Harsha de Silva, LIRNEasia’s lead economist, presented a paper co-authored with Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara and Ayesha Zainudeen entitled, “Social Influence in Mobile Phone Adoption: Evidence from the Bottom of Pyramid in Emerging Asia” at an International Conference on Mobile Communication and Social Policy. The conference was held at the Centre for Mobile Communications Studies, Rutgers University, New Jersey, 9-11 October 2009. The paper is based on findings from the Teleuse@BOP3 study. A working paper is available here.
New Zealand’s Commerce Commission has won a high court battle against Telecom NZ, with the court agreeing that the operator abused its market power to deter competition. The Auckland High Court held that Telecom charged disproportionately high rates for wholesale access to its data transmission access lines during the period between 2001 and 2004. This action – which was a breach of New Zealand’s Commerce Act – prevented ISPs from offering competitive retail prices for high-speed data services. Telecom’s wholesale charges were often higher than its retail prices during this period, the court found. The court found that Telecom aimed to deny competitors access at prices that would allow them to develop their own data transmission networks.
The Vietnamese government has been uncomfortable with the exaggerated number of subscribers the industry claims. Growth rate and market share are the fundamental motivation of such misleading statistics. Last year the government said, “Enough is enough.” Lately the country’s Ministry of Information and Communications (MoIC) has revealed around half of the SIM cards recorded as customers by the operators are actually in use, according to Cellular News. There is nothing wrong about it as the usage of multiple SIM is part of life across the developing world.
Sri Lanka’s 1919 Government Information Center, serving 20 million people gets around 3000 calls a day, compared to New York City’s 311 service which is serving perhaps the same number of people but gets 50,000 calls a day. Long way to go .. . .
TPRC was the first organization set up to connect scholarly research and communication policy/regulation. CPRsouth, which is just three years old, was modeled on TPRC and EuroCPR. CPRsouth differs from its sister organizations by its explicit focus on capacity building and mentoring, tasks that are looked after by the well established universities and research institutes in North America and Europe. We were pleased that I and Alison Gillwald (who will be leading the CPRafrica initiative) were invited as guests to the 2009 TPRC conference, facilitated by Prabir Neogi, among others. Alison and I chaired sessions, at the kind invitation of Judith Mariscal who is in the leadership of DIRSI and also on the program committee of TPRC).
That is the phrase I brought back from Harvard Forum II that I attended on behalf of LIRNEasia a few weeks back. In 2003 they held Harvard Forum I (which, among the LIRNE.NET group only Alison Gillwald attended). One of the results was the funding of organizations like LIRNEasia that seek to remove policy and regulatory barriers to the use of ICTs. This time the focus was on “what next.
This comprehensive report on smart grid developments seems most pertinent as Sri Lanka recovers from another nationwide blackout caused by the inability of the state owned monopolist to manage its grid (and to restore power despite repeated attempts). Of course, smart grids are not simply about reducing blackouts; they can reduce the massive waste caused by T&D losses and also introduce time-sensitive pricing to reduce peak-load demand. LIRNEasia has its eye on the intersection of energy and ICT as future area of work. WHAT was the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century? The motor car, perhaps, or the computer?
Clearwire enjoys every bit of its WiMax extravaganza at the investors’ expense. Lately Intel and Google have written off more than $1.3 billion. Clearwire hasn’t blinked. It used to pitch WiMax as a mobile substitute of DSL.
The profitability and surveillance potential of the state telecom monopoly has not been missed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, described by many as the pseudogovernment of Iran: The nearly $8 billion acquisition by a company affiliated with the elite force has amplified concerns in Iran over what some call the rise of a pseudogovernment, prompting members of Parliament to begin an investigation into the deal. Full story. In other countries, similar arrangements are emerging. In Sri Lanka, it is alleged that no-name companies with interesting connections have entered into joint ventures with the incumbent teleco on highly favorable terms.
The ICT arm of Sri Lanka’s largest community-based organization, Sarvodaya, launched its FarmerNet initiative last month. They have been kind enough to mention that the initiative had been triggered by a LIRNEasia presentation at a National Telecenter Alliance event. As an organization committed to catalysis, we are gratified. And we wish them well. The premise of the initiative is to create an efficient marketplace, using information technology to reduce transaction costs.
The colloquium was conducted by Tahani Iqbal, Research Fellow, LIRNEasia. Mobile number portability refers to the ability for customers to retain the same number, irrespective of the operator they choose to subscribe to. The most obvious benefit of this to customers is that it lowers switching costs. One question that arises is whether it shifts property rights to the customer – it may be still owned by the operator, but it raises an interesting debate. Other benefits to customers is that it would create a level-playing field between operators and increases competition among them.
Handsets using the open platform Android will soon be available from Verizon, according to NYT, leaving AT&T as the only US carrier not offering Android phones. A year after Google introduced its Android operating system on T-Mobile, the smallest of the major wireless carriers in the United States, it announced a deal to offer handsets with Verizon Wireless, the nation’s largest carrier. The carrier said Tuesday it expects to introduce two Android phones this year. It didn’t name the manufacturers, but one is expected to be made by Motorola. In addition, Verizon and Google said they would work together along with manufacturers to design handsets specifically for Verizon’s network.
We could not view this webpage, receive emails or use mobile phone unless Charles Kuen Kao invented the optical fiber 40 years ago. This British-American citizen of Chinese ancestry shares this year’s half of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Prof Kao, 75, was born in Shanghai in 1933 and moved to Hong Kong with his family in 1948. He went on to England to study engineering and work at STL – then the UK research centre of ITT, the US telecoms company – where he made his ground-breaking discovery in 1966. By 1971 scientists at the Corning Glass Works in the USA, a glass manufacturer with over 100 years experience, produced a 1 kilometer long optical fiber using chemical processes.
The Sunday Leader (Sri Lanka) had the story excerpted below tucked away in the business pages. It contains several lessons for public policy that will be discussed below. They include the importance of interrogating data to make sure that your conclusions make sense and of course the ever present problem of incentives. Some 1.2 million cellular phones were imported illegally into the country last year, causing a loss in government revenue, the B.
South Korea leads the world in providing broadband services, according to a study released last week. The United States did not make the top 10. The study, sponsored by Cisco, examined 66 countries and 240 cities. Broadband leadership was measured by various factors, including the number of wired households, where South Korea scored 97%. Hong Kong, which was rated number three in overall broadband leadership, had an even higher penetration, at 99%.
Broadband Quality of Service Experience (QoSE) has been an area of research interest to LIRNEasia since December 2007. In the process of our research, the software application, AT-Tester was developed as a testing tool in order to monitor broadband QoSE. It is available for free downloading. Users can test the quality of their connectivity and upload the results to server for viewing by others. The results or data uploaded are available in the public domain.