LIRNEasia was among team of researchers under the umbrella of Data-Pop Alliance was contracted to produce a synthesis report as part of a DfID project on Big Data for climate change and disaster resilience in developing countries, meant to feed into the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit. In this context I participated in a discussion workshop in London on June 5, 2015. Also participating were researchers from Flowminder (working on big data and climate change issues in Bangladesh) and University College London (analyzing all kinds of big data, including GPS locations of fishing fleets worldwide and data from public-transport payment cards. There was much discussion about how big data research could be made more responsive to the needs of users (defined as including citizens rather than government officials) and on inclusiveness. As the only South-based research organization that had obtained data and conceptualized and executed big data research, LIRNEasia was asked to present its experience in the form of a case study on how barriers to data access could be overcome.
LIRNEasia has publicly tabled the proposal of laying fiber along the Asian Highway for universal access to broadband in CommunicAsia on June 2011. At that time we called it LION or Longest International Open-access Network. Light Reading and Total Telecom were cautiously optimistic. The then boss of ITU, who also attended the event, gave cold shoulder to our initiative. Unsurprisingly the ESCAP took us seriously.
LIRNEasia organized and moderated two panels at CommunicAsia 2015 in Singapore earlier this week. Senior Policy Fellow Abu Saeed Khan will write about the session that he moderated. I was about to write about mine, when Don Sambandaraksa, one of Asia’s best telecom journalists, did this piece for Telecompaper: Myanmar currently has three mobile operators, namely Telenor, Ooredoo, and state-owned Myanma Posts and Telecommunications (MPT), which has partnered with Japan’s KDDI. Myanmar will soon have a fourth operator, ISP Yatanarpon Teleport (YTP). Demand for mobile services in Myanmar is on the rise.
We have been, officially, persuading the deployment of terrestrial optical fiber along the Asian Highway since 2011. Our point is very simple: Asian countries, unlike the ones in Europe, are interlinked exclusively through submarine cables. Deployment and maintenance of undersea networks keep Asia’s bandwidth manifolds pricier than Europe’s. As a result, the consumers of developing Asia cannot afford broadband. TeleGeography’s global bandwidth prices at major market places have been central to our argument for a pan-Asian cross-border fiber network.
According to the Deputy Minister of Telecommunications in Myanmar, U Thaung Tin, the Government is working on a new spectrum allocation policy. An important aspect of a county’s broadcasting sector, streamlining the nation’s spectrum allocation is bound to be well received by anyone who is engaged in broadcasting. The Ministry is hoping to make the relevant policy document available “soon”. Myanmar currently has three mobile operators; Telenor, Ooredoo and MPT while they will soon have a forth – YTP. Myanmar shows a high demand for mobile services.
I was at a CommunicAsia session on 5G thinking about the meaning of generations of mobile technologies. I had just read this piece, and was thinking how interesting it is that Telenor is planning to shut down 3G before 2G. Confirms the centrality of machine-to-machine (M2M) communication in everyone’s thinking about the future of wireless. Telenor Norway’s CTO, Magnus Zetterberg, said the company plans to completely shut down its 3G network in 2020, five years before it closes 2G in 2025. Speaking at the company’s analyst and investor day, Zetterberg talked up the company’s evolution of 4G, established in Norway in 2012, which now accounts for 60 per cent of all mobile data traffic in the country.
I was recently asked to justify my claim that the big data debate should not be reduced to a “competition of imaginations” between hype and pessimism. The future is unknowable, so we have little alternative but to use our imaginations to discuss the future. We can extrapolate from what is known which is better than pure scenarios, but even this is not perfect. What happened yesterday need not happen tomorrow and what happened in one country under specfic conditions may not be replicated in other circumstances.inning But that is still better than scenario spinning.
Nalaka Gunawardene in his column published in Ravaya on 31 May 2015 looks at the current status, benefits and challenges of Sri Lanka’s Information Technology supported Business Process Outsourcing (IT-BPO) industry. The column touches on the challenges faced by the industry and mentions the observations made by LIRNEasia Founding Chair, Prof Rohan Samarajiva at a recent panel discussion on ICT innovation and awareness organised by the Business Times Sri Lanka, where Prof Samarajiva commented on problem areas that should be a priority for Sri Lanka such as slow broadband speeds and too-high latency times. The column also touches on the need to enable PayPal payment systems and highlights the potential of the industry to create high-end jobs for skilled professionals in Sri Lanka. The full column can be read here.
LIRNEasia’s ongoing big data research was recently presented at the 13th International Conference on Social Implications of Computers in Developing Countries held in Negombo from May 20-22. LIRNEasia researcher Danaja Maldeniya presented preliminary work on transport forecasting using mobile network big data under the conference track ICT4D Sri Lanka : Challenges, Opportunities and Solutions. |paper|presentation slides|
WSIS is the is the UN’s annual gathering of ICT for Development stakeholders. The main organisers are ITU, UNESCO, UNDP and UNCTAD, though there is significant participation from other agencies such as UNDESA, FAO, UNEP, WHO, UN Women, WIPO, WFP, ILO, WMO, UN, ITC, UPU, UNODC, UNICEF and UN Regional Commission . The 2015 WSIS Forum, held in Geneva 25-29 May, was special in that this was the place where WISIS met the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the successor to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Most of the sessions at this year’s WSIS Was organised around specific SDGs that the nations of the world are considering unto at the end of this year. LIRNEasia CEO Helani Galpaya was invited by UNCTAD to participate and give input on how c7.
Freelancing provides a reliable source of income with flexibility to the self-employed, those who are not part of a large organisation or for a person unable to work full time. This also provide a platform for unemployed youths and married women with small children to make an earning and thereby increasing inclusive growth. Payoneer, a financial services business that provides online money transfer and e-commerce payment services recently conducted a study among freelancers within 180 countries. Objective was to determine the average hourly rates charged by freelancers based on several factors. Payoneer’s Survey results were collected from the responses of 23,006 freelancers worldwide through an online questionnaire during November and December 2014.
Samarajiva, R., Lokanathan, S., Madhawa, K., Kriendler, G., & Maldeniya, D.
Ooredoo Myanmar has received two international awards for its MayMay app, recognizing their innovative approach to helping ensure that vital maternal, child health and wellness information is available to women, particularly during and after pregnancy. The app bridges the mobile and health sectors to help ensure that a wealth of useful information is readily available to women across the country both during and after pregnancy. Says Ross Cormack, CEO of Ooredoo Myanmar “MayMay’ is a great example of how our team develops innovative, home-grown solutions that speak to real issues affecting people in Myanmar today.” Today ‘MayMay’ has more than 11,000 users, emphasizing the growing demand for the service. It is free and can be accessed on iOS and Android.
Multiple authors; truly multi-disciplinary; published in the center of gravity of our work. I am excited, even though it is still behind a paywall at the Economic and Political Weekly: There is a middle path that positions the citizens who are the ultimate beneficiaries of urban development as the primary sensors. Instead of seeing the city as a clock-work machine that can be perfectly controlled, this approach recognizes the inherent complexity of the system and supports incremental changes, following the Deng Xiaoping dictum of “crossing the river by feeling the stones.” Experimentation and learning are integral to the approach. This low-cost approach is especially appropriate for the organically developed, congested cities in developing countries where the costs of installing and maintaining city-owned sensors would be quite high.
The United States has been at the bleeding edge of universal service policy ever since the term was misinterpreted from the early competitive era. It is therefore worth paying attention to the current FCC efforts. We will soon have US Aid and others promoting these ideas in our parts. More than 12 million households now participate in Lifeline, which was created in 1985 by the Reagan administration to subsidize landline telephone service. In 2008, the program was extended to cover the cost of mobile phones.
The poor state of Internet in the Philippines has received a significant amount of attention in the past few months. LIRNEasia research fellow Grace Mirandilla-Santos has been involved in multiple working groups, senate hearings and has had many interactions with the respective regulatory agency and ministry on how to introduce some form of quality measures. Operators are fighting back on compliance benchmarks. The regulator has requested for a final set of recommendations on the methodology to follow in setting standards for monitoring and compliance of broadband quality of service. Grace has submitted these recommendations (based on our previous work) on behalf of LIRNEasia.