Per capita GDP (PPP) of Myanmar is US$1,300 and each mobile connection costs $240 only. The country has “succeeded” to raise teledensity from 1 percent in 2005 to 5.4 percent in 2011. State-owned monopoly has been the sole culprit behind such abysmal state of telecoms profile. The authorities have, however, realized their good days are nearing to an end.
I entered the policy and regulation space through an unusual door: the AT&T Divestiture Case of the early 1980s. There the evidence of consumer harm was clear to all: Lily Tomlin had seen to that. That was not the case with Google. “The way they managed to escape it is through a barrage of not only political officials but also academics aligned against doing very much in this particular case,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor of antitrust law at the University of Iowa who has worked as a paid adviser to Google in the past. “The first sign of a bad antitrust case is lack of consumer harm, and there just was not any consumer harm emerging in this very long investigation.
Asia is said to the last redoubt of belief in the Westphalian state. The Internet is fundamentally incompatible with the notion of a national state (legislature, executive and judiciary) having untrammeled authority over all that went on within its boundaries. It is therefore understandable that government officials have trouble dealing with Internet policy. But as stated by this observer of the Indian process, it appears that Indian officials have overcome these handicaps, thanks to vibrant stakeholder engagement: But a subsequent close engagement on their part with the government seems to have borne fruit. The positions that were put forward in Dubai by the Government of India in the end were far more nuanced, effectively taking into account many of the concerns that civil society and industry had put on the table.
It was President Truman who wished for a one-armed economist. One who would not qualify every statement, with “on the other hand . . . .
It is said that the late founder of Hyundai helped break the isolation of N Korea by striding across the DMZ with a herd of cattle. Google’s Executive Chair Eric Schmidt is going to N Korea. Is he taking with him promises of 21st Century cattle? And as the Internet began connecting the world — a movement South Korea embraced — North Korea reinforced its moat of security. Travelers arriving in Pyongyang are ordered to leave their cellphones at the airport and all devices are checked for satellite communications.
It’s like a country with excellent seaports but bandits rule the roads and highways. Welcome to Nigeria, which has awarded four 3G licenses in 2007. It also boasts of four submarine cables with an installed capacity of over 19.2 terabytes international bandwidth. The country was never short of hype.
Making affordable communication devices for the BOP is not a high school project. It requires strong backing from every stakeholder of the industry. GSMA’s Emerging Market Handsets (EMH) was intended to make the mobile handsets at or below $30 level. Motorola won the GSMA’s deal. My study on Stolen Handsets has captured the semiconductor industry’s involvement in scaling down the handset prices.
In a recent amendment to the Quality of Service of Broadband Service Regulations, 2006, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) states: The purpose of these regulations is to prescribe financial disincentives on the service providers for failure to meet the prescribed Quality of Service (QoS) benchmarks for Broadband Services. These regulations prescribe financial disincentive on Broadband Service providers for noncompliance with the benchmark at a rate not exceeding Rs. 50000 per parameter for the first noncompliance and Rs. 100000 per parameter for subsequent non-compliance of the benchmarks. This amendment is effective from the 1st of January 2013 and provides for a deterrent against false reporting and delay in submission of mandatory quarterly Quality of Service benchmark reports.
The Bangladesh delegation flew to WCIT 2012 without necessary homework. Members had, however, informally said they would “follow the crowd” in the conference at Dubai. And they kept their word while voting in favor of the new ITR. After coming home, the team leader is triumphant: Least developed countries like Bangladesh will be benefitted from the recent amendment to international telecom regulations, said an official. Subscribers in Bangladesh will enjoy reduced international roaming charges, better internet security, freedom from junk mails, and wider access to international communication.
LIRNEasia Research Planning Meeting for the IDRC funded “Inclusion in the Information Society” project 20th and 21st December 2012 Session 1: Introduction to the research project | Helani Galpaya | Session 2: Telecommunications in Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka Bangladesh + Sri Lanka| Roshanthi Gunaratne, Shazna Zuhyle | India| Payal Malik | Session 3: Electricity in Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka Bangladesh| Pial Islam | India|Usha Ramachandra PhD, Rajkiran Bilolikar | Sri Lanka|Nilusha Kapugama| Session 4: Frameworks, theory and comparability | Rohan Samarajiva PhD| Session 5: Government services in Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka | Subash Bhatnagar PhD | Session 6: Introduction to the Urban Micro-Entrepreneur (ME) survey |Vignesh Ilavarasan PhD, Ranjula Perera | Session 7: Big Data for Development | Sriganesh Lokanathan | Session 8: Drafting of ME research questions Session 9: Qualitative research for User Centric Design | Namrata Mehta | Session 10: Dissemination Strategy | Rohan Samarajiva |
It was seven years to this coming January that we launched our Last Mile HazInfo project, just one year after the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. It’s good to know that the project is still talked about. We are beginning work on a Tsunami + 10 initiative that will assess the impacts of post-tusnami. LIRNEasia also brought the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) to Sri Lanka. This software allows messages to be channelled through multiple media so that duplicate messages relayed through other means, such as radio or the Internet, can function as a backup in case mobile phones fail.
Many countries left the final decision on the ITRs to officials. In some case like Kenya, the officials applied their minds. In too many developing countries, it was a knee-jerk response based on maximizing national control and/or loyalty to the ITU. India is different. “ITU should only focus on telecom sector and not get into information and communication technology as they have tried to do through the Dubai convention last week,” said Subho Ray President of Internet and Mobile Association of India.
Of all the books I read in Grad School, perhaps the one I treasure the most is Exit, Voice and Loyalty (1970) by Albert Hirschman. We anchored our current project on that book. Every so often we explain the acronym HHI and Hirschman’s name comes up again. It is said that a 700 page biography will be out next year. Look forward to it.
It’s a rare government servant who does not believe that his prime directive is not that of giving all possible power to his government. Refreshing. But Dr Ndemo had indicated he would not support the inclusion of internet in the ITU regulations even before he left the country for the conference. “Why would we want to change anything? This period that ITU has not been regulating internet there have been tremendous innovations.
Now defunct PanAmSat’s corporate tagline was, “Truth and Technology Will Triumph Over Bullshit and Bureaucracy.” Its fight against the multi-government Intelsat’s monopoly in the satellite market was captured in this marketing pitch during early 90s. Mobile phone has triggered the funerals of state-owned monopolies worldwide. But it was dogged by the “Bullshit” of 3G or third generation issue. Soon it was followed by 4G and the press screamed, “ITU’s G-spot numbed by over-use.