We’ve been writing about spectrum sharing on and off. There is mention that sharing will be encouraged in the Indian National Telecom Policy 2012. Indications were that actions to implement the policy were underway. But it has come up against the need to raise more money from auctions. I came up against this problem in Bangladesh early this year.
Nathan Eagle is well known for his big data work in the Kibera slum in Kenya and elsewhere. Now it looks like he has monetized his knowledge to the tune of USD 15 million. On Monday, the Publicis Groupe, one of the world’s largest advertising holding companies, will announce a $15 million investment in Jana. The investment is the first by the company in a mobile technology start-up. As part of the investment, Maurice Lévy, the chief executive of Publicis, which is based in Paris, will join the board of directors at Jana.
The title of an article in The Diplomat is “Has Snowden killed Internet freedom?” Whatever one thinks of Mr. Snowden’s actions or motives, one of his most lasting legacies in ousting these programs is likely to be severely setting back the cause of Internet freedom in the international community. Although the U.S.
If most people will access the Internet over mobile platforms, those in our countries must actually start using mobile broadband. Turkey seems to have some lessons. Turkey has been one of the main mobile broadband growth engines in the region and all three operators in the country benefitted from significant data revenue growth in the year to Q1 2013. Turkcell has been particularly active in marketing data services, with its own-branded range of low-priced smartphones (the “T” series) contributing to a smartphone penetration of 22% at the end of Q1 – some 6.9 million devices.
The ethic of reciprocity is perhaps the most fundamental principle governing human interaction. I once studied this in some depth for the purpose of teaching interconnection of all things. My favorite was Rabbi Hillel’s formulation: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn it.”—Talmud, Shabbat 31a, the “Great Principle” So now, Russia wants the ethic of reciprocity applied to the metadata, the collection of which President Obama said was no problem at all.
The 90 day period for finalizing the licenses is still not over, but information has been released on the planned pricing structures (this is unusual, since normal practice is to keep it secret until the day the products are launched). But then we should not expect normal from Myanmar. Norway-based Telenor said it will charge 25 kyat ($0.03) per minute for calls, while Qatar’s Ooredoo will put the price at 35 kyat ($0.04) per minute for on-net calls and 45 kyat ($0.
Under anti-trust law, the US government cracked down on booksellers forming a united front against Apple to keep their prices high (or according their lights, reasonable). Seems simple enough. But here’s what some people say its implications are: “We’re at a moment when cultural power is passing to new gatekeepers,” said Joe Esposito, a publishing consultant. “Heaven forbid that we should have the government telling our entrepreneurs what to do, but there is a social policy issue here. We don’t want the companies to become a black hole that absorbs all light except their own.
It’s very difficult to measure the true value of the Internet. It’s not that one Internet search is equal to another in value. Information obtained from the Internet does not always lead to good or bad outcomes, by itself. It is combined with other inputs. And so on.
I know one thing about predictions: they are wrong. But we use them. They have their uses. Does the VNI have a good use? You can decide.
It’s been a few weeks since this presentation, developed on the basis of work Tahani Iqbal did while she was at LIRNEasia. It had one piece missing, the importance of timing. This was pointed out by my colleague M. Aslam Hayat. If MNP is introduced when a new and hungry entrant comes into the market, it could make a difference.
Last week, Informa conducted its first Asian Telecom Regulatory Affairs conference in Singapore. As part of the event, I was asked to offer a half-day workshop on broadband. Since the issues are dramatically different in emerging and developed markets, my content focused on the former, drawing from LIRNEasia research over the years. The audience was small, but high quality. There are a couple of things I will change in the slideset as a result of the conversations in Singapore.
LIRNEasia uses Facebook as another window to its web content that is located primarily on the blog. Since the blog is searchable, it has never been a problem for us that Facebook search sucks. But that is not the case for people who use Facebook as their primary web interface. Now, Facebook is trying to make it easier to find that lost photo or restaurant recommendation and unearth other information buried within your social network with a tool it calls Graph Search. On Monday, the company will roll out the feature to its several hundred million users in the United States and to others who use the American English version of the site.
Now that the two mobile licenses have been issued, all eyes are on the new Telecom Law, expected to be enacted any time. The version I looked at, supposedly worked with assistance from the ITU Bangkok Office, was so bad that it was withdrawn. It appears the subsequent version is not too good: The Sections 15 and 16 of the proposed bill says the license holders must abide by the rules, regulations, orders and directives issued by the Ministry of Information and its related departments. And the Section 32 stipulates that license holders must provide services in conformity with the price rates approved by the department. According to Section 38 said the license holders are not allowed to share market, buy telecommunication appliances from unapproved suppliers or go against a certain opponent in an improper way.
LIRNEasia Research Manager, Shazna Zuhyle was recently invited to speak about the realities of the virtual world by her alma mater, Methodist College. The talk was for students and the Parent Teacher Association separately. She was also invited to a round table discussion among a few heads of schools and more recently to address the students of Ladies College. The effects of social media have affected the schools to some extent with stolen identities and altered images being used in the public domain. This has also raised privacy issues.
I’ve had a running argument with my friends M. Aslam Hayat (one of the creators of the Fund) and Parvez Iftikhar (first CEO of the Fund) about whether it’s possible to have an effective, efficient universal service fund. My position has been that that such a thing can function for a few years, if well designed and with political commitments, but that it’s a matter of time before they go bad. As we used to say when we were designing Sri Lanka’s fund in 2003, when the cheese is out, the rats are inevitable. I have pointed to the successes of the Pakistan Fund in its early years in many of my talks, but I have always qualified the claims being made of its behalf.
President Obama makes a distinction between the contents of phone calls and the information generated by the call (he calls it meta data, we used to call it transaction-generated data, and now it falls within the scope of big data), here is the analogy that is governing his thinking: Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images. Together, the two programs show that postal mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to telephone calls and e-mail. The mail covers program, used to monitor Mr.