Harsha de Silva, LIRNEasia’s Lead Economist presented a few of the preliminary findings of the Teleuse@BOP (Shoestrings:2) study at CEPA’s (Centre for Poverty Analysis) Annual Symposium on Poverty Research in Sri Lanka at the JAIC Hilton on December 6 2007. The presentation turned around much of the discussion at the Forum, in line with Prahalad’s thinking, taikng a stand that the ‘poor’ should not be seen as a burden to the private sector, but more of a gold mine. The presentation was based on a paper, co-authored with Ayesha Zainudeen, which will be published by CEPA in the coming months. View presentation slides Download paper: Poverty reduction through telecom access at the ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’ – Harsha de Silva & Ayesha Zainudeen
Several weeks ago we speculated on why the Maldives, with its tiny population, needed two undersea cables. The answer is that the first cable is a collaboration between the new entrant Wataniya and India’s disruptive competitor, Reliance (through its FLAG unit). This created enormous pressure on the complacent incumbent Dhiraagu, the result being the cable to Colombo. LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE – LBO A new fibre optic undersea cable that connects Maldives to Sri Lanka will bring down international call charges from the Indian Ocean coral atoll, officials said Tuesday.Until the cable was commissioned this month, bilateral traffic of 600,000 minutes per month was routed via more expensive satellite links.
Faculty of Humanities, The University of Manchester The BWPI de Silva PhD Scholarship for Sri Lanka Award of this scholarship has been made possible by the generosity of Dr Harin de Silva (BSc Mech Eng 1982). Value of award: Total award = US$90,000 (this will be augmented through BWPI support for fees and maintenance) Criteria: This scholarship is open to Sri Lankan nationals to research poverty and poverty reduction in Sri Lanka. The award seeks to support a Sri Lankan citizen in their intellectual development and it is hoped that the successful candidate will subsequently work on poverty analysis from a Sri Lankan base and push forward the understanding of how to reduce poverty in the country.
See Job description / requirements Please submit a detailed CV, phone/email contacts of two references who can speak to relevant experience/abilities and a sample of research-related writing (less than 10 pages) to the following email: hr@lirne.net by January 7, 2007. Applications can also be mailed to Human Resources, LIRNEasia, 12 Balcombe Place, Colombo 8. Results of the screening (positive or negative) will be notified if an e-mail address is provided. LIRNEasia may make the appointment at the level of a Research Intern depending on the qualifications.
Until 2005, Sri Lanka had one undersea cable (if one did not count the aged SEA-ME-WE 2) and one operator controlling access to it. Then came SEA-ME-WE 4 and the BSNL cables. More cables, but still one operator, SLTL. Now finally, we have operator redundancy. This should be sweet music to the BPO industry.
Nov 13, 2006 By Tony Chan, Wireless Asia http://www.telecomasia.net/article.php?id_article=2622 This article raises the important question of affordability of access to services on mobile networks versus services on fixed networks (e.
Just returned from the sensory overload of the ITU Telecom World exhibition and forum in Hong Kong. One of the buzzwords/phrases floating around this year is multiple play. Triple play is passe though a few are hanging on with quadruple play. Given my recent column in LBO, my mind was on payments. Where in the multiple play talk was payments?
The Indonesian Minister for Communication and Information Technology, Dr Sofyan Djalil, presented a number of new initiatives for removing the barriers to Internet growth in his country at Building Digital Communities forum session at the ITU World 2006 event in Hong Kong on December 7, 2006. Divakar Goswami, LIRNEasia’s Director, Organizational and Projects, who was moderating the panel asked the following question: One of the first achievements of your government was to delicense the 2.4 GHz frequency that allowed communities to use Wi-Fi extensively in the country. Despite that, Indonesia currently has Internet penetration of 0.69 percent.
Rohan Samarajiva and Divakar Goswami, chaired sessions at the first Telecom World event , ITU Telecom World 2006, to be held in Asia, in Hong Kong SAR, 3-8 December 2006. This event, held once in four years, is normally held in Geneva. It was moved to Hong Kong to recognize the leading role of the Asia Pacific in the ICT sector today (see Figure 1).Samarajiva and Goswami were the only persons from Sri Lanka featured in the program of the Forum at Telecom World. Figure 1: Goswami, lead researcher on LIRNEasia’s Indonesia ICT sector and regulatory performance study, chaired a session that included keynote presentations by Dr Sofyan Djalil, the Indonesian Minister of ICTs.
India’s Department of Telecom (DoT) has mandated non-discriminatory access to international cable landing stations which are an essential facility for a host of international data and voice services. VSNL has agreed to open three landing stations to all operators on a non-discriminatory manner. LIRNEasia has been pushing for having access regimes in place for telecom infrastructure bottlenecks like cable landing stations and backbone in a number of countries we work in. Hopefully, this will be emulated in other countries in the region. DoT will also introduce resellers for international bandwidth in order to further bring down international bandwidth prices since the liberalization of the international gateway (IGW) in 2002.
Please continue discussion from Software Issues in Sri Lanka Part 5, on this thread. This thread is devoted to diverse software issues discussed in the context of Sri Lanka. Please stick to the topic and keep the discussion civil. Previous discussion is archived in the following threads: Standardizing Sinhala for IT Part 4 Standardizing Sinhala for IT Part 3 Standardizing Sinhala for IT Part 2 Questioning ICT Myths
One hour warning possible for tsunamis originating from the Sunda Trench. What we do with that one hour is the key question. People’s Daily Online — Nations progess on tsunami detection Thailand launched the first of 22 US-made tsunami-detection buoys to be positioned around the Indian Ocean as part of a regional warning system against giant waves caused by earthquakes under the sea. The satellite-linked deep-sea buoy, unveiled at a ceremony on the tsunami-hit island of Phuket, will float 1,000 kilometres offshore, roughly midway between Thailand and Sri Lanka. “This will give us the capability to provide 1 hour warning to most of the countries in the northern part of the basin,” Curtis Barret of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.
LIRNEasia regulatory website assessment has been mentioned prominently in an official Pakistan government document, The Economic Survey 2005-06 from the Ministry of Finance “Best Regulator’s Website Of Asia Pacific Region LIRNEasia is a regional ICT policy and regulation capacity building organization funded by IDRC and infoDev of World Bank. The organization evaluated 27 websites from the Asia Pacific region covering 62 economies. The website of PTA was declared as the best website among all the national websites of regulators of Asia Pacific and regional economies. The website was declared best on the basis of availability of legislative & consumer information, future plans, continuous updating, user friendliness, links to external sites and availability of information on mission statement, organizational chart, contact and online forms.”
As part of the Six Country Indicators Project, Joseph presented the interim findings from the Pakistan country study (over Skype). The study assesses Pakistan’s telecom sector and regulatory performance. It employs the common methodology and list of indicators adopted for the Six Country study.
Early warning regarding tsunamis depends on skilled interpretation of earthquake data from seismic monitors like the one at Pallekale and data from ocean based buoys that detect fast moving bodies of water. The ocean between Sri Lanka and Thailand now has one. It is up to us to make sure that the warning that get communicated from international and regional warning centers will be communciated to the affected communities promptly and that those communities will be prepared to respond properly. NOAA Provides First Tsunami Detection Buoy for the Indian Ocean: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance Following a ceremony in Phuket, Thailand, where the 2004 Boxing Day event caused the most extensive tsunami damage in Thailand, the MV SEAFDEC set sail today to deploy the buoy about mid-way between Thailand and Sri Lanka.
Here is what Telegeography has to say on the subject: Computer-based Voice over IP (VoIP) is nothing new, but Skype is the first such service to break into the mainstream, attracting millions of users worldwide. Skype had 1 million simultaneous users within six months of the release of its first version for Windows in July 2004. By the end of the third quarter of 2006, Skype had 136 million registered users, and the number of users online now regularly exceeds 8 million. These users generated about 6.6 billion minutes of traffic in the third quarter of 2006, and are on track to make over 27 billion minutes of PC-to-PC calls this year.