Asia Pacific telecom operators had a big party in Colombo this week. They were celebrating the 21 st anniversary of the global mobile standard, GSM. Despite a few puzzlingly sexist comments about the significance of the 21 st birthday to a “Young Girl” (as though it was not significant for a male) it was a good party. Anyway, the point is that it was not just fun and games. The conference that followed was a serious one.
As researchers with a focus on government and private-sector actions that benefit the bottom of the pyramid, LIRNEasia has an interest in understanding poverty and who is poor. This summary report by the Economist gives a good overview of World Bank and ADB research on the subject. Of course, those interested are recommended to go to the sources for the real thing. BTW, for those who wonder why we keep saying that South Asia is the home to the world’s largest concentration of poor people, the answer is that the World Bank states that 595.5 million people live on below USD 1.
Babar Bhatti, who maintains an interesting website on Pakistani telecom developments, has written an interesting post where he calls for simpler tariff plans. Having seen the graphical presentation of Dialog Telekom’s tariff plans in their nice new publication, 077, I am convinced that there is a need for simplification in Sri Lanka too. Surprisingly, I cannot find the publication, or the graphical presentation of the tariff plans, on the Dialog website. Informed consumers exercising consumer sovereignty are the basis of competitive marketplaces. If they cannot figure out the prices they are paying, how can they be sovereign?
One of the key debates on broadband is between those who believe in “all you can eat” service packages and pricing and those who do not. Our research so far indicates that broadband can only be provided to the Bottom of the Pyramid using the same kind of business plans that were effective in providing mobile service to the BOP, that is, not all-you-can eat. Comcast, a leading US ISP, has just announced caps on downloads. If this is the future for rich country users, can there be any doubt about what the future for BOP users in poor countries?
Ten years ago, pretty much all the traffic went through the US Internet backbone. Today, claims are being made that only 25 per cent of traffic is routed through the US system. This may require changes in LIRNEasia’s (and Singapore’s) efforts to improve broadband quality of service experience through benchmark regulation or otherwise, using as one of the measures, Round Trip Time to the Internet cloud, defined as first point of landing in the US. An alternative will not be easy to come by, but we have faith in the wisdom of the many. Please contribute.
Meeting the traget of a billion dollars of FDI in 2008 seems to rest on foreign investment continuing at a high rate in telecom. After all, in the first half of the year, telecom brought in USD 291 million, out of a total of USD 425. However, the increasing hostility to the sector driven by the JHU plus the decline in people’s buying power pulled down profits last quarter. The largest mobile operator, Dialog, stated that its capital expenditures for the coming year will be cut by about 25 percent at an investment briefing recently. One cannot draw conclusions from one quarter, but do not be surprised if the first half of 2008 turns out to be the high point of investment in the sector.
Desktop to Laptop. Fixed phone to mobile. Wired connectivity for the laptop to wireless connectivity through WiFi. All important steps in the untethering of people from places in the communication process. But one wire remains.
It appears that erstwhile rivals Google and Verizon are talking about putting Google on the mobile palmtop. Good news for those who see a mobile-centric future, like us.
Hutch, a pure BOP play that was making very good profits, has reported declining profits and revenue growth. One quarter does not a trend make. But seen together with Dialog’s bad results for the last quarter, it suggests things are not looking good for the telecom sector which is taking multiple hits with tripled spectrum charges, revenue-raising taxes in the name of the environment and all sorts of additional costs imposed in the name of national security. If the government keeps taking JHU advice, they are likely to make the economy slow to a crawl.
We welcome the USD 71 million project to improve dam safety in Sri Lanka. LIRNEasia , together with several partners including the Sri Lanka Committee on Large Dams, Vanguard Management and Sarvodaya, did a lot of work on raising awareness of the impending dangers posed by ill-maintained dams, going as far as saying that a catastrophic dam failure in this reservoir-dotted country was not a question of if, but when. The repairs will, we understand, address the most serious risks raised by the LIRNEasia participatory research. However, due to ill-informed protests of the opponents of water-use reforms and the weak-kneed response of the government agencies and the World Bank, the component that would have addressed the sustainability issues was stripped out after one exchange. So we have postponed the day of reckoning, but not created a long-term sustainable system for safe water use.
Upon being awarded a full scholarship, LIRNEasia researcher Tahani Iqbal has moved to Singapore to commence her graduate studies in public policy at the LKY School at the National University of Singapore. She joins Senior Researcher Sriganesh Lokanathan who is in his second year at the Lee Kuan Yew School. He was also awarded a full scholarship. Sending our researchers to high-quality graduate programs is one way in which we operationalize our commitment to being a learning organization.
Nicholas Negroponte said, in the context of the United States, that all that was carried on wireguides would shift to wireless (e.g., telephony) and all that was carried by wireless (e.g., television) would shift to wireguides.
The new Competition Commission of Pakistan has entered into competition with the Pakistan Telecom Authority. If the FCC had sole authority over telecom in the US, we wouldn’t probably have the Internet in its present form. That’s a controversial statement, but one that can be defended. AT&T was broken up and space created for the efflorescence of multiple providers of communication services and products by the Antitrust Division of the US Department of Justice, not by the FCC. I state this upfront to indicate that I am not against telecom operators being regulated by multiple agencies.
Perhaps a phone call to the Pakistan Telecom Authority may help the TRC design a practical solution. Unregistered SIMs that are not connected to specific human beings/legal entities are a problem in any country. Operators should not issue such SIMs, in Pakistan or in Sri Lanka. Focused action on these SIMs, if any, will yield better results for security than taking photographs of millions of people, as Mobitel plans. State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan The initiative taken by Senate’s Standing Committee on Interior to curb unregistered Subscriber Identity Modules (SIMs) Card culture has resulted in blockage of eight million unidentified connections, said Senator Talha Mehmood, Chairman of the committee, here on Friday.
Instead of a either/or response, a thoughtful contribution from Vint Cerf, now at Google: Google backs ISP-guaranteed minimum data rates One side effect of the FCC’s recent move against Comcast’s P2P “delaying” technology has been to make discussions about the dark art of network management even more pressing (and they were pretty pressing before). If Comcast can’t use TCP reset packets to limit the number of BitTorrent connections a client can spawn, what legitimate techniques can ISPs use to deal with congestion ? Google’s Vint Cerf, one of the grandfathers of the Internet, today weighed in withn his answer: transmission rate caps.
It is evident from Mobile Benchmarks south asia that Sri Lanka has low mobile prices, but not the lowest. Looks like the Sri Lankan operators are working on changing that. The OECD methodology that is the basis for the mobile benchmarking by LIRNEasia treats a minute as a minute, while the proposed pricing scheme differentiates. We will start working on a solution. The approach used by the operator makes sense within the budget telecom network business model that we are beginning to describe.