Once monopolists get entrenched, it takes significant courage to dislodge them. The monopoly profits have been used to build up considerable political capital. So it is noteworthy when entrenched monopolies get taken, as it appears to be happening in Mexico. The lack of serious competition in Mexico has kept prices high, has limited investment and has held back the penetration of new technologies. According to the International Telecommunications Union, only 26 percent of Mexican households had access to the Internet in 2012, compared to more than 45 percent in Brazil.
LIRNEasia staff was invited to conduct a workshop on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in electricity sector at the Research and Development Center, Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) on 4th March 2014. The workshop was based on the LIRNEasia research on CRM. The invitation was extended to LIRNEasia by Mr W. J. L.
Bangladesh and Myanmar have joined an international consortium, which has signed an agreement today in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to build the South East Asia – Middle East -Western Europe 5 (SEA-ME-WE 5) cable. Once activates in early 2016, the cable will be literally a lifeline for Myanmar’s international connectivity. The country now survives on the first generation undersea optical fiber (SEA-ME-WE 3), which suffers from frequent outage. The SEA-ME-WE 5 cable will also bolster the international connectivity of Bangladesh, as the country is only plugged with the SEA-ME-WE 4 undersea cable system. The six terrestrial operators of Bangladesh have been saving the country from fragility like Myanmar.
Tomorrow, we start a Ford Foundation supported four-day course on “How to engage in broadband policy and regulatory processes” at a hotel located in Sohna, Gurgaon. Gurgaon, a new city that sprang up in the last few decades and is a symbol of the new ICT-centric India, was where I thought we were teaching the course. But we’re more than 20 kms further into the interior of Haryana. Driving across the narrow and pot-holed roads to get to the location, I started to think about the immensity of the challenge of realizing the real benefits of broadband in India. The occasional cuts in electricity (always short because I am in a hotel with full backup power) reminded me of the punishment electronic equipment must be taking in the non-backed up outside.
Among the comments to an informative article on Zuckerberg’s interactions with telecom CEOs at GSM Mobile World tamasha in Barcelona was this: The carriers are making tons of money supplying pipes. The expensive pipes are in demand because of the low cost apps people can run over them. It would be like power companies complaining they don’t make money off of selling electrical appliances, when people pay power companies every month for power.
JOIN US IN SRI LANKA – Indian Ocean Tsunami 10th Year Anniversary (IOTX) – CAP WORKSHOP DOWNLOAD THE CAP WORKSHOP FLYER These are exciting times for alerting enabled by the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) standard (ITU-T Recommendation X.1303), especially as major online media and technology companies continue their support and promotion of CAP. One theme is the emergent support for CAP-enabled alerting through advertising by online media. In that vein, we expect this Workshop will discuss the development of harmonized design guidelines for such emergency alerting, perhaps including aspects such as colours, fonts, languages, and sets of symbols. Earthquake and volcano alerting are also expected to be Workshop topics, as well as updates on progress for some of the many CAP implementations already in production and others in active development.
The XX Factor is written by Alison Wolf, the CBE Roy Griffiths Professor of Public Sector Management at King’s College London. The book outlines how working women of the modern workforce have changed the society. This change has occurred due to the fact that women are working in white collar jobs around the world hand in hand with men in contrast to past generations where both educated and uneducated women stayed at home once married. Author starts the book with the story of Jane Austen (1775 – 1817), an English novelist braking off her engagement with Harris Big Wither in 1802, which was something extraordinarily brave at her time. Then the book describes modern highly educated professional females, 70 million worldwide who stand in a direct line from Jane Austen.
They say mergers are coming in both India and Sri Lanka. I’d prefer clear guidelines rather than discretion, for reasons like this. A rash of consumer-friendliness has broken out across the mobile data industry. Over the last year, the four major carriers — AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile — have cut prices and offered greater flexibility in how they sell their voice, text and broadband services. The industry could be on the verge of an all-out price war.
Yesterday I listened sporadically to a live streamed conference on Big Data. Sporadic was not intentional. I am in Dili, Timor Leste, where most connectivity is via satellite with latencies in the 700ms range. Anyway, the focus was not on big data per se. They talked about all sorts of things, mostly open data (in the parts I heard) and crowd-sourced data.
LIRNEasia’s dissemination workshop on Improving Service Delivery for e-Inclusion was held on 18th February at the Hilton Residencies (Jaic Hilton), Colombo. The workshop was attended by the senior management of Sri Lankan telecom and electricity companies. Rohan Samarajiva led the theoretical discussion on service quality addressing how incentives for service quality differ under different market conditions. Helani Galpaya, CEO and Ranjula Senaratna Perera presented the quantitative and qualitative findings on how low-income, urban micro-entrepreneurs (MEs) are being served by their electricity and telecom service providers. Research Managers, Shazna Zuhlye and Nilusha Kapugama proposed some solutions/ designs for improving service delivery in the two sectors.