LTE (aka 4G) is manifolds faster than UMTS (aka 3G). That doesn’t mean the governments can make more money from auctioning LTE spectrum. Her Majesty’s government, which had forked £22.5 billion from UMTS auction 12 years back, knows it. Yet the British Finance Minister, George Osborne, targeted £3.
GSMA Mobile World Congress has become the preeminent international event in telecom. A Government Mobile Forum is held as part of it. I have been asked to moderate two sessions, the first being described below. It will be held on the morning of 26th February in Barcelona. I look forward to it.
ComScore has published its tech predictions. It’s all about mobile. The mobile transition is happening astonishingly quickly. Last year, smartphone penetration crossed 50 percent for the first time, led by Android phones. People spend 63 percent of their time online on desktop computers and 37 percent on mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, according to comScore.
One of the great ironies of the present discourse on Internet/broadband is the appointment of Carlos Slim Helu, the world’s richest man and possibly the single most significant barrier to greater Internet access in Latin America, to serve as the Co-Chair of the ITU-UNESCO Broadband Commission. It is widely recognized that Telmex exerts significant market power to keep prices up, users out, and its profits high. I co-authored a few pieces on Mexico’s early reforms in the 1990s so I have some knowledge of the subject. Now the government has set its sights on telecoms. According to Aurelio Nuño, the president’s chief of staff, within two months the PRI will present a bill to attack the “great problem of concentration” in telephony, internet and television.
What we noticed in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was the randomness of the damage. Houses that were right next to each other were affected differently: one destroyed another untouched. This was supposed to be caused by the complex interaction of the wave and the topography of the coast. In the case of the meteor hit that affected the Siberian city of Chelyabinsk, the damage has also been random according to reports. Sometimes with glass containers within a home damaged while the windows were not.
Information and communication technology causes unprecedented consequences. It knits the networks of people who challenge the establishment, as the printing press of Gutenberg did to the Vatican. Church is no longer the crucible of political power. But few years back Father Federico Lombardi, the outgoing Pope’s spokesman, has tested the water by warning “of the corrupting influence of mobile phones and the internet on our souls.” He is not alone.
In April 2012, LIRNEasia participated in a regional FAO workshop held in Bangkok. The workshop brought together representatives from the agriculture ministries/ departments of 10 countries in Asia (Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam), FAO personnel as well as the private sector, including operators of Mobile Agricultural Information Services (MAIS). The official workshop proceedings are now available, with a chapter dedicated to LIRNEasia’s survey findings on the use of ICTs by the BOP. The report articulates the need for clear policies and the benefits of public-private partnerships in creating viable, sustainable and importantly reliable Mobile Agricultural Information Services (MAIS-s).
I’ve been thinking about big data and privacy these days. I used to think about this subject a lot in the early 1990s. Back then I did not have a lot of company. But now, there is plenty. But as I read what is being written, I worry.
How exactly, is the question. In the case of a tsunami or a tidal surge we know what causes the damage. What were knocked out: power? towers? Was it caused by congestion?
The irony was palpable. At the recent talk I gave on telecom sector reforms at the Bangladesh Enterprise Institute, I used Khan Academy to illustrate what Digital Bangladesh would give the people of Bangladesh. Everybody was very happy, since Salman Khan has Bangladeshi roots. But I knew, and they knew, that the government bans YouTube at the drop of a hat and at that moment, it was blocked for all users of BTCL connectivity. So no Khan Academy.
In the late 1980s, I supervised a Masters thesis on the emergence of the fax. Those days, fax was big. Among the drivers she found were the significance of Japanese corporate culture and ideograms. It appears that the Japanese who were then the most enthusiastic adopters have not given up on it yet while the rest of the world has. Japan is renowned for its robots and bullet trains, and has some of the world’s fastest broadband networks.
Renesys report how Egypt went dark. They have worked out a way to tell which countries are easiest to cut off from the Internet and which are harder. How many phone calls does it take to kill the internet? It seems like an odd question to ask about a network once thought to be strong enough to withstand a nuclear attack. However, first-strike mushroom clouds aren’t the biggest threat to the internet anymore.
Verizon has started to assess and issue “report cards” on mobile apps that its customers are likely to use, according to the NYT. Sounds like a noble effort on Verizon’s part, but why is the carrier reviewing apps in the first place? After all, Verizon would benefit from apps using excess data, because that would result in higher cellphone bills for customers. David Samberg, a Verizon spokesman, said that it behooved the company to inform customers on how apps affect their smartphones because an app that behaves badly can detract from the entire customer experience. And dissatisfied customers might complain to the carrier, not the app maker.
“Only five years after its launch, Skype has emerged as the largest provider of cross-border voice communications in the world,” said TeleGeography in 2009. Today Skype is barely a 10-year old. Yet, its year-on-year increase of 51 billion minutes in 2012 is more than twice the collective increase achieved by all international carriers worldwide. International telephone traffic grew 5% in 2012, to 490 billion minutes and cross-border Skype-to-Skype voice and video traffic grew 44 per cent to reach 167 billion minutes. International migration, the rapid uptake of mobile phones in developing countries, and steady reductions in international call prices—especially in the form of flat-rate (and even free) calling plans—have contributed to traffic increases.
Just today, my friend Abu Saeed Khan was telling me this was something the mobile operators of Bangladesh could easily do. And here, the Economist carries a story about how the Dutch have done it. Each technique has its upsides and downsides. Radar and satellites can cover swathes of land, yet they lack detail. Gauges are much more accurate, but the price of that accuracy is spotty coverage.
Today I delivered the keynote at well attended workshop on how the Telecom Sector could contribute to Digital Bangladesh. It was organized by the Bangladesh Enterprise Institute. Attendees included the Ministers of Post and Telecom, ICT and Information. The Chair of BTRC and the Secretary of the Ministry of ICT, a key actor in Bangladesh’s e gov activities, spoke. The government envisions a Digital Bangladesh that makes the full potential of the Internet available to its people, but appears unclear about how they will be connected.