The ITU dataset is the mother lode, mined by all. But sometimes, it is good to interrogate the quality of what the ITU produces. The most recent instance of ITU data being subject to sophisticated analysis without any attention being paid to the quality of the data is by noted ICT4D scholar, Richard Heeks. In a previous essay, Heeks interrogated the numbers emanating from the ITU on “mobile subscriptions.” It is a pity the same was not done in the recent piece on Internet and broadband.
An organization called RIS (Research and Information System for Developing Countries) invited me to speak at a workshop celebrating 25 years of SAARC. I see nothing to celebrate, but came nevertheless because there is value in cross-fertilization and because it was time to apply some more pressure on changing the absurd international calling prices and roaming charges in the region. It was like being the new kid in the class. These people had been meeting each other for the past 25 years or more and knew each other well. Many warm and fuzzy things were said about what a wonderful thing regional cooperation was.
The shoe is yet to drop in terms of South-Asia-like retail prices, but Bharti is beginning to move out its famed outsourcing model to Africa. The story emphasizes IBM, but one has to be understanding of the US-centric NYT. I.B.M.
On the eve of Nuwan Waidyanatha’s big dissemination event in Colombo, it was nice to see very high profile coverage for his work in one of India’s leading newspapers, the Hindu: The detection of spread of respiratory tract infection in conjunction with a viral fever in Sri Lanka that caught the attention of the health departments and escalating diarrhoea cases in Tamil Nadu were detected in a matter of a day after the onset of the outbreaks. Through alert systems in the pilot project, such situations were communicated to the local community and health departments, who then publicised preventive measures and treatment. Potentially, the RTBP reduces the time to identify a potential disease outbreak to just a day.
Fiber put in place for smart grid applications is making possible Gigabyte speed broadband, according to NYT. The high-speed Internet service is piggybacked on top of the utility’s smart-grid network, which was the reason for stringing the fiber optic cable to homes in the first place. Smart grids are advanced electrical networks that can improve energy efficiency, enable variable pricing based on the time of day, and reduce disruptions. They require digital networks for two-way communications, and computerized meters in homes. EPB had already begun a smart-grid program before the Obama administration included billions for grants for smart-grid projects in the economic stimulus program in 2009.
For the perpetually connected, the experience of being unconnected is salutary; but not pleasant. The Sinharaja Forest Reserve is a world heritage site about three hours driving distance from Colombo. I spent two days there and unexpectedly found myself unconnected, except for a single location in the hotel that allowed the sending and receiving of texts if the phone was held high! It is not that the place is completely disconnected from electronic networks. I paid for the hotel using a credit card, which was processed through a fixed line.
A significant contribution to the m-money debate has been made by Chanuka Wattegama, until last month LIRNEasia’s Senior Research Manager and the person responsible for managing the Mobile 2.0 research module. The tightly argued piece contains many references to LIRNEasia work and is a perfect example of the success of LIRNEasia’s catalytic role. Worth reading in full by anyone interested in the subject. Ours is an anxious society that expects the protection of every electronic money transfer by the financial regulator.
Something that has been going on South Asia (efficiently or not) is now going to happen in China too, according to the NYT. The Chinese government on Wednesday began to require cellphone users to furnish identification when buying SIM cards, a move officials cast as an effort to rein in burgeoning cellphone spam, pornography and fraud schemes. The requirement, which has been in the works for years, is not unlike rules in many developed nations that ask users to present credit card data or other proof of identification to buy cellphone numbers. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said that about 40 percent of China’s 800 million cellphone users were currently unidentified. Those users will be ordered to furnish identification by 2013 or lose their service, according to The Global Times, a state-run newspaper.
In 2006, when I expressed skepticism about government claims that Jaffna was getting a fiber optic network in the middle of the war, I was assailed. Unless SLT has built a second cable in 2009, in addition to the one they built in 2006, I was right. This would be the right time for Mr N.P. Perera, or whoever he was, to apologize.
A month or so back, I wrote the following Voice calls will be “free” in the future. The quotation marks signify that nothing is really free. In the natural evolution of the industry, there will come a time when customers will pay for connectivity in various forms, either by data volumes or time. Voice will simply be one among many applications they can use as part of this connectivity bundle. I didn’t think the future would come so soon.
We have been saying for sometime that telecom operators urgently needed to think beyond their core voice business. Mobile, beyond voice, is what we wrote about incessantly in the past two years. Here’s more reason: Google entered a new business beyond Internet search on Wednesday with a service within Gmail to make phone calls over the Web to landlines or cellphones. The service will thrust Google into direct competition with Skype, the Internet telephone company, and with telecommunications providers. It could also make Google a more ubiquitous part of people’s social interactions by uniting the service for phone calls with e-mail, text messages and video chats.
Last week, LIRNEasia’s lead scientist and the director of the knowledge to innovation project, Dr Sujata Gamage, made a presentation to the annual sessions of one of Sri Lanka’s oldest social science associations, the Social Scientists’ Association (SSA), on the literature pertaining to Research to Policy and how to take research to the policy process. Given the preoccupation of those associated with the SSA with the ethnic issue in the past decades, the very fact that they invited Sujata to react to the papers that were presented suggests a transition is underway from Right to Protect (R2P) to Research to Policy (R2P). The presentation is likely to be useful for anyone wanting a quick and comprehensive overview of the literature. It uses the work being done at LIRNEasia on the delivery of government services with IDRC support as an exemplar and is possibly the first publication of some of the findings of her research on self-organizing networks that are emerging among Sri Lankan local government authorities.
The Kim-family-owned North Korea has the world’s lowest mobile penetration despite having issued a 3G license to Orascom. Right next to them at the bottom of the league table is Myanmar, which used to charge a horrendous fee to get connected only to postpaid. Now it appears that they have started offering some kind of non-renewable prepaid. Even mothballed Myanmar is coming along, albeit slowly. Until recently, its military rulers did not permit pre-paid mobile services on its network.
There was talk that India would get 4G mobile before 3G mobile, given all the delays in licensing. That won’t happen. But 4G is not pie in the sky, according to the Economist: WHILE much of the world is still rolling out the third generation (3G) of mobile networks, some countries have already moved on to the fourth (4G). Russia offers an intriguing example. Yota, a start-up with no old voice business to protect, has built a 4G network from scratch, burying 3,000km (1,864 miles) of fibre-optic cables to connect its wireless base stations.
Abu Saeed Khan, Senior Policy Fellow, who has been with LIRNEasia from the very beginning, has been appointed as the first Secretary General of AMTOB, the mobile operators association of Bangladesh. We congratulate Abu and wish him the very best in contributing to the advance of Bangladesh through productive private-public partnerships. Knowing Abu, we are confident that he will use this prestigious position to steer Bangladesh away from unproductive confrontations of the type we have seen over the past years, to one where the mobile operators who have done the heavy lifting in getting the people of Bangladesh connected electronically will also be allowed to play their due role in the government’s plans to reach middle-income status by 2021 (the fiftieth anniversary of the republic) through actions such as the implementation of Digital Bangladesh. AMTOB is an industry body and he will have to represent the industry. But we are confident that one can represent an industry and also serve the public interest, especially in the context of a rapidly expanding pie.
Sri Lanka has a peculiar media structure. The government has its own TV stations (2), radio (2) and also an entire newspaper publishing company. These have no similarity to the BBC and CBC, on which they were modeled. These are out and out propaganda operations. I cut my media teeth at the government radio station in 1978-79 (it was a monopoly back then, so I had no choice) and have done many programs there since.