Two journalists attended our five-day course on regulation in Taungoo, Myanmar last week. Both interviewed me on the sidelines. Below is the first, from Internet Journal. I can’t read it (cute pictures though); hope you can. Interview in Bamar
October 14 will be the first anniversary of launching 3G by TeleTalk in Bangladesh. The state-owned mobile outfit wasn’t required to pay anything for license or spectrum at that time. Authorities said that TeleTalk would pay exactly the same amount the private operators pay once the 3G auction is over. Now TeleTalk is to match the payment of Grameenphone (US$210 million + 5% VAT), as each of them use 10 megahertz 3G spectrum. The government strictly realizes payments from the private operators.
Very recently the Transparency International has said the political parties, police and the judiciary are among the most corrupt in Bangladesh. Now the amended ICT law empowers the police to arrest any citizen without any warrant for suspected cyber crime. The suspect will be also denied any bail and end up in the jail for 14 years. According to the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) (Amendment) Act 2013, a person will face similar punishment without bail for willfully publishing anything “untrue and obscene” on a website that may result in “defamation, deterioration of law and order situation, tarnishing the image of the state or individuals and hurting people’s religious sentiments.” Full report.
The headline suggests the focus is on the capture of regulatory agencies by retired IAS officers. But it is more, a wide-ranging discourse on problems of regulatory governance. It is a pity that the arguments are harmed by sloppy blame attribution: how can TRAI be blamed for spectrum auctions, when the article itself recognizes that is in the province of the Department of Telecommunications? So how do we reverse this capture of important decision-making bodies by the bureaucracy? In 2006, the Planning Commission published a report (Approach to Regulations: Issues and Options) with some suggestions.
Alexa ain’t perfect (how could S Korea’s most popular site be Baidu?), but fascinating nevertheless. What’s with South Asia? India is Google country while all its neighbors are Facebookers. We used to talk about Facebook being a synonym for Internet in Indonesia, but not to Alexa.
While teaching a course on policy and regulation at a very nice, generator-equipped hotel in Taungoo, I was struck by how bad the Internet was and how unstable the electricity supply was. We are used to working closely with the office while on the road, but this proved too difficult in Taungoo and one of us had to advance the departure by one day to ensure projects did not get disrupted. The importance of electricity has been picked up by this analyst, as reported. The costs of Internet subscriptions are expected to decline gradually, particularly for equipment and administrative fees. Announcements that a high-speed Internet cable network is being built this year, and more hydropower dams over the next few years, will have excited the market, it said.
Greater value could be added to the newly built cross-border power grid, which brings electricity from India to Bangladesh. Early this year, Bangladesh has diversified its international connectivity through cross-border underground optical fiber links with the Indian carriers. The six Bangladeshi International Terrestrial Cable (ITC) operators are, however, linked with their Indian counterparts through a common optical fiber link. It exposes both the parties to the risk of disconnection, once the link is snapped. The Indo-Bangla power grid is fitted with Optical Ground Wire (OPGW) to measure the volume of electricity being flown (Red line in the map).
The honeymoon is over and the clock is now ticking in Myanmar’s business hours. In June, the authorities have selected Qatar’s Ooredoo and Norway’s Telenor to run mobile services initially for 15 years. Neither has received the license as yet but both have kept the fingers crossed to get the paper within this year. The government is still processing a new telecom law, which will guide the licenses. Myanmar’s parliament has passed the law in August but the President has returned it to the lawmakers with suggested amendments.
Today, our CEO Helani Galpaya was on a panel “Harnessing the power of convergence and big data for enterprise success” at a Sri Lankan summit called “Enterprise 2.0: building future ready enterprises” (full video of the panel session is available HERE). I thought some of the ideas she proposed about were worthy of further discussion. LIRNEasia is curently working on utilizing telecom network Transaction Generated Information (TGI) to conduct public interest research using big data. One of her comments was about how companies are not fully appreciating the value of the data that they have.
We have been working with the Pakistan Telecom Authority, the Pakistan Universal Service Fund and operators to achieve universal service in that country. Universal service means a phone for everyone. But according to this report there are people in Pakistan who will kill barbarically to prevent this goal from being achieved. A young mother of two has been put to death in Pakistan for possessing a cell phone, Opposing Views reported on Thursday. Arifa Bibi was executed three months ago, on July 11, after a Pakistani tribal court sentenced her to death by stoning.
Several years ago, I was in Chennai learning about what Ashok Jhunjhunwala’s teams were working on. One idea Ashok had was that of basing agricultural extension advice tailored to micro-climatic and soil data. So when a farmer calls/texts, the advice he would get would be specifically for his land and the climatic conditions relevant to that land at that time. I’ve talked about this with many people since, but only as a theoretical construct. I was skeptical the enormous data base that it required could ever be constructed (and maintained, since the soil and climate conditions changed all the time).
For those who worry about their privacy being harmed by transaction generated data, here’s more to worry about: sensors in the sky. These systems generate so much data that they do require big-data analysis. Just as important, he shepherded research and development of new kinds of satellites that made digital pictures of objects on the ground as small as five inches across and then transmitted the images to earth for analysis almost instantly. The aerial reconnaissance programs, most done in conjunction with the Air Force, were highly classified, and many remain so. In a 1967 speech that he asked not be quoted, President Lyndon B.
Earlier this year (April 2013) we pushed for Demand Side Management (DSM) in Sri Lanka to managing the burgeoning electricity demand in the country. Hence we were quite happy when the Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lankan (PUCSL) recently released draft regulations for the institutional framework conducting DSM activities in the electricity sector. Today, at a consultative workshop on the draft regulations, we recommended the following: Coordinate the market research design that each of the 5 distribution licensees have to conduct prior to initiating DSM activities. Make use of behavioral economics and Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) for high impact since it is the most effective way to understand consumer behavior and “nudge” them to more energy-efficient and energy-conserving behavior. The impact could be even higher if Sri Lanka were to quickly scale up the use of smart meters.
The Team Leader of LIRNEasia’s Human Capital Research Unit has published an analysis of a policy draft presented by the Ministry of Education. The proposed policy may be downloaded from here.
LIRNEasia, in partnership with the Myanmar ICT Development Organization (MIDO), is conducting a training course on ICT regulation in Taungoo, Myanmar from September 28 to October 2, 2013. The information on this course will be posted under capacity building shortly. Taungoo is 3.5 to 4 hours away from Yangon. Yet I considered it a good use of my time to take a break from teaching to travel to Yangon yesterday because our anchor funder IDRC had convened a roundtable of Myanmar researchers and wanted my presence.
We have discussed different Arab initiatives to reach Europe through cross-border terrestrial optical fiber links. Now Vodafone’s Qatar unit, du of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait’s Zain along with the country’s ISP named Zajil have formed another consortium – Middle East-Europe Terrestrial System (MEETS). And optical power ground wire (OPGW) will be the vehicle during initial leg of its long distance terrestrial telecoms journey to Europe. MEETS has rented 1,400-km OPGW from the power transmission grid of Gulf Cooperation Council’s (GCC) interconnection authority for 15 years. The consortium will invest US$36 million to primarily inject 2300 Gbps capacity using 100G optical transport network (OTN) technology.