National Safety Day was somewhat overshadowed by floods and an election. Yet, LIRNEasia and its partner Sarvodaya pulled together a good exhibit. The judges have selected our exhibit as one of the top three. As a reward we have been offered an educational trip to Bangkok. Someone from Sarvodaya will make the trip.
This used to be seen as a challenge. Now it’s “same old, same old.” The social network, which makes most of its money by including advertising in the news feeds of its users, said about 69 percent of its advertising revenue came from mobile devices, which have become the most common way people tap into the service. Facebook reported that it had 1.39 billion monthly users worldwide in December, up 3.
The Philippines Senate conducted its 4th public hearing on the Philippine internet, where the National Telecom Commission presented the summary of the position papers it received on MC 07-07-2011 on minimum broadband connection speeds. The photo shows Senator Bam Aquino (right) and government officials, including NTC Commissioner Gamaliel Cordoba and ICTO Deputy Executive Director Denis Villorente on the left. Comm. Cordoba personally approached LIRNEasia Research Fellow Grace Mirandilla-Santos to say that they really liked LIRNEasia’s comments, and that he would like to discuss our proposal further. There will be a 2nd NTC hearing on broadband QoS on 16 Feb 2015, which Grace plans to attend.
The Lankadeepa, the leading Sinhala newspaper in Sri Lanka, has reported a speech by Dr Ranga Kalansooriya at a recent event on media ethics organized by the Sri Lanka Press Institute, where he claims that a survey covering 14 out of the 25 districts showed very high levels of reliance on the Internet for political news. Of those who had changed their views on who to vote for President, 59 per cent had done so based on TV; while 31 percent did so because of Internet content. Only one percent of those changing their stance had done so because of print media Somewhat ironically, the SLPI has not posted any information related to the event on its website. Hopefully, more information about this survey will be forthcoming.
The conventional telcos were complaining that the Googles and the Facebooks of the world (labeled by them as Over-the-Top or OTT players) were unfairly getting a free ride on the expensive, difficult-to-maintain last mile access network. Bharti Airtel went as far as unilaterally seeking to identify such uses by their customers and to impose additional charges on them. They backed off in the face of widespread protests, but they said that they expected the regulator to “level the playing field.” Now it looks like their complaints may be getting a response from a different quarter. If the Googles and the Facebooks of the world provide connectivity directly to their users, the old boys will have nothing to complain about.
How do YOU think? We tell ourselves that when people are faced with making a decision, they would make reasonable, well informed and carefully thought out decisions. Oftentimes, we think (unconsciously of course) that other people think in the same way that we ourselves do. But for the vast majority of time, this is just not how it works. The latest World Development Report explains the three principles of human decision making: thinking automatically, thinking socially, and thinking with mental models.
SEA-ME-WE4, the only submarine cable of Bangladesh, has been down again for 10 days. This outage has affected the business of BSCCL, the state-owned subsea cable monopoly. Doug Madory of Dyn Research, the global Internet performance monitor company, has shared with me the diagnostic image of BSCCL traffic (Click on the thumbnail). Evidently the six cross-border terrestrial operators of Bangladesh have been keeping Internet alive via India. There is, however, a huge risk.
It appears that getting sites to build towers is one of the biggest barriers to rapid rollout of mobile networks in Myanmar. One operator, MPT, has an advantage in that it owns land in all major population centers. The claim that they are examining tower quality before offering sharing is one that I would take with a grain of salt, were I the regulator. The sooner the assessments are completed, the easier life will be for its competitors. So I can imagine the priority being given to this task.
One of the problems with social media is that no one reads beyond the 140 characters. I was asked about mobile number portability via Twitter. I provided the information via links in a blog post and then tweeted the post. I get the sense that no one went to the nuances. I am good at summarizing, but cannot give the true pros and cons in 140 characters.
We have been requested via social media to shed light on MNP, I gather in light of various dissatisfactions about what all ISPs did in terms of blocking websites in the past few years. Attachment to the number, the costs involved in printing up new business cards, etc were seen by many in the West as a barrier to customers changing from one operator to another. There are instances when we have unequivocally recommended MNP. But as a general rule, one has to weigh the pros and cons. This slideset is the most comprehensive I could find, though it was worked up for small economies where the economic case for MNP is much harder.
Five years ago, our Lead Consultant Economist, Dr Harsha de Silva, entered Parliament as an opposition national-list MP. For those unfamiliar with idiosyncrasies of Sri Lankan politics, that is an MP without constituency responsibilities who is appointed by a political party based on the contribution he/she may make to legislative or executive functions. Without doubt, Harsha was one of the best national-list MPs in the 14th Parliament. In the early years, he continued to engage in research-related activities sometimes on behalf of LIRNEasia and sometimes on his own. Few years back, his party made him a constituency organizer which left him little time for research.
On 16th January, 2015 at the invitation of the Sri Lanka Institution of Engineers LIRNEasia presented a public lecture in Colombo on the results of our ongoing big data for development research. The public lecture was organized by The Institution of Engineers Sri Lanka (IESL) and attracted over 40 people in person and an unknown number via streaming at the Wimalasurendra Auditorium in the IESL head office. LIRNEasia’s Founding Chair Rohan Samarajiva and Researcher, Danaja Maldeniya presented some of the initial findings of relevance to urban and transportation planning. They were joined in the Q&A by Sriganesh Lokanathan. The presentation slides are available HERE.
I was somewhat disappointed by the Modi government leaning toward the IBM vision of smart cities, where sensors would be ubiquitously placed across green-field new-build satellite cities across India. Our vision is lower cost and seeks to improve existing cities relying on citizens as the principal sensors. So I was pleased to our thinking echoed in a http://blogs.worldbank.org/ic4d/building-smarter-cities?
The most recent State of the Internet report by Akamai lists the Philippines (global rank 105) and India (global rank 115) at the bottom in terms of average connection speed for fixed broadband (fixed BB). The average speed (2.5 Mbps and 2 Mbps respectively) isn’t the real issue. The quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) change that is pretty much non existent and the year-over-year (YoY) change that averages at 30% for both are bigger issues, in my opinion; specially in contrast with Indonesia that has a 49% QoQ change and a 149% YoY change. These are also the 2 economies that have a less than 10% broadband adoption rate, among those surveyed (significant disconnect with ITU numbers for India’s Fixed Broadband Subscriptions per 100, but still under 10%).
Parvez Iftikhar will be amused that I am proposing a fund, after objecting to his favorite Universal Service Fund. But that is how the policy game gets played. We look at something that does not work at all or produces more bad outcomes than good (government-owned telcos with universal service obligations in the old days; government-owned media organizations now) and propose a solution that will reduce the harm (universal service fund for telecom; public media content fund for media). Then we see how the solution works and propose sunsetting it or shutting it down if it has been hijacked by nefarious interests. Deng Xiao Ping called this crossing the river by feeling the stones.
Net Neutrality has been debated, discussed and re-discussed for a while now, mainly in the context of the west. For the first time however, it is now being debated in India, “virtually overnight”, when Bharti Airtel, India’s largest mobile network provider announced preferential pricing for VoIP services. The government is in favour of maintaining net neutrality as the Internet is an instrument for the masses and must remain so, Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has said, marking the first time the Centre has adopted a public stand on the subject. “The Internet must promote local along with the global. For India, net neutrality is very important,” Prasad, also the IT minister, said at a meeting with US Under-Secretary of State Catherine Novelli.