It has been business as usual in Istanbul, the largest gateway of Eurasian telecoms traffic. Turkey, unlike Egypt, has not killed the goose that lays golden eggs in terms of telecoms revenue and reputation, despite civil unrest. Jim Cowie, the CTO of Renesys Corporation, has written in his company’s blog: We examined the reachability of social networking sites from our measurement infrastructure within Turkey, and found nothing unusual. We examined the 72-hour history of measurements from inside Turkey to these sites, and found no change in normal behavior. In short: Turkey’s Internet does not appear to have changed significantly in reaction to the current protest events.
Unlike the dictators, deposed by Arab Spring, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a democratically elected and highly accomplished statesman. “Before first winning power in October 2002, the AKP (Erdogan’s party) spent 22 months interviewing in depth 41,000 people across the country. Now, even allies admit, Mr Erdogan listens mostly to himself,” remarked the Financial Times. Erdogan is now counting the losses of not consulting his fellow citizens on building a shopping mall at an old park in Istanbul. The young Turks have hit the streets, keyboards and touchscreens simultaneously amid battling with tear gas and water cannons.
Yury Sokolov is the vice-president of Rusatom Overseas, a state-owned Russian nuclear energy outfit. Bangladesh has planned for a nuclear reactor to produce commercial power with Rusatom’s help. Mr. Sokolov underscores the development of skilled manpower, management system and relevant laws prior to building the reactor. His emphasize on building proper infrastructure is striking.
Data centers are simultaneously the factories and warehouses of Internet. A study of Cushman & Wakefield, Hurleypalmerflatt and Source8 has ranked Indonesia, India and Brazil as the riskiest countries to open a data center. That strikes out two out of the four BRIC countries from being the home of Internet. Their risks are mostly related to physical, economic and social issues. Other factors however such as high energy costs, poor international internet bandwidth and protectionist legislation are also risks that need to be taken into account.
It seems to be the high time to compare the state of telecoms between North Korea and Cuba. Cuba’s average salary is US$20 a month and it costs $4.5 per hour to surf the net, which is also heavily filtered – said a report of BBC. It means, the Cuban net users burn 25% of their average national wage in an hour. Cuba has activated her first submarine cable early this year, according to Renesys.
Earlier we highlighted how India is learning mobile banking from Kenya. Recently the Economist said, “Paying for a taxi ride using your mobile phone is easier in Nairobi than it is in New York, thanks to Kenya’s world-leading mobile-money system, M-PESA.” This world-leading mobile-money system of Kenya is a great example of unintended consequence. It had several factors in its favour, including the exceptionally high cost of sending money by other methods; the dominant market position of Safaricom; the regulator’s initial decision to allow the scheme to proceed on an experimental basis, without formal approval; a clear and effective marketing campaign (“Send money home”); an efficient system to move cash around behind the scenes; and, most intriguingly, the post-election violence in the country in early 2008. M-PESA was used to transfer money to people trapped in Nairobi’s slums at the time, and some Kenyans regarded M-PESA as a safer place to store their money than the banks, which were entangled in ethnic disputes.
NTT Docomo has shrunk its shareholding, from 30% to 8%, in Robi Axiata – the third largest operator by subscriber in Bangladesh. The Japanese heavyweight has unleashed its fury at the regulatory malfunctions and questioned the government’s credibility. Press release of Robi Axiata on NTT’s exit is the most caustic one in Bangladesh’s telecoms history. The Docomo decision comes in the face of what it cites as an unfriendly regulatory environment and business uncertainties. The telecommunications industry is at a critical juncture in Bangladesh with many issues pending between the regulators and the government agencies, notably related to VAT rebate on 2G and 3G license and 2G licensing rules, which have not been addressed even in the recent circulars of the National Board of Revenue (NBR).
The UAE boasts of Burj Khalifa (Arabic: برج خليفة, “Khalifa tower”), the world’s tallest building, at Dubai. Now it has decided to be the very first country in Europe, Middle East and Africa in terms of futuristic mobile broadband rollout by combining 700Mhz and 800Mhz spectrum bands. The country’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) has decided to bundle the 800 MHz band plan with the lower duplexer (2 X 30 MHz) – as a baseline – of the Asia Pacific (APT) 700 MHz band. It will revolutionize affordable network deployment and benefit wider population with mobile broadband connectivity. Deputy Director General of TRA Majed Al Mesmar explains: By maximising the spectrum for mobile broadband in harmony with the growing economies of scale for both bands, the TRA decision will enable nearly global interoperability and roaming.
Cyclone Nargis still haunts Myanmar. With a wall of wave as high as 16 feet at 135 miles per hour, the sea had unleashed its fury across the Irrawaddy Delta on May 2, 2008. Nearly 140,000 lives were perished and 2.4 million displaced people lost everything. It destroyed 450,000 homes, damaged 350,000 others, flooded 600,000 hectares of agricultural land and ruined 60% of farming implements.
Bangladesh has ceremoniously celebrated the World Telecommunication and Information Society Day on May 17. The day also marked eight months of shutting down of YouTube in the country. Now the authorities have decided to take over the command control of social media. Information Minister Hasanul Haq Inu at a media call on the same day said the government would take the help of ‘special technology’ to bar objectionable materials from being viewed on the social media websites. It would be easier to remove disagreeable contents from Facebook once this technology was put in place, said Inu.
While renewing the 2G mobile licenses in November 2011, the authorities had mandated that each mobile operator pays 1% of gross revenue to Social Obligation Fund (SOF). It is just a version of Universal Service Fund. By far four out of six operators have paid Tk. 2.4 billion (US$31 million) to Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission, according to press report.
Technology dictates regulation, not other way around. And the Federal Communications Commission has found many of its regulations have lost relevance in today’s America. Such useless regulations only create confusion. Therefore, the FCC has, by far, filled its trashcan with more than 120 outdated regulations. A petition from the trade body, USTelecom, has prompted this belated housekeeping.
Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) and Access to Information (A2I) project, being blessed by the Prime Minister’s Office, are blaming each other on the controversial allocation of 800 MHz spectrum to Ollo. BTRC said, according to a report of Dhaka Tribune: “I have gone through the matter and found that there were no irregularity on our part for allocating the spectrum,” BTRC Chairman Sunil Kanti Bose told the Dhaka Tribune yesterday. “BTRC cannot deny a request from the PMO and the 800MHz band allocation is not only for Ollo, it was allocated to other ISPs before also. A2I planned to use it for digital zila Jessore as well as for the whole country.” Bose also said as far as he is aware, Ollo has special plans to provide internet in rural areas through dongles.
ITU Secretary-General, Dr Hamadoun I. Touré has delivered opening speech today at World Telecommunication/ICT Policy Forum (WTPF-13). At the middle of his address Dr. Touré dramatically picked up a blue helmet of the UN Peacekeeping soldiers and said, And it is my pleasure to announce to you today … [pause] … that we are not taking over the Internet. The UN peacekeepers, in their blue helmets, … [pause] … are not coming to take over the world’s IXPs.
Banglalion, one of the two Broadband Wireless Access (BWA aka WiMAX) operators, has filed a lawsuit against Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) for awarding a pair of 10 megahertz of spectrum in 800 MHz band at “free of cost.” Evidently the whole issue has been scandalous all the way: BTRC commissioner, ATM Monirul Alam, admitted that the 800MHz band was declared very important by the International Telecommunication Union, only to point out that the spectrum was allocated to NGGL before the international body’s declaration. The spectrum was allocated on August 10, 2011 for a year on condition of using it properly. The government renewed its contract last December, 15 months after the original allocation. .
The world’s largest democracy, in terms voters, now comprehensively monitors every phone call, text message, email and online activities of its citizens and indeed the visitors’. Welcome to India, where the government has built a US$74 million Central Monitoring System. This third eye of the spy outfits is claimed to be used for enforcing “reasonable security practices and procedures” within the country. But privacy and internet freedom advocates are predictably critical. Pranesh Prakash, director of policy at the Centre for Internet and Society, said: “In the absence of a strong privacy law that promotes transparency about surveillance and thus allows us to judge the utility of the surveillance, this kind of development is very worrisome.