As part of LIRNEasia’s 5th year anniversary conference, “research -> policy -> knowledge based economies“, a photo exhibition was commissioned at the event to capture different aspects of the use of mobile phones by those at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP). The images which were sourced from Flickr from both budding as well as professional photographers (and used with their permission), showcased the varied nature of mobile connectivity and use facing the people of Asia from the BOP. An online gallery has been created to as a companion to the actual exhibition and can be viewed HERE.
Voice and Data has done a story on spectrum hoarding. Among the main sources is Payal Malik, who did the spectrum/licensing study that was part LIRNEasia’s mobile 2.0 work. According to Payal Malik, sr research fellow, LIRNEasia, “It is difficult to verify whether the spectrum is actually being hoarded, but given the way allocation has taken place, I won’t be surprised if it is. In an effort to eliminate competition, the existing players inflate subscriber numbers.
Looks like it is too much a job for an ordinary committee. The special committee will miss the special guidance of Mr. Priyantha Kariyapperuma, Director General of Telecommunication Regulatory Committee of Sri Lanka, who tendered his not so special resignation yesterday, but the regulator giving some special attention to broadband quality is good news. We reproduce the news story in today’s Daily News below. (Sorry for the scan quality.
The USF is collected at 6% in Malaysia and the government is now sitting on MYR 5 billion ($1.5 billion) cash. The government has planned to boost internet penetration to 50% by the end of 2010 from the current rate of 31.4% out of the USF. Journalist B.
It was neither a devastating earthquake nor a synchronized terrorist attack. Yet the mobile phone network in the city of Noida, a prosperous neighborhood of 700,000 inhabitants nearby New Delhi, was collapsed last Saturday. Thanks to the “dutiful” local authorities shutting down around 25% of the base stations, which were claimed to be breaking planning permits. “Electricity supply to the towers has been cut and the back-up generators have also been sealed. Only 125 cellular service providers had submitted applications requesting an extension a few months ago.
Twitter is developing technology it hopes will prevent the authoritarian governments being able to censor its users. Evan Williams, the chief executive and co-founder of Twitter, which has been credited with helping anti-government protesters in Iran to organise resistance, said software developers were working on “interesting hacks” to stop any blocking by foreign governments. “We are partially blocked in China and other places and we were in Iran as well,” he said. “The most productive way to fight that is not by trying to engage China and other governments whose very being is against what we are about. I am hopeful there are technological ways around these barriers.
The world’s fastest txters are South Koreans, followed by US and Argentina. What does this mean for the Philippines status as SMS Capital of the World? The inaugural Mobile World Cup, hosted by the South Korean cellphone maker LG Electronics, brought together two-person teams from 13 countries who had clinched their national titles by beating a total of six million contestants. Marching behind their national flags, they gathered in New York on Jan. 14 for what was billed as an international clash of dexterous digits.
The applications are developed, the hardware is ready. Who is not ready are the spectrum managers/regulators of Asia, who have barely started on refarming. Already some of Sri Lanka’s mobile data users are complaining that they cannot connect. The operators need to pay attention and so do spectrum managers. America’s advanced cellphone network is already beginning to be bogged down by smartphones that double as computers, navigation devices and e-book readers.
It is disappointing to see sirens still being promoted despite the demonstrated problems. And I think Kogami was present at the HazInfo dissemination event we held in Jakarta. Patra Rina Dewi, director of the Tsunami Alert Community (Kogami), a nongovernmental organisation working on disaster mitigation training for communities, said the knowledge people most need is whether an earthquake has the potential to become a tsunami. The current standard for this is an earthquake that occurs less than ten kilometres below the seafloor and is recorded as more than seven on the Richter scale. “But this kind of information should be translated into easy information for the people,” said Patra.
LIRNE.NET (through Research ICT Africa) together with University of Cape Town’s Infrastructure Management Programme, is organizing a five-day training course in telecom regulatory reform. The course is to be held from 12 – 16 April 2010, at the UCT GSB Breakwater Campus, V&A Waterfront in Cape Town, South Africa. The course is designed to enhance the strategic thinking of a select group of decision-makers in telecom and related sectors in developing countries and emerging economies. The aim of the programme is to address the many challenges posed by the current stage of telecom and ICT reform to governments, regulatory agencies, operators and other stakeholders.
Bangladesh exported 50 percent less manpower in 2009. Thousands of jobless workers also returned home as their employers went broke after the Wall Street collapsed. Yet inward remittance grew by 20 percent ($10.72 billion) in 2009. How could fewer workers send the highest-ever remittance?
It is nice to know that we at LIRNEasia have been ahead of the curve on Broadband QoSE, including on understanding it as more than simply download speed. Professor Gonsalves’s paper on the subject is here. The NYT today carried a story that says many of the things we have been talking about for the past two years. Tracking the speed of Internet service is becoming more and more important as everyone asks the Internet to do more than handle e-mail messages and Web pages. A few lines of text can take its time arriving, but applications sending voice calls or streaming video become unusable if there is too much delay in delivery.
Voice and Data has brought up two issues we have been pushing since 2008: intra-SAARC call prices and roaming prices. Our good friend Anand Raj Khanal, Secretary of the NTA, has said it is simply a matter between operators. Respectfully, we disagree. Lowering roaming charges in Nepal, when done by Nepal operators, benefits the customers of another country; it does not benefit Nepalese roaming in that country. If all the SAARC regulators agree on lowering roaming charges at the same time, this asymmetry goes away.
The censors among us (they do not live only in China) need to pay attention to the consequences of their actions and how it can alienate the next generation. “How am I going to live without Google?” asked Wang Yuanyuan, a 29-year-old businessman, as he left a convenience store in Beijing’s business district. China’s Communist leaders have long tried to balance their desire for a thriving Internet and the economic growth it promotes with their demands for political control. The alarm over Google among Beijing’s younger, better-educated and more Internet savvy citizens — China’s future elite — shows how wobbly that balancing act can be.
Internet censorship exists in several of the countries we work in, ranging from the Maldives to Sri Lanka. While censorship is not our focus, our readers may find this story on how Chinese Internet users tunnel through the great firewall of interest. The Great Firewall of China is hardly impregnable. Just as Mongol invaders could not be stopped by the Great Wall, Chinese citizens have found ways to circumvent the sophisticated Internet censorship systems designed to restrict them. They are using a variety of tools to evade government filters and to reach the wide-open Web that the Chinese government deems dangerous — sites like YouTube, Facebook and, if Google makes good on its threat to withdraw from China, Google.
The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami showed, among other things, the power of the Internet to raise money. Now Haiti is showing the power of the mobile to raise donations for earthquake relief. Old-fashioned television telethons can stretch on for hours. But the latest charity appeal is short enough for Twitter: “Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to @RedCross relief.” In the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, many Americans are reaching for their cellphones to make a donation via text message.