VRISHTI BENIWAL | The Financial Express India NEW DELHI, MAR 23:  Over 200 billion telephone users and 7 million subscriber addition a month may paint a rosy picture, but the telecom boom is yet to ring loud in rural India. Believe it or not, 82% people at the bottom of pyramid (BoP) in India use someone else’s phone. Only 9% people in India use their own mobile phones and an equal percentage use their household fixed line phone, according to a yet-to-be-released study ‘Teleuse on a Shoestring’ by a Sri Lanka-based non-profit research organisation LIRNEasia. [Note: This study, Teleuse@BOP was released in Singapore on 28 February 2007.] Read full article | See print article
On March 22nd, LIRNEasia was invited to present the Teleuse@BOP findings to the staff of the Indian USO Fund and interested members of the Telecom Commission.   It was a great honor to share our findings with this knowledgeable audience, knowing that they make the decisions regarding disbursement of the world’s second largest universal service fund. While the slides that were used are by no means the sum total of the findings from the survey, they are the broadest slice of data presented so far.  The discussion ranged from interpretation of the survey findings to whether or not broadband access should be subsidized, a question triggered by the rather shocking findings about the use and knowledge of the Internet at the BOP in India. The presentation slides can be downloaded here.
Dhaka, March 23 (bdnews24.com) — Grameen Bank’s Muhammad Yunus stunned the world by unveiling a poverty alleviation initiative using mobile phone on March 26, 1997. He buys bulk minutes from Grameenphone’s GSM mobile network and resells among the microcredit borrowers in Bangladesh. The industry now recognises such business model as Mobile Virtual Network Operator or MVNO. Yunus and Grameen shared the Nobel Peace Price in 2006.
Based on feedback received from participants at CPRsouth in Manila and the WDR Expert Forum in Singapore on the Telecom Regulatory Environment (TRE) assessment conducted in six countries in South and South-East Asia in 2006 (India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand) we have decided to refine the methodology. Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara and Shamistra Soysa, new additions to LIRNEasia‘s team in Colombo present the preliminary results from the adjusted methodology.
CDMA net additions in India dropped to their lowest level for nine months in February 2007, as Reliance Infocomm took its foot off the gas after four successive months of net additions over 1 million. In total a net 1.14 million new CDMA customers were added to the national customer base in India in February, which equates to just 23% of the GSM total of 4.88 million for the month. Given that February has only 28 days, however, the totals are not strictly comparable with other months of the year.
LIRNEasia conducted a media workshop to present findings from the Teleuse@BOP project in Singapore on Feb 28, 2007. Teleuse@BOP (Shoestrings 2) is a large sample study undertaken by LIRNEasia on how low-income groups benefit from telecom and how the access pattern differs in five Asian countries, namely India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Philippines and Thailand. The research looks at the use and ownership of telephones, what kinds of phones people use and why, the perceived benefits, expenditure on telephones and the barriers to telecom use in the five countries. The study, Teleuse@BOP, is the second study of this nature that LIRNEasia has conducted. It has brought out several interesting findings, which would provide valuable insights into the telecom user space in these Asian countries.
At the invitation of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), LIRNEasia’s teleuse@BOP research of relevance to the question of increasing services provided to users in rural areas was presented at a session chaired by Mr Shantanu Consul, Administrator of India’s USO Fund.   In response to audience questions Executive Director Samarajiva stated that the higher-than-other-countries percentage of non-owner teleusers at the Bottom of the Pyramid in India showed that there was a real problem these people faced in getting connected.   They could afford USD 5 per month for the services (and in some cases paid even more), but the difficulty was with the cost of getting connected (and coverage, of course). The presentation can be downloaded here.
Thailand’s Information and Communications Technology minister says he wants to fully restore the state-enterprise status of TOT and CAT Telecom to allow better use of their assets to serve the public.”These two companies can become the country’s backbone. Unfortunately, they were turned into private companies. I’ll try to bring their state-enterprise status back,” ICT minister Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom said at a forum. Read more.
Malaysian regulator has ignored the claims of incumbent fixed and mobile operators and instead has elected to award four WiMax franchises to players new to the market. The decision to exclude existing operators was a setback for Digi. The company also failed to gain 3G spectrum and is now a saddled with an EDGE network that it will have to promote against potential HSDPA and WiMax alternatives. Read more. 
In the old days, telecom operators gouged each other’s customers through excessive termination charges (settlements) for international calls.   That went the way of the dodo with bypass and calling cards.   Then they came up with the idea of gouging the customers of other operators foolish enough to use roaming facilities.   Now the EU is trying to tamp it down, at least for its own citizens: “The price of using a mobile phone in another EU country could be capped at 50 cents ($0.66; 34p) a minute.
Report on the 11th LIRNE.NET Executive Training Course on Regulation, 25 February – 3 March 2007, conducted by LIRNEasia and CONNECTasia Forum Pte.Ltd.
LIRNEasia in partnership with Sarvodaya, is organizing the concluding events of “Evaluating Last-Mile Hazard Information Dissemination Research Project” in Moratuwa, Sri Lanka on 28-29 March 2007.  This “Last-Mile” project reflects Sarvodaya and LIRNEasia’s shared objective of evaluating the suitability of information communication technology (ICT) in the last mile of a national disaster warning system for Sri Lanka and possible extension to other developing countries. A major part of the concluding events is the forum entitled, “Sharing knowledge on disaster warning, with a focus on community-based last-mile warning systems”, which will be held on 28-29 March 2007 at the Sarvodaya Damsak Mandiraya (Sarvodaya Main Campus) in Moratuwa. The conference intends to bring together knowledge from the South Asia Region to Sarvodaya for a forum on practical solutions for communicating risk information to rural communities. The events also include a Media Conference on 30 March 2007.
Our colleague who was a member of the six-country research study, Deunden Nikomborirak, has been appointed secretary to the new Minister of Finance in the interim Thai government.   The news coverage of the appointment of the new Minister also mentions Deunden as one of his other pro-market colleagues.  The new Minister, for example, had criticized the government’s December 2006 actions that led to capital flight. We wish her the very best in her new responsibilities.   Knowing her abilities and intellect, we are confident that Thailand will be well served, even if the research community loses in the short term.
Most Indonesians access the Internet primarily using fixed wireline infrastructure, mostly dialup. Because of lack of competition in the fixed line sector due to various reasons fixed line growth has been stagnant which has also affected Internet growth in the country. Not only are no new lines being added to bring more homes online, the inadequate backbone infrastructure in large swathe of the country makes deployment of broadband services unviable even if incumbent’s local loop bottleneck could be bypassed. However, yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (March 15, 2007) seems to suggest that high speed 3G wireless technology like HSDPA can bring broadband on a large scale to Indonesians. It (misleadingly) implies that since HSDPA is merely a software upgrade to 3G networks it will not require any new major telecom infrastructure investment in Indonesia.
The Indonesian government imposed unreasonable burdens on the new entrant for international service in a recently issued White Paper 140. LIRNEasia highlighted the unfairness of burdening new entrants with obligations that the two existing incumbents (Telkom & Indosat) were not subjected too in comments it submitted to DGPOSTEL (one of the two regulatory bodies): 4.4 The Indonesian policymakers may have misunderstood the concept of asymmetric regulation. Asymmetric rules place additional burdens on dominant group of providers that other operators are not subjected to. In the current White Paper, many additional burdens are imposed on the new entrant that are not imposed on the two incumbents, PT Telkom & PT Indosat.
Rohan Samarajiva’s presentation slides presented at a CFA seminar on ‘Emerging Trends in Telecom’ in August 2006 are now available here.