The deployment of 4G wireless as a complement to ADSL last mile by Sri Lanka Telecom suggests that the convergence process that was marked by having a single CEO for the fixed and mobile arms may be reaching its logical conclusion. Sri Lanka Telecom said it had expanded broadband service coverage by deploying fourth generation wireless technology to areas that are not served by its wired network. From January data volumes on all broadband packages had been increased. SLT provides broadband services through ADSL (assymetrical-digital-subscriber-lines), fibre to home and now through 4G LTE (fourth generation long term evolution) wireless technology. At Ruwanwella, in Sri Lanka’s Kegalle district the firm said it had given a gratis broadband connections to the public library and school which had demonstrated downlink speeds of 50 Megabits per second.
Regulators make decisions. Their decisions can be challenged, and often are. Thus it is important that the decisions are supported by strong evidence. In many cases, the evidence requires information. Mostly the information lies with the operators.
Myanmar is a bit of a ways from the Pacific, but I am pleased PTC picked Myanmar for its comprehensive broadband study. The online document with multiple sections is now up, including a little contribution from LIRNEasia. A flood of current reports detail the opportunities for growth in telecom and other industries; while acknowledging the obvious potential, this study takes a critical approach by detailing the magnitude of the challenges that will be faced in order to provide a realistic view of how companies, policy-makers and non-governmental organizations can best proceed and collaborate. Many current studies of Myanmar’s telecom landscape focus on the great potential for comprehensive transformation, while sometimes downplaying challenges that may not be insurmountable, yet need to be fully understood so that they can be met with effective remedies and tools to support new dynamics. Among the oft-noted, thorny and complex challenges include: ongoing ethnic violence, poverty, human and institutional capacity, and broad infrastructure needs.
Why we do research is because we get surprised, sometimes. Here is a fascinating discussion on mobile use in public space in the Eastern US, comparing archival film from decades ago with current video of the same space. Many surprises, but this is the kicker. In fact, this was Hampton’s most surprising finding: Today there are just a lot more women in public, proportional to men. It’s not just on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia.
There is a possible explanation for the confusion around whether the Myanmar operating licenses have been issued or not. It appears that the license reported on by Reuters was a permit relevant to the investment, not the license which is the critical document in telecom policy and regulatory terms. This is still to be issued, since the rules have yet to be finalized. Telenor and Ooredoo were selected as winners of a government bid for two private telecoms licenses in June 2013. They expected to receive their licences by last December, but the government has yet to pass a vital telecommunications by-law which will outline the rules and regulations by which the companies must operate.
President Obama’s first response to the revelations of NSA malfeasance was jarring to many, an unhappiness articulated by Pratap Bhanu Mehta. Now we have Obama’s considered response: Mr. Obama also said he was taking the “unprecedented step” of extending privacy safeguards to non-Americans, including requiring that data collected abroad be deleted after a certain period and limiting its use to specific security requirements, like counterterrorism and cybersecurity. “The bottom line,” he said, “is that people around the world — regardless of their nationality — should know that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security.” Full report.
Is their ability to generate massive transaction-generated data streams that will yield insights into human behavior. Packed with sensors and software that can, say, detect that the house is empty and turn down the heating, Nest’s connected thermostats generate plenty of data, which the firm captures. Tony Fadell, Nest’s boss, has often talked about how Nest is well-positioned to profit from “the internet of things”—a world in which all kinds of devices use a combination of software, sensors and wireless connectivity to talk to their owners and one another. Other big technology firms are also joining the battle to dominate the connected home. This month Samsung announced a new smart-home computing platform that will let people control washing machines, televisions and other devices it makes from a single app.
An unconfirmed Reuters report indicates that the Myanmar government may have met its end of year deadline for issuing licenses to Telenor and Ooredoo. A senior Myanmar Investment Commission (MIC) official said that operation licenses had been granted last week to Telenor and Ooredoo, the two international telecom giants selected through bidding mid last year, the Voice Daily reports. The two operators had earlier announced plans to invest about $15 billion and $ 2 billion respectively in the 15-year projects, it added.
The telecom law has been passed, but it is incomplete and will probably require an amendment or a supplementary law within two years. The rules under the Law have been published for comment, but no information yet on their final form. The critical licences to Telenor and Ooredoo have not yet been issued. The regulatory agency is to be set up in 2015. A lot remains to be done.
Following the Court of Appeals ruling against its net neutrality order, the FCC is facing an existential challenge, says Tim Wu in an interview with the Washington Post. What could the FCC have done differently? The obvious alternative would have been to do what the FCC should have done and — in the future tense — now should do, which is to reclassify broadband under Title II authority. Other observers seem to think that’ll be hard to do, politically. There’s an effort to define it that way by the carriers, and to get people in Congress excited about that.
An old workaround bites back. Seems little alternative but to classify broadband as a utility. In a decision signed by two judges and joined in part by a third, the appeals court acknowledged that the F.C.C.
For too long, the field of privacy has been becalmed by religious fealty to a concept propounded by two New England aristocrats who were annoyed by paparazzi taking pictures of a party in a home. The ill-considered explosion set off by the NSA in its zeal to prevent all future acts of terror has opened up space for new thinking on the subject. An op-ed in the Washington Post is a good example: This is an anonymity problem: The NSA cannot create a dossier on you from your metadata unless it knows that you made the calls the agency is looking at. The privacy question is all about data-gathering: Should the NSA have access to nationwide metadata? The right answer to that question is yes.
One of the reasons we opposed the ill-considered efforts by ETNO and others to impose sending-party-network-pays charging on Internet traffic was the danger of balkanization: differential access to the Internet from different countries or splinternet. We beat back that effort in a temporary alliance with the US State Department, but little did we know that another part of the US government was actively destroying the basis of the Internet. It will cause massive negative economic effects to US tech companies, as described well in a Wired article. Zuckerberg is referring to a movement to balkanize the Internet—a long-standing effort that would potentially destroy the web itself. The basic notion is that the personal data of a nation’s citizens should be stored on servers within its borders.
Reforming MPT is essential to ensure its survival in the face of skilled and well-endowed competitors. Is a partner from a high-cost, high-price telecom market the best way to do this? Japan’s KDDI Corp and Sumitomo Corp are likely to partner of Myanmar’s state-backed telecommunications operator to expand services in one of the world’s least-connected countries, a Sumitomo official said. Sumitomo’s deputy general manager in Myanmar, Soe Kyu, told Reuters the companies were jointly invited into “exclusive” talks about becoming the international partner of Myanmar Post and Telecommunication (MPT), sharing its existing licence. No further details on the likely partnership were revealed.
The very first airing of LIRNEasia‘s current research on customer relationship management in electricity and telecom sectors was in July 2013 at an event organized by Informa. But that was a partial presentation, since the design team had not finished their work by then. The first full airing was therefore in Windhoek, Namibia, a rather unusual location, but we were invited; we offered to discuss our current research; they said yes. We emphasized the telecom angle since that was year-end event organized by the Namibia regulator to announce its workplan and consult stakeholders. Later this month, we will be making a similar presentation, but this time highlighting the electricity side, to S Asian regulators meeting in Colombo.
Since 2010, we at LIRNEasia have been engaged with problems of international backhaul. Renesys, an authoritative voice in this space, has a nice summary of developments in 2013. Here is their conclusion, influenced no doubt by the incredible damage done to US players in this space by the indiscriminate snooping of NSA. Increasingly, simply having inexpensive connectivity in our interconnected world is not enough. As enterprises become more sophisticated consumers of Internet transit, they seek connectivity alternatives that will keep their own customers happy.