Slightly malfunctional signaling system can cause a train wreck. And it is no different with telecoms policy. Bangladesh enacted the International Long Distance Telecommunication Service (ILDTS) Policy in 2007. As opposed to fast convergence at technology front, this policy has savagely diverged wholesale supply chain of broadband followed by tagging licenses to each fragment of service. My article on the devastating consequences of this policy.
Coronavirus (the virus causing the disease Covid-19) has two universal problems: no vaccine or drug has been developed as yet, and the diagnostic tools are scarce. This combination has dangerously multiplied the risk of infecting Bangladesh. Because, our population density is much higher than those countries that have been fatally hit by far (see the graph). Covid-19 is not the last pandemic virus. And nobody knows when the next one will attack, followed by another.
Drägerwerk is a world leader in the production of ventilators. In an interview, company head Stefan Dräger, 57, discusses the challenges of keeping up with current demand as the corona crisis accelerates. Following is the excerpt: DER SPIEGEL: The German government has contracted you to build 10,000 ventilators. How far along are you? Dräger: The contract has a detailed delivery plan that spans the entire year.
The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has objected to the completion of the 12,971km Pacific Light Cable Network (PLCN), according to the Wall Street Journal. Once commercially launched in Q3 2019, the roughly $400 million PLCN system will plug El Segundo (California) with multiple Asian destinations: Aurora and San Fernando City (both in Philippines), Deep Water Bay (Hong Kong) and Toucheng (Taiwan). GU Holdings (a subsidiary of Google), Edge Cable Holdings (a subsidiary of Facebook) and Pacific Light Data Communication (PLDC) have teamed up to build this 144 Tbps capacity of transpacific cable, which is composed of six fiber pairs. It will be the first cable connecting Hong Kong and the U.S.
Corner shops in the neighborhood save the trouble of driving to big stores for day-to-day groceries. That’s what the carrier-neutral POPs do for affordable broadband. It’s ubiquitous in Europe but nearly non-existent in Asia. Only Singapore and Hong Kong host carrier-neutral POPs. That’s why Internet has been centralized in these two city-states.
Retrieving accurate information from a patient’s body is critical for any treatment. And information technology has been greatly contributing to the advancement of diagnostic systems. Today’s physicians are manifolds empowered than their predecessors in terms of detection and intervention. Affordability of diagnostic systems, however, remains the major barrier to universal healthcare. And it has been causing deaths at biblical proportion across the developing world.
Two segments of a mobile network can never be virtualized: power supply and radio access networks (RAN) antenna. Our mobile devices are directly connected with the RAN of a mobile network. Originally two types of frequencies (900 MHz and 1800 MHz) were good enough for 2G networks. Today’s 3G and 4G mobile networks use varieties of (700 MHz, 2100 MHz, 2300 MHz and 2600 MHz) radio frequencies. And it has added a whole bunch of complexities to accommodate different types of antennas in a network.
Call it an African miracle. Eleven years ago mobile money was born in Kenya. Today the service processes one billion dollars every day through 690 million registered accounts, generating direct revenues of over $2.4 billion worldwide. Impoverish citizens without bank accounts enjoy the most secured way to transact through mobile payment systems.
US Government Accountability Office (GAO) provides Congress with thorough and balanced analysis of technological and scientific developments that affect the society, environment, and economy. A new report of GAO has detected “that the statistics on Internet access availability and access in America provided by the US regulator, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), are over-egged and misleading figures that routinely overstate reality.” As so often is the case, it is the detail in a comparatively small and niche case study that highlights the falsifications hidden the bigger picture. Simple extrapolation of the figures and evidence presented in the September 2108 GAO report “Broadband Internet: FCC’s Data Overstate Access on Tribal Lands” indicate that the regulator’s figures are a gross distortion of the reality of broadband access, speeds and competition across not only the report’s subject area but also across the entirety of the nation. Martyn Warwick of Telecom TV has written, “US regulator’s broadband statistics: Rubbish in – Rubbish out – Rubbish throughout.
Data traffic in Finland’s Elisa 4G mobile network has grown by more than 20-times from 2011 to 2017 but the operator’s CAPEX and OPEX remained flat during this period. Mobile industry engineers should make their hands dirty, as the Finns do. The bad culture of buying off the shelf solutions to meet internal KPI should be stopped. Engineers are smart, networks are not. And the world will not collapse if it waits until the over-hyped 5G technology gets matured.
A former Google engineer named Colin Huang has developed an online shopping app named Pinduoduo in China during 2015.
Recently I apprehended looming anarchy due to lack of regulatory clarity on blocking websites in Bangladesh. Evidently it has struck the country’s popular online newspaper.
The person heading the national regulatory agency must know everything about any punitive measure his office takes. Otherwise, it compromises his authority and opens the floodgate of extra-judicial interventions. And that sprouts mistrust among the public.
Innovation ousts orthodoxy. Soft-switch has replaced telephone exchange equipment. Undersea optical fiber cables have marginalized satellites in intercontinental and transcontinental connectivity. Terrestrial optical fiber networks – along the highways, railway tracks, power grids and gas pipelines – are replacing microwave radio links. All these physical networks lead to data centers at home and abroad.
We generally credit smartphones for making camera and audiovisual players irrelevant. But we often forget that every smartphone is also, by default, a GPS receiver. Quite correct, if not precise, latitude and longitude of the device is being instantaneously updated and displayed. This standard feature is embedded in every smartphone regardless being Android or iOS. It has prompted Battalgazi Yildirim, a (literally young Turk) geophysicist from Stanford, developing a mobile-based IoT application named Zizmos for earthquake’s early warning system.
Nepal Telecom and Hong Kong-headquartered China Telecom Global has connected each other across Nepal’s northern border with Tibet through a mix of underground and all-dielectric self-supporting (ADSS) optical fiber cable network. Activation of this link on January 12, 2018 has ended the exclusivity of Tata’s and Bharti Airtel’s international connectivity to the landlocked Himalayan state. Now Nepal can procure IP-transit, interconnection bandwidth, international leased circuits and cloud services at highly competitive rates from Asia’s one of the two carrier-neutral hubs at Hong Kong (Singapore is the other one). Nepal has reportedly activated only 1.5 Gbps through the Chinese carrier, due to technical constrains of the ADSS link.