New Delhi, (PTI): Cellular operators in the country have asked the Government to go slow on devising regulations on Mobile TV, saying that the technology is “nascent” and the customer behaviour still uncertain. “This is a nascent business and therefore, no decision should be taken which will restrict the development of the market or foreclose technological options,” the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) has told the telecom and broadcast regulator TRAI. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) had last month issued a consultation paper for the stakeholders on issues relating to mobile television. “Various technology solutions are being tested in the global marketplace. It is also important to recognise that customer behaviour and demands are also evolving,” the operators said.
Our friend and colleague from TVEAP, Nalaka Gunawardene, writes from Geneva: Message to aid workers: Go mobile — or get lost! « Moving Images, Moving People! It might be that aid workers are all frustrated computer geeks…because all their talk was about collaborative and networking software, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the use of really high resolution (read: oh-so-sexy) satellite imagery, and the latest analytical tools — all requiring high levels of skill and personal computers with loads of processing power. But no mobile phones! This was too much to let pass, so I raised the question: did you guys even consider this near ubiquitous, mass scale technology and its applications in crisis and disaster situations?
Foreign telecom investors, who hold significant stake in India telecom companies, are exploring the possibility of joining hands and initiating an arbitration proceeding against the government of India and department of telecom (DoT) in foreign courts against the new telecom policy. The move comes as some of the foreign investors say the that the new policy announced last week, which allows dual technology “favoured only CDMA players, especially, Reliance Communications”. Besides, the new policy has also enhanced subscriber-linked criterion for spectrum allocation by multiple times – this implies, operators such as Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Idea Cellular cannot get additional spectrum in their existing circles unless they increase their subscriber base between two-six times, a process that will take anywhere between 18-48 months. This has also led to the pending applications of all GSM players being disqualified. The new norms, if implemented, will hit the expansion plans of all telcos and also lead to a heavy increase in the capex for the next couple of years.
The Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board (BTTB) Thursday announced cut in call tariffs, line rent, and transfer fees for the board’s land phones effective from November 1, said a telephone board release on Thursday. The nationwide dialling charge has been halved to Tk 1.5 a minute on 30-second pulses; peak and off-peak hour billing has been withdrawn. The new system has also withdrawn the distance factor for call charges. Calls between upazilas of a district will now be treated as local calls.
India’s finance minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said Monday in Washington, “Regulation must stay one step ahead of innovation”. He said the developed countries’ financial authorities are not keeping up with the new and complex financial market instruments that lay behind recent credit market turmoil. “Thanks to the present crisis which originated in the advanced economies … I think developed economies will listen more to the developing economies’ point of view,” Chidambaram remarked. “In the name of innovation, regulators or governments in the advanced economies have fallen behind the curve.” The time has come for the developed world to attend to its own problems, and stop lecturing emerging economies about what is right and what is wrong, he said.
The article below (issued to mark International Day for Natural Disaster Reduction, 11 days late) says that the manner in which warning are communicated “typically disadvantage women.” The “evidence” or illustration used to support this broad claim is strained, to say the least. Our experience with the HazInfo project in Sri Lanka was quite the opposite. It will be interesting to see what others think. OneWorld South Asia Home / News:Opinion & Comment – Disaster lessons from the past Early warning systems are critical to reducing the impact of floods, droughts, hurricanes, tsunamis and other disasters.
Rural BPO at Mahavilachchiya received wide publicity yesterday, with several local newspapers prominently highlighting the to-be-success story like Sunday Times did below in a first page half page article, and a finance editorial. BPO in the Anuradhapura backwoods IT rumble in the jungle What puzzles us is why some of these articles (Not the Sunday Times story) referred to the venture as a ‘corporate responsibility’ (an euphemism for ‘charity’) of John Keels Holdings (JKH), a top business conglomerate in Sri Lanka. When Indian Tobacco Company (ITC) launched e-Choupal chain in India, nobody branded it ‘corporate responsibility’. It was an online window for its rural suppliers of first tobacco and later other agricultural/aquaculture produce like soya, coffee, and prawns, to interact directly with the company. It was part of ITC business and definitely not charity.
Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) will auction licenses to operate two interconnection exchanges (ICX) and three International Gateway (IGW) facilities on November 22. Outbound PSTN and mobile calls will first terminate in the ICX. Then the calls will be processed in the IGW followed by getting routed to overseas via BTTB’s submarine cable station. Similar path will be followed for the inbound overseas calls. Foreign investments and joint ventures are strictly prohibited.
It is high time that Asian spectrum managers started thinking about more efficient use this valuable resource. In Search of Wireless Wiggle Room – New York Times Having missed the opportunity to include these provisions in the coming auction, the F.C.C. will have another chance this year to create cheaper wireless broadband services.
Preparing for the Worst | Bangkok Post Saddam Hossain grew up in Bangladesh listening to stories about storms and cyclones. In school, he learned from textbooks about how to stay safe when a natural disaster strikes. “When there is a warning about a cyclone, we take shelter immediately with our family,” said the 14-year-old student. In disaster-prone Bangladesh, schools play an important role in educating children about natural calamities and how to keep themselves safe. They also have life-saving equipment that can be distributed to people in the communities.
U.N. Agency Gives Boost to WiMax – New York Times The United Nations telecommunications agency in Geneva gave the upstart technology called WiMax a vote of approval, providing a sizable victory for Intel and something of a defeat for competing technologies from Qualcomm and Ericsson. The International Telecommunication Union’s radio assembly agreed late Thursday to include WiMax, a wireless technology that allows Internet and other data connections across much broader areas than Wi-Fi, as part of what is called the third-generation family of mobile standards. That endorsement opens the way for many of the union’s member countries to devote a part of the public radio spectrum to WiMax, and receivers for it could be built into laptop computers, phones, music players and other portable devices.
‘Getting a Dial Tone: Telecommunications Liberalisation in Malaysia and the Philippines’ by Lorraine Carlos Salazar, Senior Researcher at LIRNEasia and Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), was published by ISEAS this week.The book analyses the telecommunications reform process in Malaysia and the Philippines where far-reaching reforms have taken place.By looking at the institutions and actors that drove these changes, this book examines state capacity, market reform, and rent-seeking in the two countries. In doing so, the study challenges conventional depictions of the Malaysian and Philippine states. It contends that despite the weakness of the Philippine state, reform occurred through a coalition that out-manoeuvred vested interests.
Mobile phones are about to become the simplest and quickest way to transfer money across borders, under a deal announced yesterday by Western Union and GSM Association, the main mobile phone operators’ body. The agreement could have a big impact on global cross-border remittances, worth an estimated $500bn a year, and provide a springboard for mobile carriers and Western Union to offer other mobile banking services using “mobile wallet” technology. Cross-border money transfers valued at up to $100 in countries such as India, the Philippines, Mexico and China – which have large volumes of remittances from migrant workers – will be an early priority of the deal. Thirty-five mobile operators with 800m customers in more than 100 countries have signed up to take part in the GSMA Mobile Money Transfer pilot scheme led by Sunil Mittal, managing director of Bharti Airtel. Other participants include MTN, Orange, Orascom, Smart, Telenor and VimpelCom.
BBC News | Mobile phone use backed on planes Passengers could soon be using their mobile phones on planes flying through European airspace. Plans have been developed across EU countries to introduce technology which permits mobile calls without risk of interference with aircraft systems. Regulators around Europe are calling for consultation on the potential introduction of the technology. If given the go ahead, the service would allow calls to be made when a plane is more than 3,000 metres high. Individual airlines would need to decide if they wanted to introduce the technology, if the green light is given by national regulators.
Sri Lankan government withdrew proposed regressive tax of LKR 50 per month of its new tax proposals on mobile subscribers. LIRNEasia’s research evidence from the T@BOP study played an important role in pointing out the likely adverse effect of the proposed regressive tax on the mobile users at the “Bottom of the Pyramid”. The following are the articles/discussions on this topic. Sri Lanka plans to tax mobiles more heavily Taxing Sri Lanka’s mobile customers; Goose or eggs? Sri Lanka drops unfair mobile phone tax, slaps higher usage tax The following is an extract of the The Parliament of Sri Lanka’s Hansard on Mobile Taxation Issue on 6th September 2007.
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has issued regulation on domestic leased circuits in a bid to provide cheaper bandwidth to IT companies, BPOs and ISPs. The regulation imposes obligation on all service providers who have the capacity of copper, fibre or wireless, and who have been allowed under the licence to provide leased circuits, to share it with other service providers. For service providers, these regulations open up the possibility of meeting customers’ demand for end-to-end leased circuits, the regulator also said. Tariff ceilings for local leads and ports were also prescribed and the service providers were allowed to offer discounts on a transparent and non-discriminatory basis. Read more.