Indonesia is emerging as a hot broadband market, mainly as a result of the increasing availability of high-speed 3G and HSDPA mobile services. According to Arjun Trivedi, the head of business in Indonesia for Nokia Siemens Networks, high speed mobile services are now the dominant form of broadband access in the country. He says, “In Indonesia today, there are slightly more than a million broadband users. Quite a substantial number of these – we estimate some 60 per cent – are wireless broadband users, principally using HSDPA. We also estimate that there are about 400,000 fixed broadband users and a little over 600,000 mobile broadband users.
The Telecoms Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has recommended that the country’s Department of Telecommunications allow MVNOs to operate in the sub-continent under a new licensing scheme. In a major new policy document, the TRAI lays out a plan to permit interested companies to establish MVNOs, negotiate network leasing agreements with existing mobile network operators and to select from three different available service models. The MVNO licenses will be issued under conditions very similar to those currently applicable to existing MNOs and with similar eligibility terms including FDI caps and limits on service areas. This means MVNO licenses will effectively be tied to the operating licence of their MNO partners with the main difference of approach being in the entry fees payable by MVNOs compared to existing MNOs. Read more.
Mobile payments provider, Obopay has inked a deal with Grameen Solutions to deliver banking services to a billion of the world’s poorest people by 2018. The Grameen-Obopay Bank A Billion Initiative will provide access to affordable financial services, including cross-border remittances, money transfer, payments, savings and credit accounts. Cellular-News reports more. The Economic Times of India questions: Do we need regulations for these payments or do we need technological standards than operational guidelines? In case we need regulations and guidelines for mobile payments; we also need regulations for internet and phone banking.
Emboldened by its recent legal victory over net bully Comcast, the San Francisco based digital right defence organisation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched a throttling detection tool aptly dubbed the “Switzerland Network Testing Tool” (Switzerland = neutrality). The software immediately lets users know if their ISP is throttling downloads, cutting VoIP calls or otherwise tampering with the unlimited, neutral broadband connection they are paying for. Read more.
An alliance between Grameen Foundation, Indonesia’s Bakrie Telecom and Qualcomm has rolled out a Village Phone Programme in rural Indonesia, which allows renting the use of the phone on a per-call basis in rural villages where telecom services did not previously exist. “Microfinance helps to put technology within financial reach of the poor and we are pleased to work with Qualcomm and Bakrie Telecom to help Indonesia’s rural microentrepreneurs build self-sustaining businesses that also enhance the socio-economic development of their wider communities,” said Alex Counts, president and CEO of Grameen Foundation. Read more.
This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity—and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control. IPods, iPhones, Xboxes, and TiVos represent the first wave of Internet-centered products that can’t be easily modified by anyone except their vendors or selected partners. These “tethered appliances” have already been used in remarkable but little-known ways: car GPS systems have been reconfigured at the demand of law enforcement to eavesdrop on the occupants at all times, and digital video recorders have been ordered to self-destruct thanks to a lawsuit against the manufacturer thousands of miles away. New Web 2.
Globally, 2.1 billion wireless broadband customers will generate US$784 billion in service revenue by 2015, said a latest report of UK’s consulting outfit Analysys Mason. HSPA will support 88% of all wireless broadband consumers at the end of 2008, and its importance will continue. “Despite the increasing availability of LTE and WiMAX, HSPA and HSPA+ will still support 54% of wireless broadband users by the end of 2015,” said the report’s co-author Dr Mark Heath. WiMAX will fail to achieve a significant share of the rapidly developing wireless broadband market, contributing only 2% of global revenue.
He is not just talking. Neil Tagare brought the world FLAG (Acquired by Reliance in 2003) and Project Oxygen (Never kicked-off). He has now launched an online outfit (BySellBandwidth) where capacity will be traded somewhat like the Real Estate. BusinessWeek and TelecomTV have covered Neil’s latest venture. The idea of setting up an exchange for trading bandwidth between users with too much capacity and those with higher needs fell out of favor several years ago with the demise of Enron and Global Crossing, which were involved in illegal accounting.
Orascom Telecom – which is currently building a GSM/3G network in the secretive North Korea has apparently secured access to the mighty, if unfinished Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang. The company has been reported by the few foreign residents permitted into the country to be working on the very top of the 105 story building and installing equipment for its mobile network. The Ryugyong Hotel dominates the Pyongyang landscape being by far the largest building in a city already full of monumental structures. Construction was started in 1987, and while the main structure is complete, the government cannot afford to finish off the structure. Construction work stopped in 1992 and the empty shell has been left since then.
Lin Sun is a Beijing-based consultant with more than 20 years’ experience with the Chinese telecom industry. Recently he has analysed the future of WiMAX in the backdrop of 3G in an atricle. Excerpts are stated bellow: If speed is compromised, cost will become a serious concern. According to estimates, operator capex for WiMAX will be 20 percent to 50 percent higher than for HSDPA, a software-enabled overlay for sending data over 3G networks. At higher frequency, say 3.
Seismic instruments and models are used to predict a possible tsunami following an earthquake and ocean buoys and pressure sensors on the ocean bottom are used to detect the passage of tsunami waves. But globally, the density of such instrumentation is quite low and, coupled with the time lag needed to process the data to confirm a tsunami, an effective global tsunami warning system is not yet in place. However, recent investigations have demonstrated that GPS might be a very effective tool for improving the warning system. This can be done, for example, through rapid determination of earthquake magnitude using data from existing GPS networks. And, incredible as it might seem, another approach is to use the GPS data to look for the tsunami signature in the ionosphere: the small displacement of the ocean surface displaces the atmosphere and makes it all the way to the ionosphere, causing measurable changes in ionospheric electron density.
Any operator considering Mobile WiMAX should take into consideration the following challenges: There are currently more than 32 million HSPA connections worldwide, with nearly 467 HSPA mobile handsets offering 4Mbps in the downlink, which is comparable to Mobile WiMAX. 3G LTE is expected to be a fully ratified standard by the end of this year, with trials occurring in 2009 and deployments in late 2009 or 2010 offering mobile data rates of up to 170Mbps (2×2 MIMO; 2.6GHz; 20MHz). QUALCOMM’s Gobi technology which supports GSM, GPRS, EDGE, HSPA, EV-DO Rev A will be integrated into laptops this year, which either have been certified, or will be certified with operators such as T-Mobile, Telefonica, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone. Tier 1 laptop vendors such as HP and Dell are supporting this.
First the EU said: Network interconnection by means of the Internet Protocol (IP) has been a vital enabler of the Internet’s ubiquity and success. IP-based interconnection has usually been achieved without explicit regulatory obligations, and has for the most part been highly effective. Given the rapid evolution of the economic, technological and social environment this study of the European Union investigates whether IP interconnection is still better left unregulated. Martyn Warwick of telecomtv slammed: You have to wonder if some “analysts” live in the same world as the rest of us. Take for example a hefty new report, commissioned by the European Commission and written by a German research organisation, that goes so far as to recommend the abolition of termination fees – on the peculiar grounds that we might as well because, one day, everything will be the Internet anyway.
The cost of international capacity between the US and Asia has dropped dramatically in the past ten years. In 1996, US$10,000 would buy a 64kbps IPLC between Asia and the US. The same money buys a STM-1 (155Mbps) circuit in 2006. Dramatic drops in the price of international capacity as a result of market deregulation in the Asia Pacific is resulting in a shift in the dynamics of Internet traffic, according to a presentation at the APRICOT conference in Taipei this week. Read more.
An OECD report, Global Opportunities for Internet Access Developments, says that the next billion Internet users will be very different from the first billion and governments in developing countries, where these users will come from, must adapt strategic regulatory and investment policies to lower access costs. “The characteristics of these new Internet users will be vastly different from the first billion users,” the report concludes, adding that the majority of the new Internet users will be accessing the Internet on wireless networks and will have incomes of less than US$2 per day. While the report sees encouraging signs from developing markets that have adopted market liberalisation and who are now starting to enjoy the employment, micro- entrepreneurial and social development benefits of increased competition, there remain many countries that need to catch up. According to the report, “more than 70 countries still have monopolies over international gateway services,” which “raise the prices for accessing international capacity, far beyond costs, and reduce the affordability of Internet access for end-users.” Read more.
The latest figures from the Pakistani telecoms regulator show that the mobile market in Pakistan grew to 78.74m customers at the end of January. The figure for monthly net additions of 1.86m was 17% down on the January 2007 total, and also represented the second lowest figure for two years, the lowest being the 1.52m recorded last October.