackBerry, a Canadian company formerly called Research In Motion, hopes to recover lost glories with BlackBerry 10, which appeared in January after much delay.
From where I stand there is little doubt that the access network will be wireless, except perhaps in high-density housing in cities. But we have so many people going on about the necessity of fiber to the home, even from within government. But I never hear them talk about the need to liberalize the permission process for trenching in city streets. “One of the biggest issues within the market today is the movement of bandwidth – there are no routes available for fibre and companies in the business are really doing their own thing. In Cape Town there is a law now which dictates that trenches can only be opened once, and this is very difficult for a competing business.
I just returned from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, a monster event with 70,000 plus attendees that puts the ITU Telecom World events to shame. No wonder ITU’s Hamadoun Toure was introduced at the Ministerial Program as being a good friend from GSMA’s sister organization. We talked policy, but the real game was the exhibition. NYT reports one of the more significant piece of news to emerge: The new handsets, which the company introduced at the Mobile World Congress industry trade show in Barcelona, reinforced Nokia’s strategy of aiming at the lowest-priced but fastest-growing segment of the market. The Nokia 105, the company’s new basic, entry-level phone, will sell for 15 euros, about $20.