The termination of voice calls is a form of trade in services which is in many countries, including Pakistan, governed by the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). The buyer of the service is the company abroad that wishes to terminate voice calls in Pakistan. The seller is the international long distance operator in Pakistan who receives the calls and terminated them on various Pakistan telephone numbers. Under GATS, the sellers in Pakistan are free to enter into any kind of commercial arrangement with foreign operators. What cannot be done is for the government to get involved.
LIRNEasia contributed to a set of broadband quality rules that TRAI formulated in 2009. They dealt with contention ratios being maintained at certain levels and being periodically published. There is no mention of those rules in the report in the Hindu Businessline, which focuses on response times to complaints. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India proposes to collect a penalty of Rs 50,000 from operators if they violate any of the set quality norms for broadband services. The penalty will increase to Rs 1 lakh for the second violation.
We’re irregular visitors to IGF (Helani went to Rio and Hyderabad; I went to Sharm el Sheikh, . . . ). But this year is kinda exciting, with the WCIT sword hanging over the multi-stakeholder model.
We have wondered aloud about how Facebook will make money, especially from the majority of its users who are outside the US and who access it over mobile platforms. Apparently it made USD 150 million last quarter, the first in which broke out the numbers. The earnings report was the first time the company had broken out from its overall advertising revenue how much money it collects from mobile ads. The information helped to address a critical question that investors have had about how Facebook will respond to the world’s shift to mobile computing; 60 percent of all Facebook users log in from their phones. Although it is not a direct comparison, Google is poised to make far more money from mobile devices.
A new report, “Unlocking the Benefits of Cloud Computing for Emerging Economies—A Policy Overview” by Peter F. Cowhey and Michael Kleeman of the University of California San Diego, details how 60 percent of world server workloads to take place on cloud computers by 2014. It examines the critical benefits to lower and middle-income economies, in particular those of India, Mexico and South Africa, from international and domestic adoption of cloud computing. Among the key findings in the report are: The cloud enables developing world economies to be competitive with higher value added products as goods and services become more information and communications technology (ICT) intensive; The cloud bolsters South-South commerce, the fastest growing share of world trade investment; The cloud’s scalability boosts job creation by helping small to medium sized businesses reduce costs and investments; The cloud enables developing world countries’ governments to deliver core services more effectively and efficiently; and The cloud boosts network infrastructure investment in lower income economies. View the full report.
LIRNEasia has been vocal against the feudal doctrines of ITU and ETNO on dwarfing the Internet. The duo has staged a Twitter Storm on October 10. They have, predictably, failed to justify the command and control of Internet. While responding to LIRNEasia’s CEO Rohan Samarajiva, the ETNO chief Luigi Gambardella said, “We know that today Internet economic model is not sustainable” (Click on the thumbnail at left). Dennis Weller and Bill Woodcock have recently coauthored a new OECD report, “Internet Traffic Exchange: Market Developments and Policy challenges.
LIRNEasia was early in seeing mobile as the future. We had the benefit of the Teleuse@BOP surveys. We were seen as the main voice for the mobile future in ICT4D circles. We carried comments from people like Steve Jobs who saw it coming. Now the wave that we saw developing in our part of the world has reached the centers of ICT power.
Blogpost of LIRNEasia has evidently sensitized the media of Bangladesh on probing its absence in ITU’s latest ICT Development Index. It has prompted finger-pointing and passing the hot potato: According to the telecommunications ministry, Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) is responsible for sending in the information to the UN body. And as per a BTRC official, the data was sent to the UN body — but it did not meet the deadline. Such bureaucratic hide-and-seek has, however, failed to impress the industry: “Exclusion from the list would affect the promising outsourcing business of Bangladesh,” said Mahboob Zaman, a former president of Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services. He said the developed countries’ businesses consider their outsourcing destinations after getting the ICT standard or ranking of developing countries.
One more qualified bidder than number of slots is a prescription for a bidding frenzy. But then, something like this has been done before. In the UK they had one more slot than there were existing operators. The consequences of being the only 2G operator who failed to get a 3G license drove up the prices. That should do it in Bangladesh too, unless someone comes up with a clever solution.
A short film made as part of Nuwan Waidyanatha’s action research project assessing the efficacy of voice and text in disaster communication has been shortlisted for an award. TVE Asia Pacific’s short film, Do You Hear Me, is one of 11 finalists in the first Asian Film Festival on Disaster Risk Reduction which will take place in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, from 22 to 25 October 2012. The festival is part of the Fifth Asian Ministerial Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (AMCDRR), being held in the Southeast Asian city during that period. The film festival is being organized by the conference’s co-hosts, the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) and the Indonesian National Board for Disaster Management (BNBP). Do You Hear Me looks at how voice be used more efficiently in both alerting and reporting about disasters, and where computer technology make a difference in crisis management.
India’s mobile penetration is merely 26 percent and China’s is just 43 percent, says “Unique subscriber penetration” data of GSMA. The mobile industry’s trade body has also revealed that only 45 percent of the world’s population have subscribed to mobile services. It says the number of mobile subscribers globally will be 3.2 billion by Q4 2012, growing to 4 billion within the next five years. Such unpleasant findings are the results of a primary research, undertaken by the GSMA’s Wireless Intelligence team over three years and across 39 developed and developing markets.
Our research has pointed to the importance of trading platforms: The study of Cellbazaar in Bangladesh as well as the work on agriculture in the last research cycle. It appears from this NYT report that the demand for trading (and payment) platforms is most vibrant in the mobile space. John J. Donahoe, eBay’s chief executive, attributed the company’s performance in part to an early bet that mobile phones would become a platform for commerce, with PayPal providing a lead in mobile payments. “We’re the largest mobile commerce and payments provider in the world,” Mr.
In 1992, I wrote parts of a report for the National Regulatory Research Institute in the US on privacy and competitive implications for transaction-generated information (a term that has been eclipsed by the less informative “big data” in recent times). We covered all utilities, including electricity. Burns,Robert; Samarajiva, Rohan & Mukherjee, Roopali (1992) Customer information: Privacy and competitive implications, NRRI 92-11 . Columbus OH: National Regulatory Research Institute. Now, 20 years later, the issue is hot, the subject of a BBC story: The EDPS report voices concern over the “potential intrusiveness” of smart meters, which it says can track what members of a household do in the privacy of their homes.
The quotation below is from an NYT article based on British Council research that shows intra-Asian collaboration in science is highly productive. Having studied research collaborations in the ICT policy and regulation field as were starting CPRsouth, we were waiting for such collaborations to emerge organically. Seven conferences have gone, and we have yet to see intra-Asian collaboration, though we are seeing Asia-Africa collaboration. This was catalyzed by an internship offered to Rohman, and Indonesian national studying in Sweden, by our sister organization, Research ICT Africa. The quotation below refers to research on aquaculture.
VoiceICT4D project page LIRNEasia, through a stakeholder forum, advocated the Sri Lanka Disaster Management Center (DMC) to move towards a multi-agency situational-awareness platform by creating a register of alerting authorities and then sharing it’s call center and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system resources for emergency communication. The “Do you Hear Me” video, communicating the need for voice-enabled Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), to empower community-based emergency coordination, was visited by 496 viewers, of which 48 or them shared their knowledge on the subject. UNISDR debut film festival on DRR, selected our video as as one of the best three in the category of “best human interest story” Peer-reviewed scientific articles presented the realization study evidence emphasizing the practical technical instabilities and deficits in those technologies. The message was news to most researchers and practitioners. IVR-based solutions are gradually gaining momentum.
The South Asia Democratic Forum conference held on October 11, 2012 featured a talk (delivered in the form of a video) on the pernicious effects of the certain proposals before WCIT 2012. The talk is here.