Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was in Bangkok for the World Economic Forum. One of the questions she was asked was “what sectors she would look to promote first?” The summary of her answer was that the telecom sector is important as the need to have mobile phone for development is real and will look to support advancement in this field. She wants to target what she calls “low-hanging fruits” sectors to create jobs and bring Burmese migrant workers home. There is no doubt that telecom, especially voice and data communication over wireless platforms, is a low hanging fruit.
The Ford Foundation has made a grant to LIRNEasia for facilitating and enriching policy discourse in India on increasing broadband access by the poor. The work will cover documentation and archiving of key texts from India and elsewhere, the conduct of several short courses to improve the ability of civil society groups to participate in the policy discourse and the holding of expert fora that will bring together decision makers and stakeholders. The project commences this month and goes on for two years.
In order to establish the fact that the voice quality over currently available GSM networks are poor for converting the voice messages to text. These finds are from the Voice-enabled ICTs for Disaster Management project that field tested the use of an Interactive Voice Response system for extending emergency communications to the last-mile. Situational reports received from Community Emergency Response Team members, through their mobile phones, resulted in an Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of less than 4.0, on a scale of 1.0 – 5.
The Economist has a nice nuanced discussion on the above question, starting thus: DO DIGITAL economies grow faster than analogue ones? Rich-country leaders seem to think so. G7 and European Union governments are committed to a variety of digital stimulus packages; Australia, the biggest spender, has promised broadband investment of $33.4 billion (or 3% of GDP) to connect 90% of homes at ultra-fast speeds. “Digitisation” involves adopting technologies like wireless phones and internet access to generate, process and share information.
The New York Times has an interesting feature about 32 innovations that can change our lives. Here is the problem that requires fixing according to David Pogue, the NYT’s resident tech guru: That we’re heading for a bandwidth crunch. We’re saddling the Internet with amazing new features — movies on demand, streaming TV, Siri voice recognition, whole-house backup — but they’re starting to overwhelm the existing Internet’s capacity, especially on cellular networks. The Internet and phone companies respond by imposing monthly limits, and the F.C.
The Financial Express has carried a story, based on the public-domain comments we submitted to the Ministry of Post and Telecom. Other than calling and sending text messages, the mobile phone operators offer series of services like downloading of music, ringtone, wallpaper and many others. These are generally known as VAS and being offered as optional services. Now the government has proposed to categorise VAS as a separate suite of service and bring it under a licensingregime in Bangladesh. If implemented, the mobile operators will have to outsource all value added services and discontinue offering any in-house product.
Yesterday, the Indian Cabinet approved the National Telecom Policy, with five changes. I really would like to comment on it (and see if any of our suggested changes were incorporated) but at this point the Department of Telecom site says nothing. So all we have are news reports.
It has been a long time coming, but it appears, finally, that India will have new National Telecom Policy. Unless the hesitance to take decisions which is an after-effect of the 2G crisis, stalls the process again. LIRNEasia was among those who made comments. Among other things, we’d be interested in whether our comments had any effect. The Planning Commission has objected to provisions in the National Telecom Policy 2012 and the Unified Licensing Regime (ULR), which comes up for cabinet approval tomorrow, on the grounds that it could lead to a repeat of the 2G scam.
The acquisition of Skype by Microsoft was a big story. So was Nokia’s tie-up with Microsoft. But now comes the question of how to realize the synergies. Good piece in the NYT. Stephen Elop, the chief executive of Nokia, a maker of Windows Phones, told an audience at a recent conference that “the feedback from operators is they don’t like Skype” because its cheap and free phone calls can steal revenue from traditional phone businesses.
The short answer is that India has done quite well without extensive tariff regulation and should continue the policy of forbearance. But the students at the National Law School of India University wanted to know more, so this is what they got.
One hopes that the new law takes into account all the lessons we have learned in telecom reform in Asia in the past few decades. According to Nomura, a new telecom law, which could allow for more licenses (up to 5) and direct or indirect foreign operator participation, is currently in final stages of drafting.The telecom sector in Myanmar is likely to be on the radar for most telcos for incremental investment. Unstable politics and bottlenecks, including: 1) high handset prices ($45-600); 2) SIM registration cost of $150-200; 3) long waiting periods (up to 2 years) and connection hurdles; 4) poor networks and coverage; and 5) lack of competition have hampered growth. The government is now targeting 50 percent wireless penetration by 2015, implying a 50 percent CAGR.
Patrick Gannon (President & CEO, Board Director at OASIS), in an email, “You provide some very interesting information on the open source Sahana effort and examples of using citizen volunteers for disaster situation reporting. The issue is being highlighted in the 2012 CAP workshop FINAL REPORT.” Get more details on the voice-enabled alerting and situational reporting project from the video: “Do you hear me?” The Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) community has nick named us “CAP early adopter” (lol & \0/). This is because in 2005 when the CAP content standard was first released, LINREasia was quick to test it in the HazInfo project.
The oldest Department of Mass Communication in Sri Lanka (University of Kelaniya) is running a national conference on the future of media studies in Sri Lanka. I know this from the newspapers. I cannot provide links to any information on the event because none seems to exist, including information on the Department. However, they had invited Nalaka Gunawardene, a friend and colleague, to speak on new media. He was kind enough to share his slides with us.
The Indian Journal of Law and Technology in association with the Centre for Internet and Society (IJLT-CIS) , Bangalore is organising the 3rd IJLT-CIS Lecture Series at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. The lecture series will be spread out over the course of the year and will include eminent speakers who will talk with the students and other interested persons on their topics of expertise. Rohan Samarajiva, Chair and CEO of LIRNEasia will deliver the inaugural lecture on Tariff Regulation in South Asia. Tariff regulation has in the recent past attracted the attention of both the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India as well as the Telecom Dispute Settlement Appellate Tribunal, as well as the Department of Telecom at the Union Ministry of Communications. India has a burgeoning and competitive cellular services provider market, and tariff regulation has far-reaching impact on this industry.
How can peer review be effective when the underlying data cannot be shared? When scientists publish their research, they also make the underlying data available so the results can be verified by other scientists. At least that is how the system is supposed to work. But lately social scientists have come up against an exception that is, true to its name, huge. It is “big data,” the vast sets of information gathered by researchers at companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft from patterns of cellphone calls, text messages and Internet clicks by millions of users around the world.
One thing we know about “big data” in developing countries is that the only data stream that covers the poor is that which is generated by the mobile operators. Here is an account of an interesting application of mobile big data: There’s a vast market of consumers in countries like Brazil, China, India, and the Phillipines who want access to financial services like credit cards, loans, or insurance,” says Jonathan Hakim, Cignifi’s chief executive. “But while they may have jobs, and some have bank accounts, there really is no credit history for them.” One thing they do have? Mobile phones.