An article written by Rohan Samarajiva on Bangladesh’s proposed universal service taxes has been published in The Daily Star, Bangladesh; an excerpt follows. Bangladesh currently has the lowest mobile prices in the world and perhaps the world’s highest mobile growth rate. Pretty good, by any measure. A universal service tax can ruin the business model that has given millions of Bangladesh citizens the opportunity to get connected to an electronic network for the first time and to use telecom services at affordable prices. Instead of solving a problem, it will create one.
The South Asian Telecom Regulators Council (SATRC) met in New Delhi 12-14 October 2008 and discussed among other things, the implementation of the SAARC Declaration commitment on reducing intra-SAARC voice telephony call charges. This is the policy memo we sent to all the SAARC regulatory agencies immediately after the SAARC Summit: Options for lowering intra-SAARC international voice telephony tariffs The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) was created in 1985 to foster regional and economic cooperation within South Asia. It has made several attempts to improve connectivity within the region by actions including the lowering of telecommunication prices among member countries, but has met with little success so far. In its most recent effort to reduce international call tariffs within the region, the Colombo Declaration of the 15th SAARC Summit (August 2008) points out in paragraph 6 that “an effective and economical regional tele-communication regime is an essential factor of connectivity, encouraging the growth of people-centric partnerships.” The Declaration stresses “the need for the Member States to endeavour to move towards a uniformly applicable low tariff, for international direct dial calls within the region.
They call it the fourth utility: Wiring for broadband Internet service in urban areas is more or less taken for granted these days, along with hydro, water and gas. “High-speed access, both in terms of speed and overall capacity, are fundamental prerequisites for certain development decisions,” said Franklin Holtforster, president and chief executive officer of Ottawa-based MHPM Project Managers Inc. “Anybody who’s got land … and is looking at it for industrial or commercial use is keen to drag fibre as close to the site as they can.” But the reality is very different in some smaller centres, where broadband availability is patchy to non-existent or businesses are still struggling with painfully slow dial-up service. “I’ve been an Internet service provider for 13 years and it boggles my mind how we have come to expect ubiquitous high-speed access everywhere we go, but it’s just not true in the rural areas,” said Tom Copeland, chairman of the Canadian Association of Internet Providers and president of Eagle.
In our work on teleuse@BOP, reports on the use of missed calls attracted a great deal of attention. It seems to be generating even more press at the MobileActive conference in South Africa: “Donner said in a phone interview with MobileActive.org: “I started writing on [missed calls], based on being an outsider. We just simply don’t use missed-calls (in the US). But if go anywhere else, particularly in the developing world, where there are pre-paid systems, and pay-as-you-go, and people really watch their minutes, you’ll see it everywhere.
A new mobile package has been launched in the United Arab Emirates which has been designed for the country’s large expat manual labourers. The new package, called ‘alo’, which means ‘hello’ in Arabic, was launched on Monday by the Permanent Committee of Labour Affairs in Dubai and mobile network, du. The alo brand is designed keeping in mind the needs of the expat labour workforce primarily from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Egypt, China who work for the construction companies and live in labour camps, a statement from du said. In order to communicate with them in their own language, ‘alo’ comes with a multilingual user guide in the SIM pack. Read more.
Dialog Mobile has proven that broadband has a massive potential in under-penetrated markets. HSPA has all of the necessary qualities – the ability to utilise existing infrastructure, low cost devices, high throughput – making broadband commercially viable even among the poorest people. But it’s not simply a matter of technology deployment, as Dialog has discovered. Charging models and the service wrap are important however operators have to create the demand by supporting entrepreneurs and content developers to ensure that people that have not used computers before want to return time and again. Get it right, and profits can be made even among the smallest markets.
“We must realize the fact that disasters threaten sustained economic growth of the society and the country.” These were the words of Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani addressing the opening ceremony of the first National Disaster Risk Management Conference. The function, reported Associated Press of Pakistan, was organized to mark the Disaster Awareness Day observed annually after the catastrophic earthquake which struck country’s northern areas in October 2005, killing 73,000 people and leaving 3.5 million homeless. On the other side of the border Congress President Sonia Gandhi has said there is a need of effective disaster management to mitigate the woes of the people in future calamities, with floods affecting several districts of Bihar and other parts of the country.
At the end of a long day at Telecoms World South Asia in Dhaka, I presented some of the preliminary results of the Broadband QoSE work being done with IIT Madras. I talked about the finding that the bottleneck in Chennai and Colombo appeared to be the international segment and that the first results from the testing done in Dhaka suggested the same applied to Bangladesh, with the ISPs using satellite (versus undersea cable) were suffering very high latencies. The CEO of a Pakistan ISP, Mr Wahaj us Siraj, said that the situation in Pakistan was very different, with plenty of capacity available on the undersea cables and low contention ratios (1:4) being used. Prices of international capacity had come down radically in recent times, he said, and now amount to only around 25 per cent of costs. I responded that we need to start testing in Pakistan soon, because this further illustrates the value of the AshokaTissa methodology, which allows the diagnosis of where problems exist which may vary from location to location.
An article entitled, ‘Teleuse at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Beyond Universal Access’, co-authored by Harsha de Silva and Ayesha Zainudeen, has been published in Telektronikk, a leading telecommunications journal, published by Telenor, Norway. Appearing in the journal’s second issue for 2008, aptly titled, ‘Emerging Markets in Telecommunications’, the article explores the extent to which “universal access” to telecommunications has been achieved in Asia, based on findings from LIRNEasia’s five-country study of the use of telecommunication services at the ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’, namely in India, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Very high levels of access, but low levels of ownership are found. The paper then looks at the potential benefits that these non-owner users are missing out on, and then goes on to look at the key barriers to ownership that are faced by them. The paper estimates that there could be close to 150 million new subscribers at the BOP in these five countries by mid-2008.
International roaming charges may be reduced by up to half throughout the Asian region if a proposal from Malaysia’s Communications Minister, Datuk Shaziman Abu Mansor is accepted by his ASEAN counterparts. “We plan to reduce the roaming charges with Singapore first. In fact, I told the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) two weeks ago to proceed with this,” he told a local newspaper. He added that the move would particularly benefit the many thousands of Malaysians who commute across the border to work in Singapore each day. The regulators in both countries are currently working on a plan to lower the roaming rates across the border.
Bangladesh government has rewarded the telecoms regulator with Tk.10 crore (Tk.100 million or $1.46 million) bonus, according to a press report. This windfall is the result of penalizing four mobile phone operators $121.
In a fullpage advertisement that will be published in the Sunday papers on October 5th, Tigo, Sri Lanka’s “third” mobile operator (not that we place that much stock in market share calculations based on numbers of active SIMs), will effectively end the unloved receiving-party-pays regime in Sri Lanka. Its tariff scheme is about the simplest I have seen in a long time: all incoming calls free; offnet outgoing 10 LKR cents a second (roughly USD 0.001); onnet outgoing 5 LKR cents a second (roughly USD 0.0005). No time periods.
Telecompk.net is carrying a multi-part interview with one of the recent and more active universal service funds in the region. Part 1 is here.
Mark Wood, who among other things coordinates the group that is working harmonizing the address space for cell broadcasts on mobiles at ITU-T, had an intensive discussion with representatives of Sri Lanka mobile operators at a meeting organized at very short notice by LIRNEasia on 2nd of October 2008. He was on his way back from a successful visit to Male to speak at a cell broadcasting workshop co-organized by LIRNEasia and the Telecom Authority of Maldives. Why is harmonization important? Coastal areas are vulnerable to rapid-onset, broad-spectrum hazards such as tsunamis and cyclones. Coastal areas also attract large numbers of tourists.
Joseph Wilson, PhD presented the findings of the TRE study in Pakistan Started with the industry outlook. The mobile sector, Mobilink licence was renewed last year from providing the service. The licence cost UDS 291 mn. The cost is the same for everyone. Paktel purchased by China mobile for USD 400 mn.