In a packed session chaired by LIRNEasia’s Abu Saeed Khan, the next steps in improving international backhaul will be discussed. Affordable International Backhaul Monday, December 08, 2014, 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM, Hospitality Lounge 7 Many countries around the world lack affordable backhaul and cross-border networks that enable local networks to connect to the wider internet. There is still insufficient competition in some regions to facilitate competitive pricing and to allow for international Internet traffic backhaul. The availability of submarine fibre technology has brought prices down in coastal countries where competitive operators are able to bring this capacity to the market. The challenges can be greater for landlocked countries without co-operative neighbours for access to landing stations and other necessary infrastructure.
Following the plenary in 2013 at which Viktor Mayer-Schonberger introduced big data to ITU Telecom World attendees, there will be a panel discussion at the 2014 edition in Doha, Qatar. What is novel is that we will have three presentations by those who have actually got their hands dirty with big data, including Linus Bengtsson on Flowminder who will talk about their most recent work in helping track Ebola in West Africa, and our own Sriganesh Lokanathan and Joshua Blumenstock. Big Data for Development Tuesday, December 09, 2014, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM, Meeting Room 104 Companies are increasingly relying on business analytics to extract value from the large volumes of computer-readable and analyzable (or “datafied”) data in their possession. For example, telecom operators are using these techniques to identify customers likely to exit so as to manage churn. Big data for development (BD4D) seeks to apply these techniques to big data held by both government and private entities to answer development-related questions.
In 2010 I wrote a piece of science fiction. It was published in an academic book, so it came out in 2013 as “e South Asia: A social science fiction,” in South Asia in 2060: Envisioning regional futures, eds. Najam, A. & Yusuf, M., chapter 26.
As we always say, think of the Internet as a chain. A chain is as strong as the weakest link. This imperfectly researched article by a Yangon based journalist (has missed the AAE-1 Cable completely) claims that backhaul problems may be responsible for the poor Internet performance of Ooredoo. For Telenor and Ooredoo to be able to provide the capacity and redundancy needed for stable service, many across the industry point out that the companies need to be as involved with putting up towers and tower equipment as they are with building more long-haul domestic and international fiber links. Although Ooredoo has taken a starring role with regards to eye-catching marketing and corporate service responsibility initiatives, the company has also declined to even acknowledge any plans to beef up infrastructure.
Last week, I had the opportunity to participate in one of the first discussions on the maritime Silk Road being promoted by President Xi Jinping. I wrote up the two points I made in my five minutes. The second point described in the excerpt below suggests that governments and operators get behind the UN ESCAP Information Superhighway initiative that we’ve been working on with them since 2010. It is possible to place security teams on trains and ships to thwart the attacks of extremists. But it is not practical to guard fibre optic cables, be they placed on the ocean floor or buried underground.
The way mobile connectivity is growing in Myanmar, the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology should be updating the connectivity numbers every week. But given all the other priorities such as deciding who gets the fourth license, indicators are not easy to come by. According to the Irrawaddy Magazine, the country had 11.6 million active SIMs by end of September 2014. That amounts to 22.
Nothing better illustrates what we have always said about ICT’s role in development than this tragic story from Sierra Leone: But none of it was reaching Isatu Sesay, a sick teenager. She flipped on her left side, then her right, writhing on a foam mattress, moaning, grimacing, mumbling and squinching her eyes in agony as if she were being stabbed. Her family and neighbors called an Ebola hotline more than 35 times, desperate for an ambulance. For three days straight, Isatu’s mother did not leave her post on the porch, face gaunt, arms slack, eyes fixed up the road toward the capital, Freetown, where the Ebola command center was less than 45 minutes away. “This is nonsense,” said M.
Broadband in the Philippines has been receiving a lot of negative press. LIRNEasia research confirms the poor quality received in Manila. In response, the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) called for a public consultation for which LIRNEasia responded to. The regulator has been granted P 15.5 million (2015) for the benchmarking of broadband quality of all service providers.
Related to the previous post on ICT Development Index, the 2014 Measuring the Information Society report also has a section on the ICT Price Basket (IPB) which is a composite basket that includes three sub-baskets: fixed-telephone, mobile cellular and fixed- broadband. This is used to measure the affordability of ICT in a country by dividing the IPB value by the Gross National Income (GNI) per capita of the country. Even though the report mentions that the growth of mobile broadband has overtaken fixed-broadband and is less expensive especially in developing countries, the IPB still does not include mobile-broadband. ITU has a separate section only measuring the affordability of mobile broadband, but has not included these indicators into their index. While South Asia performed badly in the IDI, the affordability of ICT in South Asia is much better according to ITU’s ICT Price Basket method with Sri Lanka ranked 39 (up from 44), Bhutan 71 (up from 81), India 84 (up from 92), followed by Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal at 102, 116 and 119 which have not moved much compared to 2013.
Christoph Stork and Alison Gillwald have been engaged with the real-world problem of high mobile termination rates in Southern Africa for several years. Perhaps the earliest intervention was with the Namibian Communication Commission in 2009. Then there were repeated engagements in South Africa. We know, from our experience, that policy engagement does not leave a lot of time for academic publication. But it’s not that our colleagues did not try to publish in academic journals.
Bangladesh has not done too well in the IDI rankings, but a Bangladesh newspaper has been fast off the mark. On a global ranking of ICT usage, Bangladesh falls at 145 among a total of 166 countries, according to the latest report published by the International Telecommunication Union today. In Measuring the Information Society (MIS) report, Bangladesh has also ranked at the 27th position among 29 nations in the Asia-Pacific region with an ICT development index (IDI) of 1.97 and Afghanistan being the lowest in the region with an IDI ranking of 1.67.
We deal with a subset of ASEAN countries, the most prosperous among them being Thailand. So I looked at the performance of the not-so-rich ASEAN in the ICT Development Index. Thailand has advanced from 91st place in 2012 to 81st in 2013. Very significant. Then comes Viet Nam (101; down two places from 2012), Philippines (103; down one place), Indonesia and Cambodia holding steady at 106 and 127, respectively; Laos, down four to 134; and sadly Myanmar at 150, two places down from the last place in the region it held in 2012 — 148.
The 2014 Measuring the Information Society report is out. No surprises at the top: Denmark is now at 1 and Korea is now 2; just changed places from 2012 ranking. Significant movement from the Gulf countries: UAE goes from 46 to 23 and Qatar from 42 to 34. UAE is almost too difficult to believe. No good news from South Asia, sadly.
We’ve been thinking some big changes were coming to energy, mostly because of application of ICTs and concern about excessive centralization. But could this accelerate everything? According to a study by the investment banking firm Lazard, the cost of utility-scale solar energy is as low as 5.6 cents a kilowatt-hour, and wind is as low as 1.4 cents.
I’ve seen larger numbers being thrown around but this seems to be the component that the Indian Department of Telecom will control through its BBNL special purpose vehicle. The Rs 20,100 crore national broadband network will serve as a countrywide optic-fibre pipe to provide high-speed internet connectivity across rural India while the Rs 30,000-crore-plus wifi-based e-services project aims to create a commercial ecosystem to recover the costs of building such rural broadband infrastructure. Since the national broadband project is likely to see a 40% cost-escalation to nearly Rs 28,000 crore, the combined capex and opex cost of executing both projects is internally envisaged at roughly Rs 60,000 crore by DoT. “Currently, BBNL’s role is purely B2B (business to business), in that, it will be a bandwidth supplier to telcos who will eventually ride on the national broadband network to deliver services. But if BBNL is also required to deliver broadband services, its business model will have to migrate to the business-to-consumer (B2C) format,” said another DoT official aware of the matter.
For many, the only thing new about what journalists write about mobiles in Myanmar would be Myanmar. But I was thinking about the hate speech angle, which is, without question, going to be extremely significant in that country. Mobiles and social media are not the causes of hate speech; they are the enablers and accelerators of hate speech. Like in the old Yugoslavia, there would have been a lot of enmity toward “the other” in Myanmar. But the whole thing was bottled up and suppressed, not because the military government was against hate speech, but against all speech.