TeleGeography’s 2014 Middle East telecoms map is now available. It depicts 48 active and three planned submarine cable systems. Five terrestrial cables are also shown in this map. The landing stations and respective owners are also provided. The infographics embedded in the map present major intraregional and interregional voice and Internet routes.
Malaysian Airlines Flight MH 370 had disappeared with 227 passengers and 12 crew members on day after the signing of SEA-ME-WE 5 agreement in Kuala Lumpur. Ms. Hualian (Happy) Zhang, the VP of Network Planning for China Telecom Global, was among the ill-fated passengers of KL-Beijing flight. Besides, two persons from the Ministry, two persons from Huawei and one person from another telecom vendor were on board. Ms.
Bangladesh and Myanmar have joined an international consortium, which has signed an agreement today in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to build the South East Asia – Middle East -Western Europe 5 (SEA-ME-WE 5) cable. Once activates in early 2016, the cable will be literally a lifeline for Myanmar’s international connectivity. The country now survives on the first generation undersea optical fiber (SEA-ME-WE 3), which suffers from frequent outage. The SEA-ME-WE 5 cable will also bolster the international connectivity of Bangladesh, as the country is only plugged with the SEA-ME-WE 4 undersea cable system. The six terrestrial operators of Bangladesh have been saving the country from fragility like Myanmar.
Obama administration wants to digitize the bureaucracy for all practical purposes. With federal budgets under fire in Congress, the government’s move to the Internet has gained pace. An electronic payment, for instance, costs the government only 9 cents to process, compared with $1.25 for a paper check, the Treasury Department says. At Treasury, which last year suspended most paper mailings for all but the very aged and those with “mental impairments,” officials estimate the shift will save $1 billion over 10 years.
Prepaid has diminished the appeal of Mobile Number Portability (MNP). A recent study of GSMA suggests that merely 25% of developing markets have introduced MNP, while only a further 15% are known to be implementing it in the future. It means about 60% of regulators in the developing world have either decided against introducing MNP, or have made no progress to date. Sri Lanka Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (SLTRC) has found no value in MNP. The director-general of SLTRC, Anusha Palpita, told local media: ‘The main beneficiary of [MNP] and those demanding it [would be] post-paid mobile subscribers.
Despite having 70% global market share, the so called 2G mobile phone that runs on GSM technology has posted negative growth for the first time in 2013. And it will account for only 48% of the mobile subscription worldwide in 2018, predicts TeleGeography. Migration from 2G to 3G and LTE is already well underway in much of the world, but the pace of the transition varies widely by region. The move from 2G technologies is most advanced in North America, where 3G and LTE accounted for more than 80 percent of wireless subscribers at year-end 2013, and are projected to reach 93 percent of subscriptions by 2018. In western Europe, just over 50 percent of mobile subscribers used 3G or LTE in 2013, a ratio that is projected to grow to 86 percent by 2018.
It started in Rohan Samarajiva’s room at Islamabad Serena Hotel during April 2010. I explained him the fundamental barrier to affordable broadband across developing Asia. I also showed him the way to solve the problem – laying fiber along Asian Highway to build a transcontinental open access terrestrial network. Rohan was on board. He would later briefed ESCAP, the UN outfit that fosters Asian Highway.
Claudia Dreifus of the New York Times has had a casual discussion with Salman Khan of Khan Academy. Few of her questions were: Youtube is a search engine where producers can upload short videos at no cost. Would the Khan Academy have been possible without this technology? Last April, when administrators at San Jose State university wanted to use Harvard’s online version of Professor Michael Sandel’s “Justice” course as the basis of their undergraduate philosophy class, some San Jose State faculty members protested, saying the school was shortchanging students. Were the professors resisting progress?
TeleGeography’s 2014 Submarine Cable Map shows 285 cable systems that are currently active or will be activated by 2015. It also shows the location of 44 cable laying vessels as of December 6, 2013. An inset map presents geographically accurate submarine cable paths and cable maintenance zones. This year’s map incorporates coverage of the companies that lay and maintain submarine cables: The Protectors of the Internet. Information graphics provide detailed information on the following: Cable landing stations in key regions; Cable faults and repairs, including the number of breaks and mean time to commence repair by country; Cable system components and cross-section; Cable route seabed profiles.
Cisco’s annual security report has said that 99% of the total mobile malware targets Android devices. The report highlights the current security concerns and trends in vulnerabilities so that users can build more effective countermeasures. The report also said that mobile malware constituted of 1.2% of all web malware encounters during 2013. Another highlight from the report is that 71% of web-delivered malware was meant for Android only.
The Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) and Shanghai Liantong have developed a Linux-based new smartphone operating system. Dubbed as the China Operating System (COS), it is the country’s second move for a home-grown smartphone platform. COS has the advantage of being government backed, which in China means that local app developers will come under ever so subtle pressure to port their apps to the new platform. One area of where the OS may gain traction over Android is that apps will have to go through an Apple-style validation process and can only be sold on the official app store. That may reassure Chinese consumers in a market where Android apps are often pirated and infected with malware.
Despite opposition from ITU, the industry and the lawmakers, Bangladeshi bureaucrats have succeeded to stage a legislative coupe for amending the telecoms law in 2010. As a result, whatever little authority Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) had been enjoying was hijacked by the telecoms ministry. Regulatory environment of Bangladesh went back to the Stone Age. A rouge kitty (USF), in disguise of Social Obligation Fund (SOF), was also cunningly inserted in the amended telecoms law. Moreover, the government keeps violating this law while extorting the industry since November 2011 in the name of SOF.
Apps have attacked the lucrative harvest of voice with the tenacity of hungry locusts. Now they have targeted the farmhouse of messaging. And the device makers have joined the feast with independent messaging outfits. The revenue from messaging services fell by almost 4% in 2013 to just below US$104 billion. It predicts that the decline in messaging revenue will be more pronounced in North America and Western Europe where the greatest penetration of smartphones and data users has been prevalent.
The Skype-to-Skype international traffic has grown by 36% in 2013 to 214 billion minutes, according to new data from TeleGeography. International telephone traffic from fixed and mobile phones continues to grow as well, increasing an estimated 7% in 2013, to 547 billion minutes. While the volume of international telephone traffic remains far larger than international Skype traffic, Skype’s minutes are growing much more rapidly. Skype added approximately 54 billion minutes of international traffic in 2013, 50 percent more than the combined international volume growth of every telco in the world. Given these immense traffic volumes, it’s difficult not to conclude that at least some of Skype’s growth is coming at the expense of traditional carriers.
A submarine cable snaps in every three days while a terrestrial cable gets severed in every 30 minutes somewhere in the world. The global economy counts annual loss of US$26.5 billion due to such disruptions, estimates Ciena. Therefore, route-diversity is the fundamental prerequisite of uninterrupted Internet. Early last year we reported the activation of cross-border terrestrial links between Bangladesh and India.
Babus in public offices sit by the pile of files catching dust. Because, the Babus are busy with drinking tea, chewing beetle-leaf, reading newspapers and gossiping with colleagues. This is the general profile of public offices in South Asia. Public offices are neither zoo nor theme park. Yet a notice hangs at the Babu’s door saying, “Visitors are not allowed.