The widespread casualties caused this year by fast moving weather systems in Uttarakhand and in Pakistan have caused experts to call for real-time data sharing among the region’s meteorological departments. This seems to call for increased reliance on ICTs. The monsoon has been erratic in recent years. Last year, the monsoon failed in Sri Lanka, and parts of the country’s northern, eastern and southern regions went through a drought that affected at least 1.2 million people.
As everyone assumes that everyone is connected to the Internet (not an assumption we have to deal with in our countries at this moment), the consequences of not using the Internet become quite serious. “As more tasks move online, it hollows out the offline options,” said John B. Horrigan, a senior research fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. “A lot of employers don’t accept offline job applications. It means if you don’t have the Internet, you could be really isolated.
It was not long ago, that we thought the Myanmar would remain asleep whilst the rest of the world (save maybe North Korea) reaped the rewards of a vibrant telecommunications sector. Even a few short years ago, the only phone connectivity was through kiosks such the one depicted in the photo, a mobile SIM could cost upwards of a few thousand dollars. But things are changing. Myanmar is opening up. Two mobile operators have been licensed.
Bangladesh will provide 100 Gbps of Internet bandwidth to India. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) has planned to deploy cross-border optical fiber cable, which will ensure cheaper wholesale Internet bandwidth to the seven northeastern Indian states. The states of Assam, Tripura, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Naga Land, Manipur and Mizoram are popularly known as the “seven sisters”. India has been struggling with broadband deployment in this region being remotely located from the subsea cable lading stations (Click on the map). Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram are adjacent to Bangladesh while the rest are at closer proximity.
One thing I have learned is not to place too much trust in promises of investment. But USD 15 billion from one company seems in the ballpark for a country that wants to go from 5 to 80 fast (that’s mobile SIMs/100). All good. But why is the thinking fixated on operators who will do everything? They want the operators to build and operate telecenters; provide mobile money and aginfo services.
My respect for Huawei goes back to 2002-04 when I was responsible for telecom reforms in government. They never approached me to lobby for anything. But I asked them what the per-line costs they could offer on CDMA. Their response knocked my socks off. One of the two companies that got the first blocks of spectrum for CDMA went for Huawei.
Sitting in Yangon, preparing for a regulatory training event in Nay Pi Taw, my mind went to the hoary Jipp’s Law. Even with questionable 2012 data as reported by the ITU, Myanmar had around 5 SIMs/100 end of 2012. World Bank does not report GNI per capita data for Myanmar. Is it realistic for Myanmar to reach the level of penetration Thailand achieved in 2007, starting with the new investments and energy created by the 2013 licenses? Jipp suggests economic growth would have to reach the level Thailand had in 2007.
Governments, in general, are disgustingly infamous for despicable greed. They are notoriously addicted to the lust for windfall from auctioning spectrum. ČESKÝ TELEKOMUNIKA ČNÍÚŘAD or CTU, is the regulator of the Czech Republic. It stays away from the endemic of greed. Early this year, it stunned the world by aborting an auction of 800MHz, 1800MHz and 2.
It was tough to engage when reforms were not on the cards and Myanmar seemed happy to watch while the whole world got connected. Those days we wrote about China selling mobile service inside Myanmar and about cables that were cut. We also wrote about Cyclone Nargis and our small contributions to relief. But all that changed once the reform winds started blowing. I’ve been asked why so many blog posts on Myanmar.
A paper based on work Roshanthi Lucas Gunaratne and I did over the past two years is finally published in a peer-reviewed journal, info. Here is an excerpt of the abstract: Purpose – There are significant shortcomings in the current method of estimating the indicator “Proportion of internet users” by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in countries where demand-side data are unavailable. In the absence of demand-side surveys, governments calculate the proportion of internet users on the basis of the number of subscriptions and a multiplier, which leads to arbitrary values. Errors in such base indicators ripple through the system, causing significant errors in composite indicators, and should be minimised. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new evidence-based methodology, in the absence of demand-side surveys, to estimate the proportion of individuals using the internet.
In June I posted some pictures from Shanghai of payphones that had WiFi signs on them. What the Chinese have already done, the City of New York is debating. The most controversial idea seems to be converting the payphone locations (which already have power) into electrical vehicle charging stations. Sri Lanka has a minuscule number of payphones so this is not a big issue, but for Asian countries that are beginning to think about what to do, the first step should be to look at evidence on the question of whether payphones are obsolete. For the second step, with regard to certain cities in certain countries, the NYC process might have some ideas: Given the amount of red tape involved, it could be years before the phone kiosks are repurposed, if the idea is approved.
We posted that TRAI had said that 143 million Indians were connecting to the Internet over mobile networks. Only 15 million used fixed broadband. Facebook says it has 82 million MAUs in India. Even if assume 15 million come from the fixed side that means 67 million over mobile platforms. Buoyed by surging user base in emerging markets of India and Brazil, the social networking platform’s MAUs globally rose by 21% to 1.
One may argue that demographic trends have little to do with what we at LIRNEasia do. I disagree. Especially when we are talking about knowledge work, service industries and infrastructure, demography is the place to start from. From the colloquium given by Professor Indralal de Silva several years ago, we’ve been fully engaged with these issues. The story on how Germany is failing to respond to the demographic crisis has lessons for all, especially countries that are getting old before becoming rich.
Two days back a Facebook debate ensued over the newly inaugurated deep-draft Colombo South Port being described as China’s port by a friend of mine who is in politics. He had said this in an interview to a Sinhala newspaper where the embers of xenophobia are periodically fanned by various parties, but only rarely by liberal-thinking PhD economists. I was motivated to write up my side of the argument in my column in LBO.LK. Though the immediate subject was a container terminal, the issue was foreign investment.
The last few days, I’ve been preoccupied with the basics of regulation and sector reforms. This was because I was preparing for a regulation course we’re teaching in Naypitaw, Myanmar, for government officials who will form the core staff of the to-be-created ICT infrastructure regulatory agency. The teaching I do these days mostly assumes the basics, but that cannot be done in Myanmar, a country that is a green field in terms of regulation and reforms. In advocating for good regulation, one always searches for the stakeholders who will support your cause. Many moons ago, I used to believe that the licensees who were subject to the authority of the regulatory agency or the government would be the natural supporters of regulatory reform.
It is indeed possible to measure the performance of a school in terms of its efforts to provide a holistic education.