“We told you so.” We said that the last mile was the key to saving lives; that focus had to placed on getting the warnings out to the potentially affected people; that they had to be trained to react appropriately; that all the fancy technology in and under the sea would come to nought if these key actions were not taken. Our collaborator Nalaka Gunawardene says it again in a SciDev piece worth reading: “What failed was the education process only some of the people fled to higher ground and one of the boats put to sea immediately after they felt the earthquake the right thing to do in these circumstances. Why wasn’t everyone well prepared to respond given the recent history of earthquakes and tsunamis in the region?” Nalaka Gunawardene, director of TVE Asia Pacific, a not-for-profit media group, hinted at underlying problems with the system’s suitability for its environment.
15,000 km of fiber is pretty significant for a country the size of Sri Lanka. But this is exactly what the CEO is promising (and 10,000 is already in the ground). The beauty is that the whole thing has been done on a commercial basis with no subsidies, aid or whatever (though one could argue that the slowly disbursed universal service money generated by incoming and outgoing international calls could have contributed). In 2002-04, I was involved in planning a World Bank financed USD 20m subsidy scheme intended to accelerate the build out of fiber to cover the entire country (at that time we only had two rings, the larger connecting the Central Province to Colombo, and the smaller a metro ring around Colombo). Due to multiple factors, this component of the e Sri Lanka initiative never got implemented.
Yesterday, LIRNEasia launched UNCTAD’s Information Economy Report 2010: ICTs, Enterprises and Poverty Alleviation in Sri Lanka at a well-attended news conferences in Colombo. The first of the news reports, from LBO, is excerpted below: Use of mobile phones has helped Sri Lankan farmers get better prices for their produce and the technology can help reduce poverty, according to a new United Nations study, officials said. “There is an informational dimension to poverty – poor people need lots of information for their livelihoods such as on market prices, inputs, weather,” said Sriganesh Lokanathan of LIRNEasia, a think tank which helped prepare the report by United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. A study done by LIRNEasia on small farmers in Dambulla, an agricultural centre in central Sri Lanka, found that 11 percent of their cost of production goes towards information search, “quite a high percentage,” Lokanathan said. “Information communications technologies (ICTs) have a role in trying to bridge this information gap,” he told a news conference held to launch the UNCTAD report called ‘Information Economy Report 2010: ICTs, Enterprise and Poverty Alleviation’.
For those who are complacent about the likelihood of tsunamis hitting the coastal regions around the Bay of Bengal, yesterday was another wake-up call. The tsunami, set off by a 7.7-magnitude undersea quake, slammed into the southern part of the remote Mentawai Islands, wreaking havoc in villages and, the authorities believe, sweeping scores out to sea. The islands are a popular destination for foreign surfers, particularly Australians. The surge reached as high as 10 feet and advanced as far as 2,000 feet inland, officials at the Health Ministry’s crisis center said.
Future Gov is holding a conference in Colombo 28-29 October 2010. Can’t link to the program as such because that’s how e gov is done, but can get you close. LIRNEasia will be presenting its research anchored to the idea of delivering government services anywhere, anytime, in any official language, something that was developed by me around the time the war ended. The slideset is here.
LIRNEasia has been supporting app stores because we believe this is the solution that reduces transaction costs and mobilizes decentralized innovation. But as the NYT story today shows, it’s not an easy path for developers: Because Google makes its software available free to a range of phone manufacturers, there are dozens of different Android-compatible devices on the market, each with different screen sizes, memory capacities, processor speeds and graphics capabilities. An app that works beautifully on, say, a Motorola Droid might suffer from glitches on a phone made by HTC. IPhone developers, meanwhile, need to worry about only a few devices: iPhones, iPods and iPads.
Now that Android has taken a bigger market share than Apple in the smartphone market, the lawsuits are coming hot and heavy, according to the Economist. Eventually, even lawsuits must come to an end. How much harm they will cause remains to be seen. If Apple wins against HTC, that would be bad news for upstart handset firms. Until a few years ago, HTC only made devices for others, but now it has become a brand of its own.
Most people do not associate telecenters with the United States. That’s because they are called public libraries there. The Economist reports that more people are coming to the American telecenters because critical government and other services are increasingly available only through the web and because some people have dropped home connections in the hard times of the Great Recession. The best way for America to ease the new strain on its libraries is by closing the digital divide; companies and state agencies are unlikely ever to give up the efficiencies they won by moving online. Around $7 billion of 2009’s stimulus went to expand broadband access.
The World Summit on the Information Society set several targets to be achieved by 2015 without specifying how they could be measured. The International Telecommunication Union has proposed four specific indicators that could measure progress made by countries toward the foundational Target 10, that of bringing ICTs within the reach of a majority of the world’s inhabitants. Two indicators are for mobile subscriptions and use, and two for Internet use by individuals and by households. Of the four, Indicators 1 and 3 currently exist, albeit with significant shortcomings. This paper proposes a modest improvement to the method of measuring Indicator 3, Internet users, which combines the existing supply-side data with available but incomplete demand-side data.
We expressed skepticism when the Labor Party first announced it. We are pleased it is being cancelled. The previous Labour government hummed and hawed about this rural-urban “digital divide”. Eventually, in 2009, it proposed levying a 50p tax on every fixed telephone line in the country: the proceeds were to be given to BT to allow it to connect even the remotest hamlets by 2012. The new coalition administration abandoned that plan, ditching the tax and pushing the target date back to 2015.
I was invited by the Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry Sri Lanka to make a presentation at a SCCI meeting assessing progress on the resolutions at the 16th Summit in Bhutan. I presented data on the progress (or lack thereof) on intra-SAARC calling charges and suggested that SCCI do the same on matters they considered important. The slideset is here: Slideset
Coming from Sri Lanka, a country that endured a thirty-year war, this is nothing new. But it appears that the same issues keep coming up, and we keep making the same mistakes. Pakistan shut down mobile phones for elections. There were serious discussions in Sri Lanka about disabling mobiles within a certain distance from army camps, which meant that pretty much all of Colombo would have been a dead zone for mobiles. Now India wants the ability to listen into every conversation/text/email exchange on every Blackberry in their territory.
Earlier this year the TRC appointed a special committee to develop broadband in Sri Lanka. Possibly based on its recommendations the TRC has issued new directives on broadband, placing emphasis on customer’s right to know, an approach we at LIRNEasia also promoted a few months prior to the constitution of the committee. The guidelines had been issued in August. We regret not giving them publicity at the time. With the intention of raising awareness among broadband subscribers, the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission has issued a set of guidelines for broadband service providers.
Some people celebrate 25 years of anything: dead marriages, inert regional groupings, just occupying space. We don’t. SAARC must be assessed by its fruits. On internal connectivity it fails. Here’s the evidence, carried in op-ed articles in Bangladesh’s Daily Star, Sri Lanka’s Daily Mirror and also in a PTI dispatch: It is always easier to do things within one’s own country than outside, or at least it should be.
The US has done it. When will Asian spectrum managers start? First step is to move TV to digital. Where are the road maps? The Federal Communications Commission approved a proposal on Thursday that would open vast amounts of unused broadcast television airwaves for high-speed wireless broadband networks and other unlicensed applications.
The dissemination work done by Nuwan Waidyanatha in Colombo is yielding unexpected results. A nice write up in Fast Company. Now if the same consortia can somehow figure out a surveillance program of bureaucratic inefficiencies, then the relevant governments of these countries may actually be able to respond well and respond fast, given that identification is just one component to controlling epidemics. Increasing the efficiency with which epidemics are identified is a step forward, but what comes after–implementation of crowd control, region-wide communications, and swift deployment of medical personnel–is the real test.