Building on the previous blog post, I wrote up an op-ed on the latest developments of the Bangladesh license renewal drama that has been published in the Sunday Daily Star. What mistakes are made when incentives are not properly analyzed. More proof that the Bangladesh Ministry of Post and Telecom has a serious problem of capacity. The “market competition factor,” as presented, penalises operators with more customers. It creates a disincentive to add low-revenue customers and, indeed, an incentive to shed marginal customers.
Sometimes we can get ideas for services for the BOP from what the rich do with their smartphones and computers: The same day, my brother sent along a link for a new app (leafsnap) that allows users to identify trees by submitting photos of leaves. What a smart way to juice that nature walk, I thought. The next day I saw a Twitter message from Pierre Omidyar (@pierre), the eBay founder, in which he attached a photo and asked, “What is the name of this purple and white flower bush?” Seconds later he had his answer: lilac. Then my sister wrote to ask how she could identify the bird building a nest on her deck.
The long dragged-out drama of license renewal in Bangladesh has taken one step toward closure, according to the Daily Star. The government yesterday finalised the process of how it will charge four mobile operators — Grameen-phone, Banglalink, Robi and Citycell — for renewing their licences for the next 15 years. A high-profile meeting presided over by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina decided that the operators will pay at the rate of Tk 150 crore for per megahertz of airwave, which will be multiplied by the total allocated spectrum and a ‘market competition factor’. The meeting held at the Prime Minister’s Office also decided to give 3G (third generation) technology licences through auction. The per-MHz amount has been set arbitrarily.
Why voice for Sarvodaya’s emergency communication? The experience from the 2011 Foods in Batticaloa and Ampara districts was that Sarvodaya was able to secure aid from various sources by providing the actual ground situation through their web portal. It had images and information of rescue operations, victims, camps, and the devastation. The images and stories came from Sarvodaya head office staff who were deployed to the area. They used cameras, phones, and the internet to relay the ground situation to the Hazard Information Hub (HIH).
CPRsouth, LIRNEasia’s primary vehicle for capacity building, places great weight on the practice of “standing on the shoulders of giants,” also known as conducting literature reviews, and referring to previous work through citations. Is this an importation of an alien Western practice? Is there an alternative? Our objectives and those of Wikipedia are not the same. Still, it may be interesting to see if there is anything to be learned from the Wikimania debate.
The whole point of a public lecture is to catalyze thought and action. It’s been three months and the first evidence I saw of anything being catalyzed was the phone call I got from Bandula Mahanama, the speaker we invited from Polonnaruwa. He had some plans about reducing risks from the Minneriya reservoir and wanted me to come. He and his colleagues from six farmer organizations wanted a Colombo partner. I went with Lakshaman Bandaranayake the CEO of Vanguard Management who has been our steadfast partner on all dam-safety related projects.
The release of Thai TRE results by the principal researcher from TDRI, Dr Deunden Nikomborirak, and myself last week has resulted in significant media coverage, including this piece in the Nation (though I would have preferred a milder headline). A survey of Thailand’s telecom regulatory and policy environment (TRE) has given the country a score of only 2.7 out of five points, with implementation of interconnection singled out with a low ranking of 2.59 points. In the wake of the survey, criticism has been levelled at the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC).
Interesting piece in the Guardian on mobile more than voice. What I found most interesting was the emphasis placed by the Community Knowledge Worker on things other than communication, such as the reliable weather information and the cooperatization. To register, a farmer must provide exhaustive details about his farm, household and income, as well as the things he needs most to improve his livelihood. Many in the area still wonder why Grameen isn’t providing them with physical aid, but Simon tells me he is working to change that mindset. “Let someone give you knowledge, then you are rich.
Because of some work done on India-Sri Lanka services trade, I keep getting invited to speak on related topics, including physical connectivity between India and Sri Lanka. Not sure what good comes of these talks, but . . . Physical connectivity in the southern SAARC region.
Data centers are what cloud computing will run on. They are what we hope will be located on the southern slopes of the Himalayas, making use of the cheap hydro that is plentifully available, political circumstances permitting. But of course, less electricity use is better. Fueled by an insatiable demand for new Internet services and a shift to so-called cloud computing services that are largely hosted in commercial data centers and in the large data farms operated by companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook, there has been an increasing discussion about the growing percentage of the nation’s electricity that will be consumed by vast data centers being constructed at a record pace. But the new report indicates that electricity used by global data centers in 2010 remained relatively modest.
System of local government in Sri Lanka is long in history but short on achievements. Local authorities are the political institutions closest to people, but, except for a handful that keeps winning national awards, others fall short. While political actors take the center stage, taking credit for achievement or taking blame for failures, professionals in local government take a back stage. Driven by an emerging body of research that points to the power of networks in ICT enabled societies, we carried out a series of action research projects using the solid waste sector in local government as a case in point to induce connectivity among service provider professionals in the sector. Three new ideas for enabling knowledge networks emerged from our study.
Linking Knowledge to Innovation in Government Services: The Case of Solid Waste Services in Local Government in Sri Lanka
UN ESCAP hosted a whole week of events for the Asia Pacific business community in Bangkok last week. LIRNEasia was invited to speak on how ICTs can benefit small business. I focused on micro-enterprises of the type we see in our work, exemplified by Zayed Khan, the young grocer from Sonargoan so well profiled by our qualitative research partner CKS. There was the usual tendency to extrapolate from the personal experiences of speakers to the entirety of the Asia Pacific, but hopefully LIRNEasia’s research-based presentation provided a needed counterweight. The slides are here.
One of the principal rationales for the creation of LIRNE.NET in 2000, and then LIRNEasia in 2004, was to counter the tendency to transplant policy and regulatory thinking unchanged from the developed market economies into the developing world. But that never meant that we should ignore theoretical developments and policy/regulatory innovations just because they emerged in the developed market economies. It is my firm belief that theory is universal. But the application of abstract theory to concrete circumstances must always involve deep interrogation of local context and will almost always requires adaptation and innovation.
LIRNEasia has won the contract to establish the Pacific ICT Regulatory Resource Center, based at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji. This assignment from the World Bank will see M. Aslam Hayat, Senior Policy Fellow, relocate to Suva (actually he should land in Suva today) to establish the center as its founder director. In line with the axiom that all problems are easy if we can solve the hardest ones, LIRNEasia has been interested in the problems of regulation in micro states. This is where capacity issues are most challenging.