Myanmar is breathing on Malaysia’s neck in terms of unique mobile subscribers. Its unique mobile subscription is already ahead of Nepal, Sri Lanka and Cambodia – according to GSMA. Nielsen also advises its clients to bet on “rapid up-take of mobile technology” by Myanmar’s youngsters. Repeated outages of Internet, however, stain the country’s digital profile. Doug Madory of Dyn Research compares the situation to closing a highway at rush hour.
I can recall the astronomical ARPUs in Afghanistan (over USD 80/month) when that market was opened up. Then, after normal Afghans who were not earning expat salaries started using the service, the ARPUs came down to more normal levels. There are plenty of expats roaming the streets of Yangon, but they have no discernible impact in the fast-expanding networks of this country of 50 million plus. But the ARPUs are high. We can confirm this from the sample survey we conducted in Feb-Mar 2015.
LIRNEasia Research Fellow Grace Mirandilla Santos has been playing a leading role in getting the new rules on broadband quality approved. Here is one news report quoting her: INTERNET users in the Philippines are “paying more for less” as the actual speed of their connection has never reached the “advertised speed” by Internet service providers (ISPs), a study showed. Mary Grace Santos, a research fellow of the LIRNEasia, presented the results of their study during the hearing of the Senate committee on trade on the impact of slow and expensive Internet in the country. Santos, said LIRNEasia is a regional ICT (Information and Communications Technology) think tank policy that has been conducting quality of service testings since 2010. Read more: http://technology.
We predicted this would happen if BSNL continued to be in the driver’s seat. In what could be another blow to the broadband dreams of millions, the deadline for rolling out national optical fiber network (NOFN) across all 2.5 lakh village panchayats has been extended by two years by 2018, according to sources close to the government. “The project will be now completed by 2018, instead of 2016,” the sources said. The national Optical Fibre Network (NOFN), which will play a crucial role in government’s Digital India program, was initiated in 2011 with an aim to provide broadband connectivity to over two lakh (200,000) gram panchayats of India at a cost of Rs 20,000 crore ($4 billion).
“A hub is the central part of a wheel, rotating on or with the axle, and from which the spokes radiate.” Singapore talks about about hubs, and generally pulls off the creation of the hub, relegating others to spoke status. But this has had the unfortunate side-effect of making hub a bit of a meaningless word. And as anyone who has had spokes damaged in a bicycle wheel can testify, a hub is useless without spokes. LIRNEasia is a born-regional organization.
I was going to respond to an anti Airbnb/Uber/Lyft rant by Morazov, but other things got in the way. Apparently, some guy has done the same thing against Tinder on Vanity Fair. Farhad: I’ve got to say, though: Tinder had a point about the Vanity Fair story. Not only did it adopt a tone of high moral panic about dating apps — it compared their effects to the melting of the polar ice caps and the “Sixth Extinction” — but as New York Magazine’s Jesse Singal pointed out, the article was even factually suspect. Sociological research suggests that millennials like yourself appear to have fewer sexual partners than previous generations.
It was in January 2007 that we started CPRsouth in Manila. Now the 10th conference is coming back to East Asia, to Taipei. And as it was in Manila, there will be a strong presence from LIRNEasia. The conference program. I was the only board member then.
A noted writer on technology who was quite supportive of our stand against efforts to assert strong national controls over the Internet through resolutions approved at the WCIT 2012, tagged me on a tweet about this alarmist piece about the Sri Lanka government’s MOU with Google to test Loon over Lanka that included the para below: The real effects of this deal will be seen after Sri Lanka’s citizens have tasted universal Internet access: how can Sri Lanka’s political parties be expected to formulate and push through strict legislation on issues such as local data storage, privacy and search engine neutrality when the party that will be affected the most (Google) is the one responsible for the country’s Internet coverage? While there may be no outright arm-twisting – which is not Silicon Valley’s style – Sri Lanka’s legislators will undoubtedly think twice before coming out with legislation that would require Internet companies to retain Sri Lankan data on Sri Lankan soil; a controversial notion that has seen countries such as Brazil flip-flop in the face of intense lobbying. It’s possible that my friend did not read to the end, but simply thinking that he would outsource the response to this […]
Sujata Gamage, the Team Leader of the Human Capital Research Program has started a weekly column in the Financial Times in English and in the government newspaper, Dinamina, in Sinhala. Here is an excerpt from her first column in FT. But, how do our youth really feel about the state of affairs in their country? There is a widely held belief that this age group was instrumental in turning the tide against President Rajapaksa in the 2015 presidential election, but, we have little concrete evidence. Other countries such as UK, Australia and Malaysia carry out regular youth surveys but we don’t.
A recent write up by IDRC featured our big data work. Similarly, private telecom companies’ data on mobile phone traffic has become a crucial resource for researchers at the Sri Lanka-based think tank LIRNEasia, a long-time IDRC research partner. Using phone data that tracks traffic flows can be a low-cost means of helping governments decide where to invest in road and public transport upgrades, says LIRNEasia chair Rohan Samarajiva. Since mobile phones are ubiquitous in Sri Lanka and phone traffic data is anonymous, studies are less likely to be biased in favour of the rich, he says. “We see that a mobile phone travels down a highway at a certain speed, but whether it’s rich or poor, travelling in a car or bus or motorbike — we don’t know.
In the context of LIRNEasia’s big data work, we intend to wrestle with these issues. If we are not getting our hands dirty with the data and the stories we extract from them, I fear the conversation will be sterile. First, students should learn that design choices in algorithms embody value judgments and therefore bias the way systems operate. They should also learn that these things are subtle: For example, designing an algorithm for targeted advertising that is gender-neutral is more complicated than simply ensuring that gender is ignored. They need to understand that classification rules obtained by machine learning are not immune from bias, especially when historical data incorporates bias.
While driving a car remains forbidden for women in Saudi Arabia, its tiny neighbor puts a woman behind the wheel to drive the state-owned telco. Yes, Muna Al Hashemi has been confirmed as the new CEO of Batelco (Bahrain Telecommunications Company) on Monday. Until then she had been holding the fort as acting CEO since December 2014. The appointment makes Muna the first woman to lead a teleco in the GCC region. With a Master’s degree in Telecommunications and a BSc in Electronic Engineering, Muna began her career in Batelco in 1994.
I’ve been invited to moderate a three party discussion on live TV organized by the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, on the government SLRC channel at 10 PM today. In preparing for the task, I read through the economic proposals contained in the General Election manifestos of the JVP, the UPFA and the UNP. Given our continuing engagement with the Sri Lanka agriculture sector which started almost 10 years ago, I thought I’d use the proposals on agriculture to illustrate the approaches of the three parties. I also thought it might be useful to see if any of our ideas had percolated into the political mainstream over the past decade. Given our focus has been on the high-value fruit and vegetable segment, I will focus on that.
A4AI has published all the slidesets used at the universal service workshop, that LIRNEasia attended. The presentations are here.
In terms of research techniques, Mobile and online communities continue to dominate the methodological shift, but research clients are demanding big data insights. Themes from this year’s GRIT Report highlights the impact on research industry: speed, new platforms, and the quest for insights in a sea of data. Researchers recognize the need for speed as the businesses are moving fast. Therefore, we need to see consumers, brands, categories and markets in real-time to provide optimal guidance for competing and winning in this complex world. As new platforms, especially in the social and mobile realms with increased ubiquity, marketers and researchers must seize new opportunities and respond to the constraints of the new media and platforms.
Many of the public services that would be delivered under Digital India are those under the purview of state governments which are not necessarily under the control of, or even aligned with, the Modi government. It’s good that they are working across the lines. Congress-ruled Karnataka wants to be the flagship for the Digital India initiative. Pushed by chief minister Siddaramaiah, the state’s e-governance department is set to roll out 376 government services under the e-district programme within the next three months. This will be four times more than BJP-ruled Maharashtra’s 85 services, the highest in the country, currently.