Yesterday Syria fell off the Internet. Clean cut. Then it came back. Why was it cut? Why did it come back?
The world’s largest democracy, in terms voters, now comprehensively monitors every phone call, text message, email and online activities of its citizens and indeed the visitors’. Welcome to India, where the government has built a US$74 million Central Monitoring System. This third eye of the spy outfits is claimed to be used for enforcing “reasonable security practices and procedures” within the country. But privacy and internet freedom advocates are predictably critical. Pranesh Prakash, director of policy at the Centre for Internet and Society, said: “In the absence of a strong privacy law that promotes transparency about surveillance and thus allows us to judge the utility of the surveillance, this kind of development is very worrisome.
Gyanendra’s Law states that those who pull the killswitch do not remain in power too long. Supporting this thesis, Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad has kept his hands off the killswitch for the most part, except at the start of the civil war, and today. Four physical cables connect Syria to the Internet — three under the sea, and the fourth over land through Turkey. For outsiders to cause Tuesday’s outage, security experts say, they would have had to physically cut all four cables simultaneously. That does not appear to have happened in this case, according to security experts.
Viber, the mobile OTT Young Turk, has invaded the turf of Skype with 200 million users. Taking completely opposite route of Skype, the startup has now launched Viber 3 version desktop application with video calls. It will enable video calls for mobile followed by group videoconferencing in the future to cause further bleeding of Skype. Viber has also beefed up its Android and iOS apps, while introducing support for eight new languages (reaching a total of 27), the company said in a press release. Meanwhile, Viber’s meteoric rise will further complicate the US government’s desperation to “wiretap people who communicate using the Internet rather than by traditional phone services.
We at LIRNEasia grapple with the challenge of charting the influence of our research on policy in environments where the norm is not to attribute where ideas were taken from. One solution that we have tried is that of using identifiable memes in our communication, hoping that they will reappear in policy documents. The personal slogan of a Chinese leader is pretty important, as documented by the Economist. Where did the slogan come from? Quite possibly the New York Times.
It is not only the largest mobile operator in Japan by subscribers with a 45% market share. NTT DoCoMo also carries nearly all the mobile traffic of the crooks and criminals, said the country’s National Police Agency. NTT DoCoMo’s two rivals, KDDI and Softbank, sell number of corporate connections according to the headcounts of a business entity. Softbank Mobile checks the purpose of subscription before closing deals with corporate clients. Its dealers are also obligated to verify the customer’s identity.
Bhutan Telecom is launching Long Term Evolution (LTE) service in two locations of its capital city Thimpu. Coverage of this 1800 MHz network will encompass a radius of up to 1km, promising a theoretical downlink speed of up to 40Mbps. Cellular News reports. Meanwhile, the fate of 3G in Bangladesh looks as gloomy as its political future. The regulator could not appoint a consultant for auctioning the 2.
At LIRNEasia we study and teach about regulation. In March-April we spent some effort seeking to contribute to what we saw as an effort to remedy some long-standing political failures through transparent, consultative processes set in motion by Sri Lanka’s Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka (PUCSL). Our recommendations were not accepted, but we still hope the remedy will itself survive political failure. In the aftermath of the protests and the President’s overruling of the PUCSL, several observers have suggested that the PUCSL is a redundant entity that should be wound up. I agree that it failed in this instance and that it has done grievous harm to itself and to the essential process of moving toward cost-reflective tariffs.
Policy Tracker, a Spectrum Management research and training outfit, has referred to a report of SBR Juconomy Consulting, which has studied 15 benchmark countries and detected some significant variations in the policy approaches for spectrum pricing among them. The countries this study has covered are: Germany, France, UK, Switzerland, USA, Canada, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, United Arab Emirates, and Jordan. Jörg Kittl, a co-author of the study, told Policy Tracker most countries defined the optimal and efficient usage of spectrum as the primary goal, but some emphasized other aspects such as economic and social benefits, competition or public interest. Western countries focus on maximising the optimal use of spectrum. Others, for example in Africa, the Middle East or parts of Asia, have different approaches, including maximising the value of spectrum and income for the government.
Two weeks back we cautioned about India’s diminishing role as an unavoidable stopover in Eurasian telecoms connectivity. Now India’s Reliance has joined the Bay of Bengal Gateway (BBG) consortium to build an 8,000 kilometer submarine cable system to link Singapore and Penang with Oman via India and Sri Lanka. It has planned to commence carrying commercial traffic by end of 2014. Other members of the consortium are: Telekom Malaysia, Vodafone, Omantel, Etisalat and Dialog Axiata. It is lot more than just another submarine cable.
The pilot project being implemented by the UK regulator should yield useful learnings for all who want to make better use of spectrum. Ofcom is inviting the industry to take part in the pilot, which is scheduled for the third quarter of 2013. Locations will be chosen once the trial participants are on-board. It also noted that following a successful completion of the programme, “Ofcom anticipates that the technology could be fully rolled out during 2014, enabling the use of white space devices across the country”. Issues to be explored include the interoperation of white space devices, white space databases, and the processes to mitigate against interference to current spectrum users.
The Economist talks about how New York and Chicago are using different approaches to the analyze big data generated from within their operations. Sadly, no such activity can be reported from our part of the world. Many cities around the country find themselves in a similar position: they are accumulating data faster than they know what to do with. One approach is to give them to the public. For example, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago are or soon will be sharing the grades that health inspectors give to restaurants with an online restaurant directory.
We have not written much about MOOCs so far on this blog, but have been following developments avidly. As LIRNEasia’s work in capacity building begins to take up more of our time, we need to think about how we can effectively mobilize ICTs in our work. The report that we highlight here seems to point the way forward. Ms. Junn hoped that blending M.
A study, jointly conducted by Financial Times and Informa, reveals WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage have overtaken the text message substituting SMS. It said the OTT messaging will be more than double to 41 billion per day this year, which will be more than twice the number of text messages to be sent. It will impact more than $120 billion text message business in 2013, said Financial Times. This had “a significant impact on mobile operators’ traffic and revenues in some countries, including Spain, the Netherlands and South Korea”. For example, text revenues in Spain have fallen from €1.
I recall a Sinhala poem from my time at Peradeniya University. It asked who had actually built Sigiriya and the great irrigation works: The kings who routinely get the credit or the unnamed many who did the actual building? The telecom reforms in Sri Lanka are now seen as an unqualified success. The reforms did not just happen. Courageous decision making was needed.
With long experience in neighboring Bangladesh, where they may have well discovered the Budget Telecom Network model, Telenor appears to be pulling out all the stops in its Myanmar campaign. Telenor plans to sell SIM cards for free—or with a minimal charge of about 20 kyat (US$0.02)—and offer its phone service by a pay-per-minute plan. The company also plans to make communications accessible by establishing a high volume of points of sales throughout the country. “We never want a customer to be living more than a few hundred meters from a retailer,” Brekke said.