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.
Large corporations engage in acts of Corporate Social Responsibility. Non-profit organizations like ours sometimes engage in acts of Social Corporate Responsibility. SCR differs from CSR because the beneficiary here is a corporation. We recognize that large corporations can affect the course of events in countries and in some cases, the world. Therefore, when a large corporation with massive resources asked us to help educate their senior managers (especially those in charge of CSR) about key issues in telecom, we agreed.
In December 2005 Bangladesh became connected to the SEA-ME-WE 4 undersea cable, but it took much longer for the people of Bangladesh to actually use the connectivity, because the incumbent government-owned monopoly BTTB had not been able to connect the country’s networks to the landing station in Cox’s Bazar in time. I was invited to speak on this subject at a meeting in Dhaka at which the then Minister and other senior decision makers were present (they had little alternative, there was a hartal going on outside). These comments were written up as an op ed piece and published in the Daily Star that same month. In it I recommended the following: “Without lessening the urgency of reforming Bangladesh’s regulatory framework, the immediate problem can be addressed by structurally separating the cable segment (the share of the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable, the cable station, the fibre connecting the landing station to major population centers, the redundancy channels and related facilities) from BTTB, vesting its ownership in a fully government owned company. To ensure that the new company is truly separate from BTTB and that it is efficiently managed, it is necessary to concession out its management to a competent international operator […]
Maldives is a country with an estimated population of 309,575 (August 2008), 312,527 active mobile SIMs, two mobile operators, and complete cellular coverage of all inhabited atolls, including most of the internal ferry and shipping routes (only a little bit in the one and a half degree channel in not covered, and plans are afoot to give coverage there too). It was also the worst affected in terms of property loss in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami on a per capita basis. It is also one of the countries most dependent on tourism revenues. Of all the South Asian countries, it is best positioned to exploit the potential of cell broadcasting both for early warning and for commercial applications. In this light, LIRNEasia was pleased to be invited to conduct a scoping study on cell broadcasting for both public-service and commercial purposes by the Telecom Authority of the Maldives.
LIRNEasia’s Chanuka Wattegama will make the main presentation at a live webcast of a workshop on Disaster Risk Management in the Information Age, to be held from 8 – 9 October, 2008, 9 – 12 p.m. (ET), accessible at the following link: http://www.worldbank.org/edevelopment/live Co-organizers of the event include the World Bank’s Global Information Communication and Technology Department, infoDev and the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR).
He did not mean LIRNEasia specifically, but when the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) guru Richard M. Stallman (RMS) says CLOUD COMPUTING IS WORSE THAN STUPIDITY – certainly we are in. So just cannot let it pass without comments. Not that we are offended. Cloud computing is not our religion – it is just an experiment – part of our research.
The number of voice calls being made has remained steady over the past two years, but text messages sent and received have increased by a staggering 450 percent. At the end of 2007, text messaging had just overtaken voice calls 218 to 213. But by the end of the second quarter of this year, an average mobile phone subscriber placed or received 204 calls, compared with sending or receiving 357 text messages. Teens between the ages of 13 and 17 now send or receive 1,742 messages per month, compared to the second-highest age group, 18 to 24 year olds, who send and receive about 790 messages. Read the story in Wired News or New York Times.
Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate for U.S. president, mentioned broadband rollout as one of his top priorities during a debate Friday evening, bringing applause from several groups promoting universally available broadband as a key part of a turn-around in the U.S. economy.
LIRNEasia’s Executive Director, Rohan Samarajiva, is a candidate in the 2008 elections of the International Communication Association (ICA); he is being considered for a position on the Board of the ICA, representing West Asia. Visit the election page.
Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission is asking the mobile operators to pay Tk. 112 crore (US$16.23 million) for each MHz of 2G spectrum. But the mobile operators don’t want to pay that amount. “Mobile operators once enjoyed frequency benefits free in Bangladesh, but it should not be,” said Major General Manzurul Alam (rtd), chairman of BTRC told the media.
Preconference workshop at the 2009 conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) | 20-21 May 2009, Chicago, Illinois, USA | Download Call for Papers (pdf) Mobile phones are becoming increasingly important in bringing people into the Information Society. It is widely accepted that the inhabitants of the future household will carry mobile devices that will be capable of voice and data communication, information retrieval and forms of entertainment consumption. Mobiles are now (and will increasingly become) payment devices that can also send, process and receive voice, text as well as images; in the next few years they will also be capable of information-retrieval and publishing functions normally associated with the Internet. Through such services and applications, industry experts predict that many in emerging markets will experience the Internet, or ‘elements’ of the Internet for the first time through a mobile phone, rather than a PC; mobile payments, mobile social networking, SMS voting are just a few examples of some of these services and applications. Emerging markets appear to be following a different trajectory from developed markets; while the latter are moving forward via triple- and quadruple-play scenarios, the former are moving on paths that involve mobile phones as the key […]
Natasha Udu-gama has been invited to represent LIRNEasia at the Second International United Nations Platform for Space-based Information for Disaster Management and Emergency Response (UN-SPIDER) Bonn Workshop: “Disaster Management and Space Technology – Bridging the Gap” in Bonn, Germany, from the 13th to 15th October 2008. Natasha will make a presentation on, ‘Last Mile Hazard Information Dissemination’ at a session entitled, ‘Contribution of space-based technologies to existing and proposed Early Warning Systems’. This session will examine how public-private partnerships (PPP) centered on space-based technologies can enable the development, establishment and embedding of early warning systems. The event is organized by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), with the aim of providing a platform for brainstorming and in-depth discussion among decision-makers and experts from both the space technology and disaster management communities, academia and private companies. The UN-SPIDER was established as a programme of the UNOOSA, with the aim of providing universal access to all countries and relevant international and regional organizations to space-based information and services relevant to disaster management.