In the context of the debates about banning mobiles for school children, the issue of phones that constrain use has become relevant. The NYT has done a full survey of the options available to parents in the US, an excerpt of which is given below. Why doesn’t someone do a similar survey for India, Sri Lanka, etc.? Now for some real cellphones.
Few years back we had trouble on this blog because of anonymous posts attacking the late Professor V.K Samaranayaka. He complained to our funders and partners. But we held to the principles of allowing anonymous posts and non-moderation. Here is a another discussion about anonymity: Pseudonyms have a noble history.
Reliance was at the presentations we made on teleuse@BOP3 results about awareness, trial and use of more-than-voice applications on mobiles. We can only speculate whether our results were used in the design of the services described by The Hindu: RCom is launching three initiatives — BharatNet plan, Grameen VAS and M2M (Machine to Machine) solutions — under its rural drive. BharatNet plan is a high-speed wireless Internet service in over 20,000 rural locations across India and will address four million PC users in rural India. A high-speed variant of the Reliance NetConnect service specifically designed for rural and sub-urban markets, it will offer speeds of about 153 Kbps, which is 4 to 8 times the current dial-up speed of wire-line services. BharatNet is being offer at Rs.
The US technology giant will debut OneApp in South Africa and hopes to swiftly roll it out in India, China and other countries where millions of people use feature phones instead of powerful smartphones. “We designed OneApp from the ground up on feature phones with very limited memory and processing capabilities,” said Amit Mital, corporate vice president of the Unlimited Potential Group and Startup Business Accelerator at Microsoft. “OneApp will be able to help people do things they couldn’t do before with their feature phone — anything from paying their bills to helping diagnose their health issues or just staying connected with friends and family.” In the heels of Apple and Google redefining the smartphone segment, Microsoft appears to be trying to transform the featurephone segment, according to LBO. OneApp is designed to work with GPRS and is therefore of greater relevance to the bottom of the pyramid.
Just recently, we heard about a m-gov application in Indian villages which uses barcode readers from Subhash Bhatnagar. The Economist has a long piece on how barcodes and mobiles interact. NEGOTIATING his way across a crowded concourse at a busy railway station, a traveller removes his phone from his pocket and, using its camera, photographs a bar code printed on a poster. He then looks at the phone to read details of the train timetable displayed there. In Japan, such conveniences are commonplace, and almost all handsets come with the bar code-reading software already loaded.
It was gratifying to see McKinsey picking up on the work that PIPU did in 2002-04 and praising the TRCSL in the regulatory chapter in GITR 2009. There is a lot more refarming to be done TRC; keep up the good work. The move toward a more technology- and service-neutral spectrum policy was mainly triggered by a desire to treat all providers equitably, the urging of mobile providers to shift to GSM technology, and the need to use CDMA as a low-cost solution for fixed wireless access in rural areas. Although the Telecommunication Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka (TRCSL) was constrained to some extent by existing allocations and defense considerations, it issued more spectrum space. The regulator also recognized the problem of scattering spectrum and attempted to streamline allocations while it cleared capacity in the 1800–1900 megahertz range.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Network Readiness Index (covering 134 countries in 2008-09), only Sri Lanka has gained any ground among the South Asian countries. India is the first within the region, ranked 54th (down from 50th in 2007-08). Sri Lanka has made considerable progress from 79th place in 2007-08 to 70th place in a straight comparison (72nd among the 2008-09 countries). Congratulations to the industry, ICTA and all who contributed to this gain. Pakistan has slipped to 95th in a straight comparison from its 89th position in 2007-08.
Reading the WEF and INSEAD Global Information Technology Report 2008-09, I was struck by the presence of several references from within the LIRNE.NET community. I would have of course preferred some mention of LIRNEasia (in the same way DIRSI had been mentioned) and or a URL, but still, nice to know our work is being read and used. It is noteworthy that the second author on the first reference below, A. Aguero, is currently with LIRNEasia completing a professional internship.
Location-based services are likely to be the next big thing in telecom. Twitter is getting its ducks in a row according to NYT. There are a bunch of possible uses for location-aware tweets. With this new feature, Twitter users — many of whom use the service from their phones while on the move — could choose to view all the tweets written by people in their city, neighborhood or building, for example. In a post on the company blog, Biz Stone, a Twitter founder, suggested that the feature would be particularly useful for people following an event like a concert or an earthquake.
In our work, we refer to both the OECD and ITU definitions of broadband. They are quite different, indicating this is not settled science. Now the FCC has entered the fray, asking for comments on interpreting broadband. This is what one online commentator says: Nicely put, but defining and, even more, “interpreting” broadband may be a tough call. The FCC’s Notice certainly doesn’t make it easy.
What LIRNEasia tries to do with its teleuse@BOP research is to understand how and why people use ICTs at the bottom of the pyramid. We do this from the demand side. That has its advantages, but disadvantages too, such as cost, shortcomings in memory, etc. Therefore, we were thrilled to see someone else engaged in the same project, but from a different angle. Nathan Eagle, a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, believes that mobile phones offer more than a way to communicate.
SciDev, a prestigious science communication channel, has featured our cell broadcast report, the first of the Mobile 2.0 reports to be released. Texting short messages through mobile phones could help in early warning of natural disasters in the Maldives, says a new report. The technology, called cell broadcasting, helps to deliver messages simultaneously to multiple users in a specified area. “In the case of the Maldives, if an early warning is introduced, it must be able to reach all of the outlying islands including tourists on resorts.
All that was wired (telephone) will henceforth be delivered wirelessly. All that came wirelessly (radio and TV) will henceforth be delivered through wires. That was the Negroponte Switch. No longer theory and speculation, it seems: The decline in landline use, which has been under way for several years, has picked up speed in recent months. In the first half of 2005 only 7.
There was a time when the bans were on graphic novels in schools. The Sri Lankan version of Manga was chitra kata. We read them, despite the prohibitions, and lived to tell the tale. Why don’t the telcos put chitra kata or Manga on mobiles and give the prohibitionists another reason to ban? Currently the reasons for banning mobiles in schools are weaker than those for banning school ties.
The Sunday Times (English) and Ravaya (Sinhala) carried the results of the migrant component of the teleuse research, making direct reference to the need to set the rules in place, a topic that was addressed in a previous issue of the Times by M. Aslam Hayat. “The challenge for mobile operators is to make a remittance service as simple as handing over the money and a slip, with hand-written transfer details, to a bank clerk,” said the study. On average, a Sri Lankan migrant sends home US $ 137 per month. The most common method of remittance is through the banking system.
There is little doubt that future wars will include cyber theaters. The NYT story describes cyber attacks and the dangers of collateral damage. Although the digital attack on Iraq’s financial system was not carried out, the American military and its partners in the intelligence agencies did receive approval to cripple Iraq’s military and government communications systems in the early hours of the war in 2003. And that attack did produce collateral damage. Besides blowing up cellphone towers and communications grids, the offensive included electronic jamming and digital attacks against Iraq’s telephone networks.