Does not compute | Economist.com “PROLIXITY is not alien to us in India,” admits Amartya Sen in his essay “The Argumentative Indian”. “We do like to speak.” He supports his contention with quotations from India’s classical texts, but it is also borne out by India’s phone habits. The average owner of a mobile handset spends 471 minutes (almost eight hours) on the phone each month, and sends 39 text messages.
Was the title of a talk I gave to the Colombo West Rotary Club today. Was reinvited after 9 years. Then we had less than 300,000 phones in the country. Now close to 9 million. Doing better; but can do much better.
Strange is the day I come out in support of taxes; and today is very strange. But please read this in context: we wish the 10% tax had not been imposed on mobiles; but there was absolutely no reason to tax mobile while exempting fixed; that is why I support the extension of the tax to fixed CDMA. But for some reason the government seems to have difficulty in doing anything right the first time. Why, for God’s sake protect fixed wireline? These are most privileged people in the country.
Not everyone is convinced that Indian telecom market is developing fast. “In Beijing I see everybody having a mobile in hand, male or female, old or young and rich or poor..”. says one Chinese participant at WWRF, “…I do not see Indians using mobiles like that” (He is surprised to learn in South Asia not every user owns a mobile phone!
In the great tradition of banning everything that moves, Minister Sumedha Jayasena has stated that the government is considering banning the use of mobile phones by children. Isn’t this an unjustified intrusion by government into a decision best left to parents? And doesn’t Mrs Jayasena have more important things to do, like enforce existing (and ignored) prohibitions on child labor? In a country where law and order is deteriorating, the government has no business trying to take away the right of parents to be in touch with their children. Ethalaya බාලවයස්කරුවන්ට සෙලියුලර් තහනම් වේද ?
At Wireless World Research Forum meeting currently held in Chennai, there were two presentations on Mesh Networking. While Chanuka Wattegama of LIRNEasia spoke about the Sri Lankan experience, Sharad Jaiswal of Bell Labs, India presented a similar initiative in Bangalore. There were many similarities between the two on the approach. VillageNet, the Bangalore initiative, is a low cost IEEE 802.11 WiFi based mesh network designed for connecting villages in rural India, providing low-cost broadband Internet access for wide regions.
Paper titled: Challenges of Optimizing Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) for SMS based GSM Devices in Last-Mile Hazard Warnings in Sri Lanka (authors N. Waidyanatha – LIRNEasia, D. Dias – University of Moratuwa, and H. Purasinghe – Microimage) was presented at the 19th Meeting of the Wireless World Research Forum (WWRF), in Chennai, India, 5-7 November, 2007. The paper was discussed in Working Group 1 – Human Perspective and Service Concepts (WG1).
The Colloquium that was a follow-on from the discussion held in Kandalama regarding KPIs was conducted by Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara and Shamistra Soysa. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are those that help in measuring the success of the day to day activities of an organization. This means that the KPIs would lead to KRIs. First the mission statement was reviewed, with comment on the structure to highlight the important areas. Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara noted the critical success factor that would feed into the strategies and thereby facilitate the mission statement.
Chennai, Nov 6. Perhaps not surprisingly, the messages from most of the speakers are the same at the Wireless World Research Forum, currently held here. Asian telecom markets are booming; (Where else you see one country adding 7 million new mobile customers per month?) this is the right time to take ICTs to rural and less privileges sections of the society; affordability too, not just technology is a key issue, and wireless, not wired is perhaps the sure solution that can make the transformation. More or less, that is the bottom-line emerging.
Given that Asian countries are taking the lead in mobile software applications (in Sri Lanka, already using open source), this is a very exciting development. LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE – LBO A Google-led international alliance announced Monday it is releasing open-source software that will free developers to bring the full power of desktop computing to mobile devices. The Open Handset Alliance bills “Android” as the first comprehensive mobile operating platform that software developers are free to adapt in any ways they wish for video, audio, social networking and other features. “We are developing a very open system and will distribute all the codes to allow people to innovate on mobile devices,” Google co-founder Serge Brin said in a conference call with the press and other alliance members. “I’m really excited about this and I can’t wait to see what the next generation of innovators is able to do with these tools.
Asian evidence says the best explanation for the take up of texting is the ratio of price of a voice call to cost of a text. Is this also the explanation for the UK? BBC NEWS | Technology | Britons sending 1bn texts weekly Britons are now sending more than one billion text messages per week according to the latest figures from the Mobile Data Association (MDA). The figure is 25% higher than a year ago and is set to shatter forecasts for how many text messages have been sent to and from handsets this year. That weekly total is the same as the number sent during the whole of 1999.
UNCTAD has released “Manual for the Production of Statistics on the Information Economy” which it claims to be a reference for national statistical offices and other producers of official statistics on business use of information and communications technology (ICT). The Manual provides a guide to data collection and analysis, international standards, and definitions. It also offers model questions for surveys on ICT use, and it reviews important institutional issues related to compiling ICT statistics. Download it free.
The Sri Lanka telecom regulator has taken a welcome step to consult stakeholders on a regulatory agenda. Interesting list has been generated (my top item, transparent licensing within a defined framework, is missing, but I won’t complain just yet). The test of this exercise is twofold: What will be the highest priority items and how quickly and effectively will those items be acted upon? LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE – LBO Sri Lanka’s teleco operators are pushing the industry regulator to remove technology limits and allow networks to share resources as part of a broad plan to liberalise the market further, officials said. The wish list — prepared during an industry pow-wow with the telecom watchdog last week — also includes prickly issues like allowing free incoming calls for seven million mobile phone users, re-aligning spectrum and allowing users to keep their own number when switching to rival operators.
The “Evaluating Last-Mile Hazard Information Dissemination” (HazInfo) project full-length video documentary, “The Long Last Mile”, is now available on YouTube. TVE Asia Pacific, a HazInfo partner, has also published an article on the premiere of the video in Dhaka, Bangladesh. More coverage of the Dhaka HazInfo Dissemination Workshop event on 25 October can be found at the Bangladesh Network Office for Urban Safety of BUET.
Google Phone – New York Times Mr. Rubin is one of the primary architects behind another product that also smacks of potential über-coolness — the Google Phone. As Google’s “director of mobile platforms,” Mr. Rubin oversees dozens of engineers who are developing the software at the company’s sprawling campus here. The software embodies the promise of extending Google’s reach at a time when cellphones allow consumers to increasingly untether themselves from their desktop computers, as well as the threat that greater digital mobility poses to Google’s domination of Internet search.
Excerpt from an article contributed to Montage, Sri Lanka’s only English language news magazine. LIRNEasia is starting a small research initiative on establishing benchmarks for broadband quality. Real broadband « Montage So what do we want the operators to do? When you sell us a 512 Kbps residential connection or a 2 Mbps business connection, try to give us something approaching what you promised. Most of the time.