Few weeks back, I was in Davos, with Peter Anderson and Natasha Udu-gama. Nuwan Waidyanatha, the man who carried the HazInfo Last Mile Project on his broad shoulders was there in spirit too. We were there to tell the world about the project and learn about how early warning fits into the big picture of disaster risk reduction. And we did. Strangely enough, I learned more from one off-print lying on a table than the entire whole conference on the subject that brought me to Davos.
US trade group, 3G Americas has published a research report focusing on restrictions on the use of SMS as an emergency alert service. It says there are serious limitations in third party Emergency Alert Systems (EAS). In particular, because of the general architecture of CDMA, TDMA and GSM cellular networks, such systems will not be able to deliver a high volume of emergency messages in a short period of time. ”SMS is touted as being able to deliver critical information during disaster events, and such services have been purchased by universities and municipalities hoping to protect the general public,” stated Patrick Traynor, Ph.D.
India has been portrayed as a beehive of innovation, where engineers at Indian subsidiaries of global technology companies design sophisticated new products for global markets. The reality is quite different, as most companies do mainly product maintenance and testing, and development of small components of products in India, according to Sudin Apte, an analyst at Forrester Research, and Vinay Deshpande, a developer of the Simputer, a handheld computer designed in India. Their sentiments are shared by a range of others in IT in India. “The situation is a lot better than it was some years ago, but most Indian operations of multinational companies are still far away from defining and architecting products,” Deshpande said. Read more.
Government has released the 2008 second quarter economic performance data, which shows, again, that the telecom sector is growing the fastest, at 23.2 per cent (as against 21 per cent, 2007 Q2), followed by mining and quarrying at 19.6 per cent. In his weekly newspaper column in the Lankadeepa, Mr Udaya Gammanpila, the Chairman of the Central Environmental Authority and the main proponent of mobile-specific taxes, has posed the question to me why the mobile sector keeps growing even as they keep loading taxes on it. For example, the mobile subscriber levy of 10 percent of every bill was in effect in 2008 Q2.
The Aspen Institute has published a report entitled, ‘m-Powering India: Mobile Communications for Inclusive Growth’ co-authored by Mahesh Uppal and Richard P. Adler, which documents the discussions from the Aspen Institute India/ C & S Joint Roundtable on Communication Policy held in Kovalam, India in February, 2008. LIRNEasia’s Executive Director, Rohan Samarajiva, participated at the event, which brought together senior representatives from the telecommunications industry, government and academia. The objective of the meeting was to develop policy proposals that would contribute to the development of low-cost and high-quality telecom infrastructure needed to facilitate seamless transactions of mobile commerce. A summary of the main recommendation (as documented in the report) is given below.
The study was undertaken by Payal Malik. The liberalization was done in 2000, and there has been a large increase in the total number of subscribers. Mobile increases expediently from 2004, this is partly due to the TRAI allocating CDMA subscribers into the mobile category as opposed to fixed. Year on year growth scores show that the mobile sector is growing as well. Rohan: It is useful to get the CAGR scores for comparison as well.
Canada is woefully positioned for future internet usage and the quality of current broadband networks is barely enough to cope with current traffic because of a lack of investment by providers, according to a new study. The survey, conducted by the Oxford Said Business School in London and the Universidad de Oviedo in Spain and released Friday, found that Canada is below the global broadband quality threshold, which measures the proliferation of high-speed internet in a country, as well as the speeds available and the reliability of connections. While Japan was the only country to meet the study’s standards for future readiness, broadband networks in countries such as Latvia, Romania and Bulgaria scored better than Canada, which ranked 27th out of the 42 nations covered. The United States ranked 16th. Researchers calculated a broadband quality score, or BQS, by testing download and upload speeds in each country, as well as latency, a factor that measures how instantaneously information travels over a broadband network.
State-owned telecom operator Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) Monday said it has decided to share its network with private telecom companies for roaming agreements. The company will sign the first roaming agreement with new telecom operator Swan Telecom, a BSNL internal circular of the management committee meeting said. This facility will enable subscribers to enjoy seamless connectivity throughout the country. “The memorandum of understanding (MoU) in this regard may be signed with the seeking operators initially for six months only on non-exclusive and experimental basis,” the circular said. The circular also added that the company would revise the initial charge of 52 paise a minute for every outgoing call after six months, and the incremental additional cost of the upgrade of equipment to provide roaming facilities will be borne by the private operators.
A recently released survey indicates Japan has the best quality broadband Internet services, with Sweden and the Netherlands completing the top three. Researchers used download/upload speeds, and internet latency when compiling numbers from eight million tests completed in May 2008. Sweden and the Netherlands were able to be the top European broadband nations because of their efforts in “increasing investments in fiber and cable network upgrades, coupled with competition diversity, and supported by strong government vision and policy.” Even though it’s difficult to define quality internet, regardless of how questions were reworded, Oxford University Said Business School researchers found Japan remained on top of 41 other nations in the “Broadband Quality Score.” Latvia, Korea, Switzerland, Lithuania, Denmark, Germany and Slovenia are the nations that round out the top ten quality broadband nations, according to researchers.
I had the opportunity of chairing a panel of seven persons from various parts of Asia at the Forum at ITU Telecom Asia 2008 in Bangkok. After we got around the inane title of Manga for the masses, we had a decent discussion, focussing on the aspects of connecting the unconnected, assuring adequate quality to the connected, and content. My overview slides setting the frame are here. Contrary to expectation, the Chairman of the Bangladesh Telecom Regulatory Commission, representing perhaps one of the least connected of the countries of Asia, talked about using universal service funds to develop content. Several people referred to the counter-productive nature of universal service taxes, wherein poor people were being taxed to provide services to poor people, yet those taxes were not being utilized, wisely or otherwise.
The study was conducted by Erwin Alampay. The number of mobile subscribers rose significantly since 1998, this is due to prepaid being introduced. This made access easier to potential subscribers. Also, after 1993 the number of fixed telephone lines that were installed increased significantly and have remained constant since. The number of mobile subscribers are very low from 1991 to 1998, this could be explained by the high cost of obtaining a handset amongst other factors.
In many Third World and developing countries, the distance between people in need of healthcare and the facilities capable of providing it constitutes a major obstacle to improving health. One solution involves creating medical diagnostic applications small enough to fit into objects already in common use, such as cell phones — in effect, bringing the hospital to the patient. UCLA researchers have advanced a novel lens-free, high-throughput imaging technique for potential use in such medical diagnostics, which promise to improve global disease monitoring, especially in resource-limited settings such as in Africa. The research, which will be published in the quarterly journal Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering (CMBE) and is currently available online, outlines improvements to a technique known as LUCAS, or Lensless Ultra-wide-field Cell monitoring Array platform based on Shadow imaging. Read more.
Mobile social networking is still a small part of the way people use their cell phones, but industry officials expect that use will grow, and not just for teenagers who want to text their friends or send short video clips. Analysts and network providers said that workers will adopt mobile social networking, following the way social network sites, such as Facebook, have begun to grow within workgroups that rely on desktop computers. These experts also expect that there will be affinity groups, such as doctors, engineers, lawyers or even baseball fans, who are linked with wireless devices. Mobile social networking makes sense because mobile devices are personal and they are taken everywhere, offering the potential for transmission of quick ideas or images. Mobile social networks will (and some already do) put video, GPS, text, voice and collaboration into the palm of a user’s hand.
Telecom major Bharti Airtel on Thursday launched a Rs 200-crore (about US$ 40 million) innovation fund for promoting entrepreneurship in the telecom sector. The objective of the fund is to provide opportunities to the entrepreneurs to undertake innovation in the field of telecom with regard to content, software and technologies, Bharti Airtel Joint MD and CEO Manoj Kohli told reporters. This is the first ever telecom innovation fund in the country, he said. Source: The Economics Times
Exactly seven years from yesterday (still today to some), early in the morning on September 11, 2001, nineteen hijackers took control of four commercial airliners en route to San Francisco and Los Angeles from Boston, Newark, and Washington, D.C. The hijackers flew two of the airliners, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center. Another group of hijackers flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. A fourth flight, United Airlines Flight 93, whose ultimate target was either the United States Capitol or White House, crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Telecom major Bharti Airtel today said the company hopes to start operations in Sri Lanka within this calendar year, despite the delay in getting interconnection from the local operators there. “Discussions are going on with the Sri Lankan telecom regulator and the existing operators there relating to the interconnection issue. It should be sorted out shortly,” company’s CEO Manoj Kohli told reporters here. “We should be in a position to start our operations there before 2008. It is as per our schedule,” he said.