GSMA has urged the governments to immediately suspend the collection of Universal Service Fund (USF). Because, the trade body has found that USF has failed to deliver what it promises in theory. After surveying 64 countries GSMA has detected that more than one-third of these governments have not even disbursed any fund they have taxed the consumers in the name of public interest. Such accumulated idle USF amounts to in excess of a whooping US$11 billion only. The study cites India, Cote D’Ivoire and Paraguay as bad examples: In India, the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF) continues to impose approximately a five per cent levy on operator revenues, despite the fact that is contains over 4 billion USD of accumulated funds.
Myanmar has shortlisted 22 aspirants for two mobile licenses for an initial 15-year term. Global and regional heavyweights in this beauty contest is listed bellow in alphabetical order: 1 ACO Investment Group 12 Millicom 2 Asia Megalink (local) 13 MTN Consortium 3 Axiata 14 Orange / Marubeni 4 Bharti Airtel 15 Orascom / EPIC 5 China Mobile / Vodafone 16 Qatar Telecom / Ooredoo 6 China Telecom 17 SingTel / KBZ (local) / M-Tel 7 CP Group / True / Thana Telecom 18 SK Telecoms / Red Link 8 Digicel / Quantum 19 STT / Bewell / Frontier 9 First Pacific 20 Telenor 10 IG Group / MTI 21 Telkom Indonesia 11 KDDI / Sumitomo 22 Viettel China Mobile, the world’s largest operator by subscriber and Vodafone, the world’s top operator by revenue has teamed up for a license. Telenor, which operates in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Thailand and Malaysia – has strong aspiration for a license in Myanmar to make its presence seamless across South and South East Asia. Bharti Airtel, China Telecom, SingTel, Telkom Indonesia, Viettel (Viet Nam) SK Telecom (South Korea), KDDI (Japan), Axiata (Malaysia), Orascom (Egypt), Orange (France) and Ooredoo (Qatar Telecom) are the other big […]
The first mobile phone network in South Asia was implemented in Sri Lanka in 1989. It also first switched on UMTS or 3G service in this region in 2004. Sri Lanka is now launching South Asia’s very first Long Term Evolution or LTE in FDD bands, which covers twice as large area compared to LTE in TDD spectrum of 2.6 GHz. Dialog Axiata, a unit of Malaysia’s Axiata Group and Sri Lanka’s biggest carrier by subscribers, has won a pair of 10 MHz spectrum in 1800 MHz band last week to launch LTE mobile broadband service in FDD spectrum.
It’s certainly worth sharing and I am to be blamed for belated posting. Douglas Madory is the Senior Research Engineer at Renesys Corporation, which is globally respected as the “Internet Intelligence Authority.” Doug closely watches how the Internet functions worldwide. Two months back he published the imperatives of terrestrial backup for the only submarine cable of Bangladesh. In the concluding paragraph titled, “Greater Terrestrial Connectivity in Asia” he wrote: Abu Saeed Khan, the Senior Policy Fellow of LIRNEasia, helped persuade the government of Bangladesh to join the SMW4 consortium in 2002 and has been working ever since to increase Internet inter-connectivity all across South and Southeast Asia.
Earlier we discussed the snapping of four submarine cables in Egypt and its impact. Now we have come to know it was an act of sabotage. Telecom Egypt’s CEO Mohamed al-Nawawi has confirmed that his country’s Armed Forces have arrested three saboteurs. Among the global news outlets, Associated Press and BBC have covered it by far. There is, however, nothing to celebrate.
Pakistan’s 50% internet traffic has been impacted as the Sea-Me-We-4 submarine cable went down in Egypt, said local press. The blogpost of Sunil Tagare brings more bad news: altogether four major submarine cables — I-Me-We, Sea-Me-We-4, EIG and TE North – have been severed in northern Egypt impacting a huge portion of Eurasian telecoms traffic transiting the Middle East. Last week I highlighted the risks of Egypt being the only gateway of Eurasian cables networks. Collapsing of the aforementioned four cables is just an example of the fragile transcontinental submarine telecoms backbone.
Exploding growth of smart devices has divided the industry into two camps debating on the availability of spectrum in future. One says the world is running out of spectrum. The other says there is nothing to get panicked. One year ago the mobile phone’s inventor Martin Cooper has suggested using innovative technologies rather than giving the carriers more spectrum. He said that currently the technology with the most potential for carriers to use their networks more efficiently is the smart antenna.
YouTube has hit a billion regular monthly visitors. Such milestone, also reached by Facebook last October, further solidifies Cisco’s projected dominance of video in the cyberspace. “If YouTube were a country, we’d be the third largest in the world after China and India,” the company said in a blogpost announcing it now has a billion unique visitors every month. “Nearly one out of every two people on the internet visits YouTube.” Launched in February 2005, a year after Facebook, YouTube operated from a small office above a fast-food restaurant in San Mateo, California.
Asia’s median wholesale price of Internet bandwidth is now more than four-times expensive than Europe’s. In LIRNEasia I have been working with ESCAP to formulate a Eurasian terrestrial cable initiative. The objective is making Asia’s submarine cables highly resilient by adding a meshed transcontinental overland optical fiber network. It will make Asia’s wholesale IP-transit bandwidth cost either at par or lesser than Europe’s. Broadband in Asia, regardless fixed or mobile, will grow like mobile voice.
Telenor Pakistan acquired stake in Tameer Micro Finance Bank to introduce the country’s first branchless banking in 2009. Analysts raised eyebrow when China Mobile threw US$5.8 billion for 20% of Shanghai Pudong Development Bank in 2010. SPDP now offers Corporate Mobile Banking Services. It will be, however, grossly inappropriate if the Philippines and Kenya are not credited as the global pioneers of mobile banking.
The deputy governor of Uganda’s central bank said that mobile financial services (MFS) have outnumbered the traditional bank account holders in 2012. The MFS transactions have totalled UGX11.7 trillion (USD4.374 billion) in 2012, up from UGX3.75 trillion in 2011.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has asked US carriers not to pay more than US$0.02 per minute to their Pakistani counterparts. This decree has been slapped after Pakistan has raised its international termination rate to $0.88 per minute, which the FCC calls anti-competitive. Pakistan’s 14 Long Distance and International (LDI) operators have formed a single international gateway called International Clearing House (ICH) and raised international termination prices in October 2012.
Universal access was discussed in “Networking Revolution: Opportunities and Challenges for Developing Countries” of the World Bank in June 2000 as follows: In low-income countries, however, the focus should be on providing public access to services. The only realistic objective in the short term is therefore to achieve “universal access”, whereby everyone would be able to access a public booth in every town, village or vicinity or within “reasonable” distance. What “reasonable” distance actually means, what services are to be provided at every public booth (telephone, e-mail, real-time Internet), and which of these services are appropriate at what level in the hierarchy of towns and villages, will very much vary from one country to another, depending on potential demand and ability to pay for these services. The scale at present runs from access to 2 Mbps high-speed Internet lines for every home in Korea to a telephone within (distant) walking distance in some African countries. That was 13 years ago.
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.
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.
“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.