The usage-based pricing model, which is used widely for billing retail customers, is hampering the growth of local content and services in India. “In contrast, a flat-rate pricing model would spur demand for broadband services and enable content providers to target the local and emerging market,” argues Ashwin Gumaste, James R. Isaac Chair at Computer Science department in the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay. His statement has hit the front page of The Hindu. It happened after his thought-provoking article – On the State and Guiding Principles of Broadband in India – got published in the current issue of IEEE Communications Magazine.
Reliance was at the presentations we made on teleuse@BOP3 results about awareness, trial and use of more-than-voice applications on mobiles. We can only speculate whether our results were used in the design of the services described by The Hindu: RCom is launching three initiatives — BharatNet plan, Grameen VAS and M2M (Machine to Machine) solutions — under its rural drive. BharatNet plan is a high-speed wireless Internet service in over 20,000 rural locations across India and will address four million PC users in rural India. A high-speed variant of the Reliance NetConnect service specifically designed for rural and sub-urban markets, it will offer speeds of about 153 Kbps, which is 4 to 8 times the current dial-up speed of wire-line services. BharatNet is being offer at Rs.
The US technology giant will debut OneApp in South Africa and hopes to swiftly roll it out in India, China and other countries where millions of people use feature phones instead of powerful smartphones. “We designed OneApp from the ground up on feature phones with very limited memory and processing capabilities,” said Amit Mital, corporate vice president of the Unlimited Potential Group and Startup Business Accelerator at Microsoft. “OneApp will be able to help people do things they couldn’t do before with their feature phone — anything from paying their bills to helping diagnose their health issues or just staying connected with friends and family.” In the heels of Apple and Google redefining the smartphone segment, Microsoft appears to be trying to transform the featurephone segment, according to LBO. OneApp is designed to work with GPRS and is therefore of greater relevance to the bottom of the pyramid.
Mobile TV has so far failed to deliver on its promise of ubiquity, but analysts expect worldwide user numbers to increase to 54 million in 2009. Industry watchers said the biggest potential will be in emerging markets. See the complete article at: http://news.bbc.co.
Singapore has devised what looks like a level playing field for its national broadband rollout – complete with competing players in different tiers. But as the first homes are connected questions are being asked about just how competitive the market will be. Alfred Siew reports in telecomTV. Robert Clark of Telecom Asia has recently also questioned IDA’s transparency in disbursing the fund for NBN.
Just recently, we heard about a m-gov application in Indian villages which uses barcode readers from Subhash Bhatnagar. The Economist has a long piece on how barcodes and mobiles interact. NEGOTIATING his way across a crowded concourse at a busy railway station, a traveller removes his phone from his pocket and, using its camera, photographs a bar code printed on a poster. He then looks at the phone to read details of the train timetable displayed there. In Japan, such conveniences are commonplace, and almost all handsets come with the bar code-reading software already loaded.
It was gratifying to see McKinsey picking up on the work that PIPU did in 2002-04 and praising the TRCSL in the regulatory chapter in GITR 2009. There is a lot more refarming to be done TRC; keep up the good work. The move toward a more technology- and service-neutral spectrum policy was mainly triggered by a desire to treat all providers equitably, the urging of mobile providers to shift to GSM technology, and the need to use CDMA as a low-cost solution for fixed wireless access in rural areas. Although the Telecommunication Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka (TRCSL) was constrained to some extent by existing allocations and defense considerations, it issued more spectrum space. The regulator also recognized the problem of scattering spectrum and attempted to streamline allocations while it cleared capacity in the 1800–1900 megahertz range.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Network Readiness Index (covering 134 countries in 2008-09), only Sri Lanka has gained any ground among the South Asian countries. India is the first within the region, ranked 54th (down from 50th in 2007-08). Sri Lanka has made considerable progress from 79th place in 2007-08 to 70th place in a straight comparison (72nd among the 2008-09 countries). Congratulations to the industry, ICTA and all who contributed to this gain. Pakistan has slipped to 95th in a straight comparison from its 89th position in 2007-08.
Reading the WEF and INSEAD Global Information Technology Report 2008-09, I was struck by the presence of several references from within the LIRNE.NET community. I would have of course preferred some mention of LIRNEasia (in the same way DIRSI had been mentioned) and or a URL, but still, nice to know our work is being read and used. It is noteworthy that the second author on the first reference below, A. Aguero, is currently with LIRNEasia completing a professional internship.
Location-based services are likely to be the next big thing in telecom. Twitter is getting its ducks in a row according to NYT. There are a bunch of possible uses for location-aware tweets. With this new feature, Twitter users — many of whom use the service from their phones while on the move — could choose to view all the tweets written by people in their city, neighborhood or building, for example. In a post on the company blog, Biz Stone, a Twitter founder, suggested that the feature would be particularly useful for people following an event like a concert or an earthquake.
Two days back SearchTelecom said Intel and Google have written off more than US$1.3 billion combined in Clearwire. The deep pockets are in deep trouble unless Clearwire goes for massive deployment. But that’s a huge challenge in this economic climate. The future of WiMAX is pretty bleak in developed countries and as a result, equipment makers aren’t likely to sustain their investments in the space, said research firm Analysys Mason today.
LIRNEasia’s T@BOP3 research findings on ownership levels of mobile phones versus radios at the BOP have been cited in both MobileActive.org and MediaShift Idea Lab. Seemingly surprising findings reveal that in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, more people own mobile phones than radios. Read the two articles here and here. MediaShift Idea Lab, 19 Aug 2009: In the United States, high-end smartphones like the iPhone and BlackBerry don’t have built-in radios.
In our work, we refer to both the OECD and ITU definitions of broadband. They are quite different, indicating this is not settled science. Now the FCC has entered the fray, asking for comments on interpreting broadband. This is what one online commentator says: Nicely put, but defining and, even more, “interpreting” broadband may be a tough call. The FCC’s Notice certainly doesn’t make it easy.
Harsha de Silva, LIRNEasia’s Lead Economist, presented a paper at the 27th IAAE conference in Beijing yesterday (19 August 2009). His paper entitled “Role of ICT in Linking Farmers to Markets a transaction costs perspective from Sri Lanka“, based on findings from LIRNEasia’s AgInfo study, was presented at a min-symposium titled, “Role of ICT in linking smallholder farmers to markets: What do we know?” I presented a paper at the 27th IAAE conference in Beijing China yesterday; 19th August. http://www.iaae2009.
What LIRNEasia tries to do with its teleuse@BOP research is to understand how and why people use ICTs at the bottom of the pyramid. We do this from the demand side. That has its advantages, but disadvantages too, such as cost, shortcomings in memory, etc. Therefore, we were thrilled to see someone else engaged in the same project, but from a different angle. Nathan Eagle, a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, believes that mobile phones offer more than a way to communicate.
SciDev, a prestigious science communication channel, has featured our cell broadcast report, the first of the Mobile 2.0 reports to be released. Texting short messages through mobile phones could help in early warning of natural disasters in the Maldives, says a new report. The technology, called cell broadcasting, helps to deliver messages simultaneously to multiple users in a specified area. “In the case of the Maldives, if an early warning is introduced, it must be able to reach all of the outlying islands including tourists on resorts.