How can the ubiquitous mobile phone improve the lives of the poor? How can the phone become more like the “Aladdin’s Lamp” that Muhammed Yunus talks about, something that can offer any service its owner wants? If the phone is to be about more than just talk, we have to put some effort into adding to the services offered over it. The 2012-14 LIRNEasia research program funded by IDRC focuses on these questions. One thing we discovered in our research was that people need to manage the inevitable power outages.
Increasingly, we are beginning to hit the wall with respect to Internet use because of constraints that involve people. We lack users with the skills necessary to use full potential of the Internet. We lack the innovative entrepreneurs who could develop the content and apps that would attract more of our people to the Internet. The problem is illustrated by the puzzle of Sri Lanka’s low Internet user population (25 percent) and low use of Internet from the home (11 percent of households) despite the country offering the lowest broadband prices in the world. At these prices adoption should be rocket-like.
I wrote this on the flight back from the Baku Internet Governance Forum of 2012, where we did serious damage to the ETNO campaign to introduce the “sending party network pays” principle into an international treaty document governing relations between telcos and companies such as Google (so-called OTTs). I make it a habit to try to understand the opposition. This was the result. Once upon a time, there was a sleepy old railway company, serving a sleepy old town. The tracks were old, the rolling stock had been paid for, and the customers were regular.
LIRNEasia was selected on the basis of a competitive procurement to offer a training course by the Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka (PUCSL). Among the attendees are new recruits of the regulatory commission, staff from the electricity companies, a few government officials and members of the PUCSL’s consumer consultative committee. The course syllabus is here. The course slides will be posted at the end of the course.
Thaung Tin, Myanmar’s Deputy Minister of Communications and Information Technology, who formerly chaired KMD Group, a local computer training company, is a key figure in the ongoing telecom reforms. Here, he responds to questions from a journalist about the challenges MPT, the government-owned company, and the new licensees face. User rates are always increasing in Rangoon, meaning demand is increasing but supply can’t follow it. Whenever we’ve been issuing mobile phones [SIM cards], internet users are quickly increased as well. So when Telenor and Ooredoo start working, they can take up the demand in Burma.
Myanmar Post and Telecommunication (MPT), the state-owned fixed, mobile and international gateway monopoly-cum-regulator, is signing an agreement with Japanese operator KDDI. The latter will take control of MPT’s day-to-day operations. Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) official U Than Tun Aung told Myanmar Times: The process has been delayed for many months because so many steps are required to negotiate with MPT, since it is a state-owned business. The agreement is going to be signed at the end of the month. MPT has been shopping for a foreign partner to safeguard its businesses from two heavyweight new entrants, Telenor and Ooredoo, which are due to launch mobile networks end of this year.
Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company Limited, (BSCCL) has signed an MoU with BSNL as a first step to export IP Transit bandwidth to the northeastern states of India across the eastern land borders of Bangladesh. Initially BSNL will procure 10 Gbps bandwidth from Bangladesh and a three-year agreement will be signed very soon. This February, the Bangladesh government decided to export the unused internet bandwidth, following a request from India in July last year seeking 40Gbps bandwidth for eight eastern Indian states. The BSCCL had earlier projected a monthly earning of around Tk4.83 crore ($643,000) from the export of 40Gbps bandwidth; but the MoU for only 10Gbps bandwidth brought down the estimated monthly earnings to only Tk1.
We are in the big data for development space, but we keep an eye on what is happening in the big data for profit space. And IBM is a company we watch. Since 2005, IBM has invested $24 billion in the data analytics business, including $17 billion on 30 acquisitions. In 2013, the business generated nearly $16 billion in revenue. So if IBM makes less money in the future selling hardware, software and services for corporate customers’ data centers, it plans to make more money helping its customers make sense of data — to cut costs, increase sales, innovate and personalize product offerings.
Over the past seven years, LIRNEasia has been engaged in a capacity-development exercise in the form of CPRsouth [Communication Policy Research south]. The objective has been the development of policy intellectuals, or informed and motivated outsiders to the ICT policy and regulatory process (though reflective practitioners from within the system have not been excluded). LIRNEasia, along with others, has also tried to build capacity for reform among those within the triangle through formal training and similar activities. CPRsouth did not seek to directly change the behaviors of actors within the triangles. The intellectuals who were formed or influenced by CPRsouth would, it was hoped, form or become parts of issue networks that would advance the public interest by initiating or sustaining reform.
Bangladesh has abundant international Internet bandwidth while Bhutan generates surplus electricity. Newly appointed Bhutan’s Ambassador to Dhaka, Pema Choden, has expressed interest in importing surplus bandwidth from Bangladesh. In that meeting, the State Minister for Foreign Affairs M Shahriar Alam also showed interest in Bhutan’s plentiful electricity to meet the growing energy demand of Bangladesh. Both the neighbors are now poised to be the friend in mutual needs. Bangladesh currently consumes only 40Gbps of its 200Gbps capacity of the SEA-ME-WE 4 submarine cable.
Today was the first public airing of our big data for development research results. It was a small amount of time, so we focused on a limited set of issues. So we showed that anonymized data sets can easily substitute for costly traffic studies. Slides.
In its recent public consultation, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) aim to set minimum download speeds for the different type of wireless technologies offered. This was based on the download speeds achieved and reported by the service providers over the last three quarters. The methods used while carrying out the diagnostics is not known. Further, it is perhaps more important to understand the consumers needs when access the Internet over the phone – is it for downloading or for browsing. There is no doubt that download speed matters, but latency also should be given some thought as that is what really affects the QoS for web browsing.
The New York Times reported some exciting new changes that are in the works in New York, whereby the entire electricity model is being rethought. New York State is proposing to turn its electric utilities into a new kind of entity that would buy electricity from hundreds or thousands of small generators and set prices for that electricity and for the costs of running the power grid. The proposal anticipates a radically different electric system, dominated by decentralized production, much of it of renewable, intermittent energy sources like solar or wind power. The Public Service Commission is considering how the utilities would have to change. Instead of distributing electricity themselves, the utilities would effectively direct traffic, coordinating distribution of electricity produced by a multitude of smaller entities, according to an outline published last month by the commission, which regulates utilities.
A media conference was held on the 25th April 2014 at Holiday Inn Resort, Goa to launch the resource repository on broadband policy and regulation and to disseminate the research conducted under the Ford Foundation funded project on ‘Broadband Policy and Regulation Conducive to Access by the Poor’. It was attended by journalists from PTI, Indian Express, India Forbes, Telecom Lead and Cyber Media stationed in multiple locations in India. The conference commenced with an introduction to the project and the media launch of the web-based Broadband Policy Resource Centre (http://broadbandasia.info/ ). The topics covered included what India can learn from the National Broadband Network initiatives of Malaysia, Australia and Indonesia, an analysis about the current status of the National Optical Fiber Network of India and why the Indian app market has not been as successful as expected and how it can be improved.
The attention economy requires that major investments be made to acquire the attention base and then to monetize it. Although the attention economy has been around at least since 1830, people are still not used to the model. They may be right about the business model – in which case Twitter becomes a perfect case study in the economics of information goods. The key to success in cyberspace is to harness the power of Metcalfe’s Law, which says that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its users. In layman’s terms this means that the faster you can acquire users the quicker you reach the point of becoming the winner who takes all.
Myanmar’s international connectivity has been choked due to her exclusive reliance on nearly dysfunctional SEA-ME-WE3 cable. Link with a decent submarine cable became imperative when this South East Asia’s last greenfield telecom market allured foreign telecom starlets. Finally, Myanmar has joined the SEA-ME-WE5 consortium in March. Interestingly, Myanmar was also named as one of the partners in Asia Africa Europe 1 (AAE1) submarine cable systems long before it formally joined the SEA-ME-WE5 consortium. Now the Myanmar Post and Telecommunications (MPT) is contemplating to join the AAE1 consortium.