Yury Sokolov is the vice-president of Rusatom Overseas, a state-owned Russian nuclear energy outfit. Bangladesh has planned for a nuclear reactor to produce commercial power with Rusatom’s help. Mr. Sokolov underscores the development of skilled manpower, management system and relevant laws prior to building the reactor. His emphasize on building proper infrastructure is striking.
Vodafone and China Mobile were an odd couple. Now the story has become curiouser. Lack of regulatory certainty has caused them to withdraw from Myanmar. Vodafone said it had withdrawn after seeing the final licence conditions, which were published on 20 May, because “the opportunity does not meet the strict internal investment criteria to which both Vodafone and China Mobile adhere”. A spokeswoman for Vodafone added that among the British company’s concerns were that a promised telecommunications bill overhauling regulation of the sector is now not due to be enacted before Burma finalises its choice of foreign mobile operator on 27 June.
In my recent visit to Colombia to assess the ICT sector for the OECD, I found that the Office of the Controlaria (Auditor General) was playing an increasingly central role in telecom policy, second-guessing decisions by policy makers and regulators years after the fact, for example requiring a Mayor responsible for the decision by a municipally owned telco to introduce ISDN many years back to compensate the municipality out of his personal funds for the resulting losses. The broader issues of government ownership raised by this story are discussed in detail in my LBO.LK Choices column. The Indian Comptroller and Auditor General was involved in telecom regulation from the 1990s, for example claiming that TRAI under the leadership of Justice Sodhi was negligent in not optimizing government revenues through BSNL. It played a decisive role in the 2G scandal that has been dragging down the Indian telecom industry for the past 2-3 years by making an inflated assessment of the losses caused.
Last year, I wrote about how the ubiquity of mobiles had helped a Bangladeshi doctor improve vaccination rates and win a Gates Foundation Prize. Here is another story about how the ubiquity of mobiles is helping improve government service delivery in Lahore, Pakistan. Even among the poorest fifth of households, 80% now use phones, so the technology can reach almost everyone. Illiteracy is a problem, but the chief minister’s call alerts a recipient to get help, if needed, with reading the text message when it arrives. It contains a specific question: did the police respond, as required, within 15 minutes of your emergency call?
LIRNEasia works on infrastructure policy and regulation. It also has expertise in disaster risk reduction. That means that we have a natural interest in critical infrastructure issues. This is an area I had published in, even before LIRNEasia came into being. The subject was on assigning responsibility for risk reduction by regulators.
Several Sinhala newspapers and webpapers have reported that the government will henceforth give priority to delivering e gov services over mobile interfaces. I assume the English media will pick up this story in due course. This is good news for a country where mobiles are ubiquitous, but conventional desktop computer use is not. We at LIRNEasia have been hammering home the message that mobile must be given priority based on our Teleuse@BOP survey research since 2005. Specifically, this was a key message in the 2011 and 2012 Future Gov conferences in Colombo.
Data centers are simultaneously the factories and warehouses of Internet. A study of Cushman & Wakefield, Hurleypalmerflatt and Source8 has ranked Indonesia, India and Brazil as the riskiest countries to open a data center. That strikes out two out of the four BRIC countries from being the home of Internet. Their risks are mostly related to physical, economic and social issues. Other factors however such as high energy costs, poor international internet bandwidth and protectionist legislation are also risks that need to be taken into account.
It seems to be the high time to compare the state of telecoms between North Korea and Cuba. Cuba’s average salary is US$20 a month and it costs $4.5 per hour to surf the net, which is also heavily filtered – said a report of BBC. It means, the Cuban net users burn 25% of their average national wage in an hour. Cuba has activated her first submarine cable early this year, according to Renesys.
The Orascom owned mobile operator in North Korea has issued its two millionth SIM. Naguib Sawiris, Executive Chairman of OTMT, commented saying: “When we first acquired the license in North Korea, people thought the service will only be provided to a few privileged individuals. We are very proud today to witness our subscriber base in North Korea increasing at a growing rate, emphasizing the right of the North Korean citizens in DPRK to communicate.” It is worth noting that through recent decisions of the North Korean government restrictions on availing internet connections through mobile phones for foreign visitors have been reduced, allowing Koryolink to also offer some data services through its network.
People ask me where cell broadcasting has been implemented. I’ve said Netherlands. But it actually had been implemented quietly in the US two years ago. The ad campaign to publicize it is being run only now. “Many people do not realize that they carry a potentially life-saving tool with them in their pockets or purses every day,” said W.
Earlier we highlighted how India is learning mobile banking from Kenya. Recently the Economist said, “Paying for a taxi ride using your mobile phone is easier in Nairobi than it is in New York, thanks to Kenya’s world-leading mobile-money system, M-PESA.” This world-leading mobile-money system of Kenya is a great example of unintended consequence. It had several factors in its favour, including the exceptionally high cost of sending money by other methods; the dominant market position of Safaricom; the regulator’s initial decision to allow the scheme to proceed on an experimental basis, without formal approval; a clear and effective marketing campaign (“Send money home”); an efficient system to move cash around behind the scenes; and, most intriguingly, the post-election violence in the country in early 2008. M-PESA was used to transfer money to people trapped in Nairobi’s slums at the time, and some Kenyans regarded M-PESA as a safer place to store their money than the banks, which were entangled in ethnic disputes.
NTT Docomo has shrunk its shareholding, from 30% to 8%, in Robi Axiata – the third largest operator by subscriber in Bangladesh. The Japanese heavyweight has unleashed its fury at the regulatory malfunctions and questioned the government’s credibility. Press release of Robi Axiata on NTT’s exit is the most caustic one in Bangladesh’s telecoms history. The Docomo decision comes in the face of what it cites as an unfriendly regulatory environment and business uncertainties. The telecommunications industry is at a critical juncture in Bangladesh with many issues pending between the regulators and the government agencies, notably related to VAT rebate on 2G and 3G license and 2G licensing rules, which have not been addressed even in the recent circulars of the National Board of Revenue (NBR).
MapBox has released its JavaScript code for the public to use in visualizing the recent Moore tornado impact. Simply slide your mouse over the area in the map below. Exerpt from mapbox blog – “Thanks to open aerial imagery provided by the U.S. Government and our MapBox.
“In a recent article on BBC Future, Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Internet Law at Harvard University, promotes the need for a network that works independently of the ones owned and controlled by the network operators and only in an emergency – something called a mesh network.” – FULL STORY
The UAE boasts of Burj Khalifa (Arabic: برج خليفة, “Khalifa tower”), the world’s tallest building, at Dubai. Now it has decided to be the very first country in Europe, Middle East and Africa in terms of futuristic mobile broadband rollout by combining 700Mhz and 800Mhz spectrum bands. The country’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) has decided to bundle the 800 MHz band plan with the lower duplexer (2 X 30 MHz) – as a baseline – of the Asia Pacific (APT) 700 MHz band. It will revolutionize affordable network deployment and benefit wider population with mobile broadband connectivity. Deputy Director General of TRA Majed Al Mesmar explains: By maximising the spectrum for mobile broadband in harmony with the growing economies of scale for both bands, the TRA decision will enable nearly global interoperability and roaming.
Cyclone Nargis still haunts Myanmar. With a wall of wave as high as 16 feet at 135 miles per hour, the sea had unleashed its fury across the Irrawaddy Delta on May 2, 2008. Nearly 140,000 lives were perished and 2.4 million displaced people lost everything. It destroyed 450,000 homes, damaged 350,000 others, flooded 600,000 hectares of agricultural land and ruined 60% of farming implements.