Last week I attended a day-long seminar on applying design thinking to government. I wasn’t fully convinced that this was truly novel. But there is no doubt that government does not adequately research the end user of its services. A write up about the event in Mint highlights that aspect: Design thinking denotes an approach to problem-solving, with three distinct aspects. First, users are studiously followed and analysed employing ethnographic tools.
This should be of relevance to the ongoing debate on the net benefits of mobile networks for liberty. But as a German Green party politician, Malte Spitz, recently learned, we are already continually being tracked whether we volunteer to be or not. Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts. The results were astounding.
The US State Department is developing an application called “Panic Button” for the anti-government activists. A demonstrator will hit this button and the address book, call records and other information of mobile phone will be deleted when the device is confiscated. Subsequently the device will emit an “Alert Message” to inform the comrades about looming attacks. The panic button is one of the new technologies the U.S.
Auction design is hot. The Economist reports on 4G auction design in the UK: The government will want to squeeze as much revenue as it can from the sell-off, but it must also preserve competition in a consolidating industry. The recent merger of Orange and T-Mobile has left Britain with four mobile-phone operators: Everything Everywhere (the imperious name for the newly merged company), Vodafone, O2 and Three. That is a healthy number compared with some countries, such as America, where AT&T’s proposed acquisition of T-Mobile USA would create what some regard as, in effect, a duopoly. But Three warns that it would struggle in an unrestrained bidding war with its larger rivals for the new spectrum.
I was asked about charging different amounts for spectrum when I was in Dhaka recently and I said it was like pricing jet fuel differently for competing airlines; it did not make any sense. Now we have the full argument laid out. It’s very peculiar. On what basis was this utilization factor calculated? I asked Dr Harsha de Silva who prepared the comments on the consultation paper; he said it was fully opaque.
We thought up the idea of crowdsourcing broadband QoSE, but could not make it work because the AT Tester was too complicated. In the US, they came with the idea two years later but made it work. Now someone has added value to that product. Given many governments in the region (e.g.
Evidence from LIRNEasia’s Teleuse@BOP3 survey of mobile use at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) suggests that by late 2008, 78 percent of BOP mobile owners in the study countries were using the functions of the Internet through their mobiles; nearly one third of them have never even heard of the Internet. For the last three years, LIRNEasia has been arguing the case that many people in developing markets will have (if they already haven’t had) their first “Internet experience” through a mobile. Most of our 2008-2010 research program was based on this premise. It seems that the general discourse in the mobile research field is converging on this point, as evidence of growing mobile Internet use in these markets emerges. In addition to this, LIRNEasia’s argument (which in fact CEO & Chair Rohan Samarajiva has been making from as early as 1999: written up in Samarajiva, R.
Japan’s Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry said that 11,400 mobile base stations and 880,000 fixed lines went out of service in the northern region. Progress in restoring mobile communications has been faster than fixed communications. It is presumed to be due to the operators’ prioritization. Because the fixed lines have been vulnerable to frequent power cuts. Therefore, the VoIP terminals and broadband modems get impaired.
We work with data, so we see the evidence: more people have phones, more houses have permanent roofs, more homes have refrigerators, and so on. Yet, the everyday conversations harp on the failures. We too talk about them, because we must, but we do so in the form of “what could have been better” rather than failure. Charles Kenny, an economist whose work we have been following for some time, has written a new book called Getting Better, dealing with this problem. Here is an excerpt from the review: Among the seven major regions into which the World Bank divides the planet, life expectancy has grown more since 1980 in the Middle East and North Africa than anywhere else (12.
I have been writing about the lessons that can and should be learned from the Japanese experience with the devastating local tsunami which in addition to its normal destruction, also triggered the failure of the nuclear stations. Those writings were intended for general Asian audiences, rather than any particular country. In the slideset here, I focus on one country, the one that I know best, my own.
Some people ask me about 3G. Is this the ISDN [I Still Don’t kNow] of our time? But I tell them that new, new stuff gives zing to an operator. That Mobitel in Sri Lanka got a lot of energy from 3G, even on the 2G side. Now comes more concrete support: If not for the i Phone, T Mobile would not have been sold, say some.
My response to incessant complaints in the region about profits disappearing and investment drying up because of excessive licensing has been to say that liberal and transparent market entry policies must be accompanied by clearly stated exit policies that are consistently enforced. I have also pointed out that in many South Asian markets the levels of competition, as measured by the HHI, are relatively higher than in the US and that what applies in S Asian markets does not necessarily apply in N American markets and vice versa. In this light, it is worth tracking what happens to the AT&T acquisition of T Mobile. AT&T customers, though, could benefit in one notable area: service. Both AT&T and T-Mobile operate on the same technology, known as GSM, so the combination should provide better coverage.
At LIRNEasia we consider every disaster, however tragic, an opportunity to learn. Among the disasters we have analyzed are the 2010 evacuation orders in Sri Lanka, the reaction to the Bengkulu earthquake and ensuing tsunami alert in 2007, and even the Cyclone that devastated Burma/Myanamar. Here is our contribution to the analysis of the Great Tohoku Earthquake and the ensuing local tsunami and teletsunami. It has been published in multiple places. The excerpt below is from Asian Sentinel.
The US wireless industry is at the cross-road. Spectrum is becoming dearer as the smart devices are flooding the market. It’s multiplying the consumers voracious appetite for bandwidth by manifolds. This phenomenon is pushing the small and medium telcos to acquire more airwaves. But there is none left.
Ovum said that broadband access is now as important as other essential utilities such as gas, water, and electricity. In developed countries, fixed broadband is available in the majority of homes and penetration is above 60% of households in many markets. However, mobile broadband usage is growing rapidly in both developed and emerging markets. Will the future of broadband see the convergence of broadband-based fixed and mobile services? Or will mobile broadband substitute for fixed services?
Europe’s model of auctioning spectrum has failed to generate competition. It helps big players to become bigger and marginalizes the small ones simultaneously. The market also remains out of bound for the new entrants. As a result the Consumers appear to be in danger of losing out because the largest operators are using their superior financial and political clout to shut newcomers out of the bidding process and out of the mobile market. Limiting competition is likely to have the effect of increasing the cost of mobile Internet services, slowing the adoption of its use and realization of the European Commission’s ambitious goal of providing broadband service with ultrafast, 30 megabit-per-second download speeds to every European household by 2020.