The Mo Ibrahim Foundation has published its 2012 facts and figures on African youth titled, “African Youth: Fulfilling the Potential”. It reveals: Africa is the only continent with a significantly growing youth population. In less than three generations, 41% of the world’s youth will be African. By 2035, Africa’s labor force will be larger than China’s. Africa is keen to reap the benefits from this imminent demographic dividend.
John Kay cites interesting Q&A with a Russian planner who visited the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union: A perhaps apocryphal story tells of a Russian visitor, impressed by the laden shelves in US supermarkets. He asked: “So who is in charge of the supply of bread to New York?” The market economy’s answer – that not only is no one in charge, but it is a criminal offence for anyone to seek that position – is surprising. The essential things like milk, bread and eggs get supplied through obliquity rather than direct central planning. And so has been the Internet, worldwide.
Fury of Sandy hasn’t spared anything that a modern society survives on. Unlike most of the cities in America, the wooden power poles don’t exist across the downtown of New York and Manhattan. But the underground power cable systems are submerged by stagnant salty water from tidal wave. Barb Darrow posted a chilling account of consequences in Gigaom: As already reported, data center facilities in lower Manhattan suffered a string of outages after flooding and Con Ed cut electrical power. Datagram, the web hosting company that serves the Huffington Post, Gawker, Gizmodo and BuzzFeed, went down Monday evening after flooding caused those sites to go dark.
Analysys Mason has published a report for the Internet Society on what a good thing the Internet is, as it is, not as it might be if undermined by the imposition of telco business models, according to Telecom TV. This report is a sober reminder that the Internet continues to work remarkably well and that its heartbeat is sustained by the very things – openness underpinned by settlement-free peering – that some want to get rid of. The report tackles all of the technical and structural objections to the way the Internet is governed and shows how the technology and the evolving business models have always solved looming crises. For instance, despite fears to the contrary the history of the Internet so far has involved sustainable development as bandwidth demands rise. Telecom TV has further said that this report, commission by the Internet Society and entitled ‘How the Internet continues to sustain growth and innovation’, is a direct and pointed rebuttal to all the talk of data tsunami, unsustainable business models, scissor effects and so on that we’ve had for the last year or two and which have culminated (in a way) in the effort to establish ‘sending network pays’ […]
The British government has allocated nearly £1bn to accelerate the development of superfast network. It is expected to boost national broadband speeds to more than 24 megabits per second – nearly three times today’s average – by 2015. This initiative is an essential part of the UK government’s policy, which believes that rapid internet access will boost productivity, create new industries and link distant areas. The Economist Intelligence Unit, however, argues that existing networks are capable of delivering many of the anticipated new services over the next few years. It also warned that there were obstacles to even using the existing technology capabilities, including a shortage of digital skills and ingrained resistance to change, although it predicts that there will be some short-term stimulus to jobs and economic activity.
A new report, “Unlocking the Benefits of Cloud Computing for Emerging Economies—A Policy Overview” by Peter F. Cowhey and Michael Kleeman of the University of California San Diego, details how 60 percent of world server workloads to take place on cloud computers by 2014. It examines the critical benefits to lower and middle-income economies, in particular those of India, Mexico and South Africa, from international and domestic adoption of cloud computing. Among the key findings in the report are: The cloud enables developing world economies to be competitive with higher value added products as goods and services become more information and communications technology (ICT) intensive; The cloud bolsters South-South commerce, the fastest growing share of world trade investment; The cloud’s scalability boosts job creation by helping small to medium sized businesses reduce costs and investments; The cloud enables developing world countries’ governments to deliver core services more effectively and efficiently; and The cloud boosts network infrastructure investment in lower income economies. View the full report.
LIRNEasia has been vocal against the feudal doctrines of ITU and ETNO on dwarfing the Internet. The duo has staged a Twitter Storm on October 10. They have, predictably, failed to justify the command and control of Internet. While responding to LIRNEasia’s CEO Rohan Samarajiva, the ETNO chief Luigi Gambardella said, “We know that today Internet economic model is not sustainable” (Click on the thumbnail at left). Dennis Weller and Bill Woodcock have recently coauthored a new OECD report, “Internet Traffic Exchange: Market Developments and Policy challenges.
Blogpost of LIRNEasia has evidently sensitized the media of Bangladesh on probing its absence in ITU’s latest ICT Development Index. It has prompted finger-pointing and passing the hot potato: According to the telecommunications ministry, Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) is responsible for sending in the information to the UN body. And as per a BTRC official, the data was sent to the UN body — but it did not meet the deadline. Such bureaucratic hide-and-seek has, however, failed to impress the industry: “Exclusion from the list would affect the promising outsourcing business of Bangladesh,” said Mahboob Zaman, a former president of Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services. He said the developed countries’ businesses consider their outsourcing destinations after getting the ICT standard or ranking of developing countries.
India’s mobile penetration is merely 26 percent and China’s is just 43 percent, says “Unique subscriber penetration” data of GSMA. The mobile industry’s trade body has also revealed that only 45 percent of the world’s population have subscribed to mobile services. It says the number of mobile subscribers globally will be 3.2 billion by Q4 2012, growing to 4 billion within the next five years. Such unpleasant findings are the results of a primary research, undertaken by the GSMA’s Wireless Intelligence team over three years and across 39 developed and developing markets.
Your data are not your data. They are the digits of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. If Gibran were around today, would his magnificent poem look somewhat as above? I am not sure.
Robert Pepper is the vice president for global technology policy at Cisco. He has elaborated “a grave threat” in ITU’s “fatally flawed proposals to update” the way Internet would be regulated. While analyzing the impact of revising International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs), he said: It could break the global Internet into unconnected islands of national or regional networks, extend telecommunications regulations to computing, or lead to onerous government regulation of the Internet……….. Some proposals for the WCIT would control the routing of Internet traffic in the name of security but would balkanize the Internet and threaten Internet freedom.
One may wonder if the Afro-Asian thinkers are crying wolf while addressing SPNP doctrine of ETNO. They should listen to J. Scott Marcus, an accomplished researcher and consultant: “The interconnection proposals that are publicly known, specifically including the ETNO proposal, are ill-advised and should be rejected.” Marcus further said: Turning to the interconnection proposals in general, and the ETNO proposal in particular, we think that they are particularly ill-advised, both in terms of what they are seeking to do, and in terms of their likely consequences. The Sending Party Network Pays (SPNP) principle put forward by ETNO is likely to negatively impact social welfare, and not “just” by hampering innovation.
African scholar Dele Meiji Fatunla is respected beyond Africa. He has slammed ETNO’s proposal as a threatening element to the economic future of Africa as well as the developing world. And LIRNEasia CEO Rohan Samarajiva’s analysis on ETNO’s doctrine shines, along with OECD’s researcher Rudolf Van Der Berg, in Fatunla’s arsenal. A report, written by Rohan Samarajiva, former Director General of Telecommunications for Sri Lanka and CEO of Lirne Asia, an ICT think-tank, predicts dire consequences for the development of the internet and Africa’s prosperity if governments do shift to a “sending party network pays” model. The report says that a global agreement to move to a “sending party network pays” policy would have a detrimental effect on regions by providing a blank cheque to providers to raise prices for consumers.
LIRNEasia has raised alarm after two camps have ganged up behind the ITU to command and control the Internet. It immediately drew the attention of Africa and CEO Rohan Samarajiva was invited to Ghana. There he explained how the authoritarian governments have planned to put fingers on the Internet’s on/off switch. And ETNO, a club of European state-owned telcos, foolishly aspires to be the robber barons of Internet. It received wide media coverage and we have posted them in this blog accordingly.
Hutchison Global Communications (HGC) has predictably bagged the first “permission” to provide international data and voice services with “an authorized representative” of state-owned Myanma Posts and Telecommunications (MPT). The HGC-MPT partnership dates back to 2007. Brushing aside the western sanctions, HGC kept transporting Myanmar’s overseas voice and data traffic using the Sino-ASEAN terrestrial link named GMS Network. And HGC has proudly publicized it. Now the government of Myanmar has blessed the corporate wedding of HGC and “an authorized representative” of MPT.
Ghana’s Communication Minister Mr. Haruna Iddrisu said his government “will not allow any economic cost or value to the internet that will limit access” and ubiquitous access to Internet is a “nonnegotiable” issue. In a stakeholder meeting Idrisu also said, “One ingredient that had helped Ghana to enjoy the stable and peaceful economy was access and use of ICT and that the Government would not interfere in what its Constitution has guaranteed.” The government’s statement came within few days after Ghana News Agency ran a story based on LIRNEasia CEO Rohan Samarajiva’s article, “A Giant Step Backward or the Way Forward? An Analysis of Some Proposals before the WCIT.