I recall a meeting within weeks of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, convened by the current President (then Prime Minister), to seek the views of intellectuals about rebuilding. The most memorable suggestion came from the late Arisen Ahubudu, who began with a reference to Madagascar once being part of Lanka and ended with a proposal to build a wall around the island, adhering to ancient Sri Lankan engineering norms. Luckily, it was not acted upon. In contrast, some bureaucrat in Japan accepted a harebrained proposal to build a wall to stop tsunamis. That collapsed in the tsunami that came with the Great Tohoku Earthquake.
Some time back I wrote about the dangers of the emergence of an International Internet Union at the behest of Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao. They’ve held a conference in London to beat it back, but apparently were missing something really important: a counter narrative. In his closing message, he said: “State-sponsored attacks are not in the interests of any country, long term… those governments that perpetrate them need to bring them under control.” He did not name names. Some private-sector delegates like Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales were less reticent.
First, you must read Steve Song’s self-described rant. He is a thought leader. Will do anyone good to read his thoughts. What follows is my response: This could be the beginning of a good brawl, so let me first thank Steve for starting the debate right, with some facts wrong and slightly in rant territory. Without these elements one would not get a lively debate.
One aspect that we tend to use frequently is advertised vs. delivered performance of broadband packages. This year LIRNEasia tested broadband packages in 10 cities across 6 countries, out of which the worst three in terms of offering far less than promised were India’s Airtel 2 Mbps packages (tested in Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore) and SLT’s 2 Mbps package tested in Colombo. When it comes to USB dongle based packages we noticed a difference in advertised speeds with most operators quoting the dongle speed or (more often than not) ‘up to’ 3.6 Mbps.
Many who engage with Communication Policy Research south (CPRsouth), our primary vehicle for capacity building, are associated with the field of communication. It is a wide, sprawling field, which has experienced significant growth in Asia in recent times. An enterprising graduate student took the trouble to poll senior scholars on what they believed to be the most important task for communication scholarship. The responses are here. My views are also included.
In Sri Lanka, the window for saving the post has probably closed. According to the latest Household Survey, a Sri Lankan household spends LKR 4/month on postal services and LKR 750/month on telecom services. You cannot build a viable business on that kind of money. There will always be a need to deliver packages (until teleporting is perfected), but this can be done by agile courier services, not the bloated government post office. Now that the US postal service is almost bankrupt, everyone is looking at Europe.
We’ve been talking about inclusive development for some time now. Here, our friend W.A. Wijewardene, defines inclusive development and distinguishes it from pro-poor actions. The Commission he refers to is the Commission on Growth and Development chaired by Micheal Spence, whose work has influenced ours in many ways.
The October 13th dissemination event has generated more coverage, this time in the Sunday Times, the leading English weekly. LIRNEasia, a think tank headquartered in Sri Lanka and representing South Asian, has teamed up with the Lanka Fruits, Vegetable Producers and Exporters Association (LFVPEA) and are jointly involved in a project to find out ways and means of obtaining more money from agriculture – and to improve the agriculture value chain to make it a win-win solution. They held an open discussion programme with expert research findings last week at the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce Auditorium and the focus at this open forum was on pineapple growing and how to assist the pineapple smallholders to overcome the hassles in producing quality consistent fruit, and to ascertain on adequate supplies to the export market.
The 2009-10 Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) is a representative sample survey based on responses from 22,000 households from all across Sri Lanka, except Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu and Mannar districts that were considered too dangerous because of uncleared mines. It is a veritable treasure trove of data on how Sri Lankans live, what the differences among the provinces are, and, when combined with data from past HIES, a source of trend data. It reports communication and recreation expenditures separately, but I decided to combine them since communication is recreation. When the different telecom related expenditures are combined, they amount to LKR 750 per month (around USD 7) and dwarf everything else. Households spend 17 times more money on telecom and Internet services than on books, newspapers and magazines.
The program we talked about few weeks back has been announced. It will spend USD 4.5 billion a year to connect 20 million Americans to broadband. In an effort to expand broadband Internet service, the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday approved an overhaul of its fund that subsidizes rural telephone service, turning it into one meant to offer broadband service to the millions of Americans who lack high-speed connections. The plan could lead to higher fees for consumers on their telephone landlines because the commission also approved changes in the complex compensation system by which telecommunications companies pay one another for completing or carrying calls on one another’s systems.
The New Zealand incumbent telco has separated itself into infrastructure and access companies, according to Telecom TV. This week it was announced that the incumbent telco will demerge so that Chorus, the firm’s fixed-line infrastructure arm, would be able to participate as an independent entity in the upcoming award of government contracts for the building of a national broadband network. It’s believed that this is the first time that an incumbent has undertaken complete separation. The new structure should mean that New Zealand avoids the ‘incumbent problem’ Australia suffered when full-scale war broke out between Telstra and the government around the role of the still vertically-integrated incumbent in the development of that country’s NBN. Shareholder approval for the complete services/infrastructure split in New Zealand was gained this week.
Senior Policy Fellow Abu Saeed Khan has been extensively quoted in an analytical piece on backhaul concerns in Asia, published in Capacity magazine. Coincidentally, this is directly connected to the post a short while back on the data tsunami. One man, however, has come up with an ambitious concept that could potentially dwarf any existing terrestrial projects and radically reduce Asia’s reliance on subsea cables. Abu Saeed Khan is senior policy fellow at the Asia-Pacific ICT policy and regulatory think tank LIRNEasia, and his clear vision is to utilise the extensive Asian Highway Network project by deploying an open access terrestrial optical mesh backbone alongside it. The Asian highway project brings together 32 countries in Asia and Europe and is assisted by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) which aims to create a highway system from Japan all the way to Turkey.
Hotels are sort of like countries with regard to broadband use. The guests have to obtain broadband connectivity from the hotel (let’s disregard the 3G option for now); residents in a country have to obtain broadband from providers licensed by the government. When quality drops, users hold the hotel accountable; in case of a country, the ISP is held accountable. In the case of hotels, the traveler can choose to not stay in the hotel where connectivity is poor. In the case of a country, one can switch ISPs, but if the constriction is in the cables linking the country to the Internet cloud, it may not make much difference.
Our agri value chain work starts from the agriculture side and hopes to end up with solutions that include ICTs is some form. This is not that easy. This fascinating article about how venture capital is focusing on ICT applications gives some excellent ideas. His firm has invested in RelayRides and other start-ups that stretch the definition of clean tech investing. They include the Climate Corporation, for extreme weather insurance; Clean Power Finance, which runs an online marketplace for financing residential solar panels; and Transphorm, which makes tools that reduce power loss when electricity is converted in data centers or industrial motors.
It was just a few weeks ago that reports said Asian markets had more or less saved the year for both Ericsson and Nokia. Yet the product launch focuses on Europe and US. Go figure. BTW, these handsets are LTE. Nokia’s chief executive, Stephen A.
Until the 1970s, it was customary to ensure seats for specific under-represented castes in the Sri Lankan Cabinet. It was only in 1989 that a non-leading caste politician got elected President. Caste-bloc voting has ceased to be a major factor in elections in at least the Western Province. These progressive changes are catching on in North India, it appears. South India is more progressive in economic and cultural terms, but caste is deeply embedded in the political practices in the South.