Multiple submarine cables with multiple landing stations, owned by different entities, don’t offer competitive wholesale international bandwidth in India. Today a chunk of 10-gigabytes bandwidth varies between $5 million and $9 million in India while it’s being sold from $1.5 million to $1.7 million in other Asian markets. It’s a huge challenge for the world’s fastest growing telecoms market where broadband penetration remains a national embarrassment.
Long gone are the days of waiting for dial-tone. We have now taken the ubiquity of connectivity as natural as oxygen in the air. But its quality often gets “polluted” like the air we breathe. The list of “pollutants” is endless in the wireless world: bad coverage, bad handset, bad battery, bad antenna, bad OS – you name it. The mobile phone users are upset.
Bangladesh government will allow the private sector to plug the country with two more submarine cable systems. They will create redundancy and diversity to the lone SEA-ME-WE4 undersea cable that is state-owned. The regulator has invited response to a public consultation in this regard. The licenses will be awarded through beauty contest. The new players will also deploy optical fibre backhaul up to Dhaka, the nation’s capital.
Call it “The Phantom of the Operators” or whatever. It is fraud. Your long distance carrier, possibly, uses False Answer Supervision (FAS) and charges for the calls you could not make. Carriers can earn minimum 21 per cent extra profit through such fraudulent act. And organized criminals are there to help.
The days of making good money through bad services will be, theoretically, over in Bangladesh. The regulator has decided to publish monthly ratings for mobile network operators from January 2010. Among the various issues; the regulator will state each of the six mobile operator’s coverage, dropped calls and customer care. To measure these parameters, the BTRC is procuring “the equipment” from SwissQual, reported Cellular-News quoting the Helvetic vendor’s press release. It says that following consultation with operators, BRTC will publish a draft regulation regarding the rating procedure in mid November.
Martin Cooper, a researcher in Motorola, invented the handheld cellular mobile phone. He also made the first call using a handheld cell phone prototype on April 3, 1973, in front of reporters and passers-by on a New York City street. It landed Motorola’s mobile unit on the July 1973 cover of Popular Science magazine, which called it a ”new type of computerized, walkie-talkie-size portable.” Well, cordless phones didn’t even exist on those days although non-cellular car phones had been used since the late 1950’s. Nevertheless, we know pretty well rest of the story, as mobile is now the DNA of our daily life.
Think twice before you make fun out of them. Mr. Karzai may have flunked in the exam of a “credible” election. But he has passed with distinction while shaping the future of his country’s connectivity. Afghanistan is leasing out 500 MHz of duplex Ku-band satellite frequency for 15 years.
Nobody has asked them to do it. Yet they have voluntarily disclosed respective assets and wealth. Moreover, all the disclosures have been posted in the web. I am talking about the judges of India’s Supreme Court. It’s a remarkable step to promote transparency and boost confidence in the country’s judicial system.
Tectonic shift rocks India’s mobile market as Tata has introduced the country’s first per-second pulse followed by launching a pay-per-call pricing model. The market had to follow although ARPU margins eroded. Welcome to the new world order of BOP. Ovum said: The Indian mobile market continues to experience high subscriber growth. With urban markets already approaching saturation, most of the new subscribers are coming from highly price-sensitive rural and low-income urban segments.
Incumbents and regulators – from USA to Bangladesh – wanted to block it. They have failed miserably as VoIP has sequentially demolished the old guards’ fortresses. Once untouchable is now the undisputed ruler of the telecoms world. What’s its size? The VoIP services market generated a whopping US$20.
The Malaysian regulator has fined in excess of US$ 1.6 million to three WiMax operators for defaulting on rollout obligation. MCMC has forfeited respective Bank Guarantee of YTL e-Solutions ($557,185), AsiaSpace ($498,534) and REDtone International ($586,510) for their failure to meet the 25% population coverage by the end of March. And that ends the rhetoric of leapfrogging with rapid broadband deployment using WiMax in Malaysia. The government has issued four WiMax licenses in early 2007 among the non-telecoms entities.
Sarojini Mahajan, a 15 year-old schoolgirl in New Delhi, has come up with the idea of using the non-stop power of the beating of the human heart and turning it into an electric current powerful enough to re-charge a mobile phone. Now scientists at Stanford University in the US are developing a prototype. Sarojini got the idea from the “self-winding” and so-called “kinetic” wrist watches that are widely advertised in India and other parts of the world. She thought, If we can have watches that run on the power generated by the human pulse, then why not have a mobile phone charger working on the same principles? The teenager discussed this idea with her science teacher and he forwarded it to India’s National Innovation Foundation (NIF).
Verizon has launched an anti-iPhone advertising campaign, satirising the Apple handset and its exclusive carrier, AT&T, teasing viewers with the promise of its first Android phones in November. iDon’t have a real keyboard … run simultaneous apps … take 5-megapixel pictures … allow open development … have interchangeable batteries,” say the advertisements, ending with: “Everything iDon’t, Droid does. According to Eric Schmidt this month, “Android adoption is literally about to explode”. Android appeals as a viable alternative for mobile handset makers looking to break the dominance of Nokia, Research in Motion and Apple, which have two-thirds of the US market and an 80 per cent global share. Ken Dulaney, analyst with the Gartner research firm, said: “If I’m a hardware manufacturer who needs to license a smartphone operating system, my choice is [open source] Linux, which doesn’t have much of a UI [user interface], Windows Mobile, which people don’t seem to like these days because the UI is kind of antiquated, or Android” Gartner sees Android eating into Nokia’s leading market share and featuring on 18 per cent of smartphones by 2012, up from 1.
Two years ago customers flocked to Etihad Atheeb Telecom, which paid USD139 million for Saudi Arabia’s second fixed-line license, bringing to an end a monopoly enjoyed by Saudi Telecom (STC). Now a group of young Saudis has organized a boycott of STC, in protest of persistently high prices and poor service, while the newcomer’s managers complain that fair competition remains a far-off goal. Ahmed Sindi, new entrant Etihad Atheeb’s chief executive, said: We have a lot of problems with the incumbent operator, and we are not seeing enough actions from the regulator to stop it. We do not have access to critical infrastructure like dark fibre; we do not have access to conduits of transmission between various cities because the pricing is very high; and interconnectivity has been delayed massively. With a young, rapidly growing population and up to 7 million expatriates, Saudi Arabia’s telecom market is one of the most coveted by local and international companies.
The FCC has engaged Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society to study net neutrality and its impact. Here is the draft report. Most of the highest-ranking countries use net neutrality policies, under which the incumbent carriers have to allow competitors to lease capacity on their networks and offer their own services, the Berkman report said. By contrast, the U.S.
The Finns have done it again. Accessing to Internet at minimum (not up to) 1 Mbps speed is the birthright of every Finnish citizen, announced the government. It makes Finland the world’s first country ensuring high speed broadband access a fundamental right, Telecom Asia reports. The government has also planned to make the 100 Mbps broadband connection a legal right for each countryman by the end of 2015. Finland launched the world’s first commercial GSM network in 1991.