An old folk tale describes a tired traveler in the desert, where the nights are cold. His camel is outside the tent. The camel wants the warmth of the tent. The traveler permits him to bring in the snout. By morning, the camel is in the tent and the traveler outside.
Digicel made its name and fortune in the Caribbean. Then it became a major regional player in the Pacific. Now it is hoping to land a license in Myanmar, a much larger market than the ones its operates in. Interestingly, they are pushing for an enabling framework for mobile money, even ahead of getting the telecom license: “The telecommunications sector offers many opportunities, and companies can provide a variety of services in this industry,” said Lorna J. McPherson, the operations director of the Irish-owned Myanmar Digicel Company.
We found people at the BOP in Indonesia claiming they did not use the Internet, yet going into great detail about their use of Facebook. Our colleagues in Africa, RIA, also noted this phenomenon. Western observers are skeptical about the value of a Facebook phone, but perhaps it may make sense in our parts? A smartphone that gives priority to Facebook services is good for Facebook, but it is unclear whether that is something consumers want. Jan Dawson, a telecommunications analyst at Ovum, said the concept was “a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
The Saudi regulator is pressuring operators to crack down on Skype and similar OTT applications. It affects both Saudis and the many expatriate workers who live there. This will require deep packet inspection and some serious interventions in the data streams. Saudi students on scholarships who use the Skype video application to contact their parents are also disappointed. “I really don’t understand what they mean by monitoring.
At every Board meeting of CPRsouth we provide evidence on the efficacy of our actions. Every time we seek funds for our work, we do the same. So we thought the question would be of equal interest to our colleagues engaged in similar enterprises, at TPRC and EuroCPR. We prepared two papers building on one another, one for each. The TPRC paper was presented last September, the Samarajiva_EuroCPR_Mar13_final a few days back.
Few days back I was asked to speak on the above subject at a workshop held at the Center for European Political Studies in Brussels. I discussed what effects the continuing efforts by ETNO and likeminded groups to introduce some form of government mandated rent extraction from Over the Top players such as Google and Facebook are likely to have on small alternative media using the Internet as a workaround or simply as a low-entry-cost publishing opportunity. The slideset that I used is Samarajiva_CEPS_Mar13.
Returning to the privacy field after a break of more than 10 years, I was struck by how inappropriate the old notice and consent approaches would be for what was actually happening on the ground. Here is an attempt to evolve new principles. Not had time to fully digest yet. Traditional approaches are no longer fit for the purposes for which they were designed, for several reasons: • They fail to account for the possibility that new and beneficial uses for the data will be discovered, long after the time of collection. • They do not account for networked data architectures that lower the cost of data collection, transfer and processing to nearly zero, and enable multiuser access to a single piece of data.
It appears they want to play: Google chairman Eric Schmidt speaks on March 22 in Yangon. The company has big plans for Myanmar, and they’re closely linked to the country’s plans for mobile. Myanmar’s President, Thein Sein, has set a goal of 80% mobile-phone penetration by 2015, from current rates of 9%. With internet penetration as low as 1%, and fixed-line telephony penetration in the single figures even in big cities, mobile networks will be the only way the vast majority of Myanmar’s 50 million people can get online, and will serve as the main communications infrastructure for a modern information economy, including banking, media and civic services. A speculative piece.
Mexico is not really within our sphere of activity, but the irony of having Carlos Slim as the co-chair of the Broadband Commission has caused me to write a few blogs about telecom sector developments there. Most recently, there was this stunning news that a political consensus had been achieved to attack “the great problem of concentration in telephony, internet and television.” One year ago, the OECD conducted a review of the telecom sector in Mexico. The conclusions came under fire from the entities that benefited from the status quo. Is there a causal relation here?
There were no training programs on how to use mobile phones, even for the villagephone ladies in Bangladesh. But they think training programs are needed in the US. What does this mean for our part of the world? According to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, one in five American adults — about 62 million people — do not use the Internet. The 2012 Pew Internet and American Life Project said the main reason these people “don’t go online is because they don’t think the Internet is relevant to them.
I just listening to Eli Noam giving a talk that claimed that Google was the world’s largest media company. The big PDF appears to be the base presentation he was working off. The slide that he used showing Google to be the largest media company, had Time Warner and Telecom Italia in it. He made references to HHI, but it is not clear how he claims that Google (a search engine and advertising company), Time Warner (a media and cable company) and Telecom Italia (a telecom company) can be in the same market and how their market shares can be calculated. When I questioned this, I was advised that the methodology is in two books, one for the US and one for the rest of the world.
It appears from news reports that the Myanmar government has commenced work on a domestic fiber backhaul network. This was among the recommendations of the oped that I published in a Myanmar newspaper last year. But as experience has shown in country after country that it is easier to build backhaul than to ensure that it is efficiently used (see downloadable book, chapter 7). For this, an open-access regime based on cost-oriented pricing and non-discriminatory access is essential. The farmlands were dug twice, while burying cables along the roads in Thapyay San village, Magway township, one of the locals said.
Ron Diebert is a friend and colleague. He gets his hands dirty looking at what actually happens on the Internet. And he thinks all governments have to rethink the way they approach Internet security. “I think Canada, like many liberal, democratic countries, is caught in a bit of a contradiction,” said Diebert, director of the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies at the University of Toronto. “We can’t accuse other countries of violating people’s human rights when there is no protection in our own country when it comes to law enforcement accessing data through Internet service providers.
LIRNEasia’s current cycle of research focuses on how mobile platforms can help improve customer relationship management in utilities. I have been contributing to the current debate on rationalizing the electricity tariffs in Sri Lanka based on the work Partha Mukhopadhyay and I did in relation to the recently concluded SAFIR core course and laying the foundation for disseminating the results of the research project when completed. Many of my interventions have been over electronic media, but here is a summary piece in LBO that is also being published in Sinhala in Ravaya next week. Tariff design must contribute to bring down peak demand by around five percent. This is a policy objective pursued in many countries, especially in light of climate-change concerns.
We at LIRNEasia are seeking to apply nudge principles to how utilities (and governments) communicate with their customers (citizens). Therefore, it was not surprising that this caught my eye when reading about Google’s employee perks: So the candy (M&Ms, plain and peanut; TCHO brand luxury chocolate bars, chewing gum, Life Savers) is in opaque ceramic jars that sport prominent nutritional labels. Healthier snacks (almonds, peanuts, dried kiwi and dried banana chips) are in transparent glass jars. In coolers, sodas are concealed behind translucent glass. A variety of waters and juices are immediately visible.
Alex Pentland of MIT has been working on mobile big data (as are we at LIRNEasia). Here is a snippet of an interview in the NYT: The phone tracks our movements, as well as our calls and texts, so it can reveal a lot about our daily lives. What did you learn about yourself by studying your own cellphone data? That I’m very predictable. We tend to pay attention only to the new things in our lives.