As attention shifts to broadband quality of service experience, more tool for understanding what’s going on are becoming available. One tool Glasnost is described in the NYT: In general, the Glasnost results suggest that telecom and cable TV operators, when they do use throttling, do so mostly to suppress bandwidth hogs and ensure a reasonable experience for all of their customers. Mr. Dischinger, now a computer engineer in Innsbruck, Austria, said throttling was much more commonly used by operators of mobile phone networks, which have much less capacity than landline grids. But with operators starting to sell superfast landline broadband service for heavy data users, such as Deutsche Telekom’s high-speed fiber-to-the-home service, the competition for bandwidth — and the need for throttling — will only increase, Mr.
Having seen the ITU’s feet of clay, I decided to probe further. True enough, there was more evidence of rot in the ITU methodology. It fails the smell test. The Skills subindex places India behind Swaziland. Enough said.
Because of excellent performance on many indexes such as the AT Kearney Service Location Index, I have made a habit of checking on Vietnam’s performance on comparative rankings. True enough, the ITU’s ICT Development Index showed Vietnam advancing from 91st place to 81st place, a dramatic 10 place advance from 2008 to 2010. This prompted me to probe deeper to find out what good things were happening in Vietnam that others could emulate. Instead of finding lessons to emulate, I ended up with deep disquiet about the IDI methodology. Vietnam’s score and ranking on the Skills subindex remained unchanged (value of 5.
The ITU’s ICT Development Index has been released. The performance of most South Asian countries has increased since 2008, but not enough. The rest of Asia shows a marked contrast. Vietnam advanced 10 places in the rankings and Indonesia six. Korea retained its first place.
Helani Galpaya’s work and LIRNEasia’s research has been drawn upon for a newspaper column. The novel element we had never thought of is using Facebook as a data source: One other metric is available to anyone, just go to facebook.com/ads and create an ad. It will tell you how many people your ad can reach. For people of all ages, that number is 1,126,020.
A good value-added blogpost drawing from LIRNEasia research Helani Galpaya’s work: These are only a few graphs and download speeds are only one measure. What’s nice is that we can now quite confidently say Sri Lanka’s Internet and not be talking about a niche product. There are at least 280,000 fixed subscribers (including dial-up, ADSL and WiMax) and around 300,000 mobile broadband subscribers. There are also over 1 million HSPA/3G mobile users with active data use. This is all via Helani’s report btw.
India’s government culture is among the most open to consultation in the region. Consultation is a legal requirement for TRAI. There is no equivalent of the Administrative Procedures Act, but nevertheless the Department of Telecom has given a month for comments to be submitted on the National Telecom Policy 2011 draft. All good. The problem is the online interface through which comments have to be submitted.
Some time back I wrote about the dangers of the emergence of an International Internet Union at the behest of Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao. They’ve held a conference in London to beat it back, but apparently were missing something really important: a counter narrative. In his closing message, he said: “State-sponsored attacks are not in the interests of any country, long term… those governments that perpetrate them need to bring them under control.” He did not name names. Some private-sector delegates like Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales were less reticent.
First, you must read Steve Song’s self-described rant. He is a thought leader. Will do anyone good to read his thoughts. What follows is my response: This could be the beginning of a good brawl, so let me first thank Steve for starting the debate right, with some facts wrong and slightly in rant territory. Without these elements one would not get a lively debate.
One aspect that we tend to use frequently is advertised vs. delivered performance of broadband packages. This year LIRNEasia tested broadband packages in 10 cities across 6 countries, out of which the worst three in terms of offering far less than promised were India’s Airtel 2 Mbps packages (tested in Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore) and SLT’s 2 Mbps package tested in Colombo. When it comes to USB dongle based packages we noticed a difference in advertised speeds with most operators quoting the dongle speed or (more often than not) ‘up to’ 3.6 Mbps.
Many who engage with Communication Policy Research south (CPRsouth), our primary vehicle for capacity building, are associated with the field of communication. It is a wide, sprawling field, which has experienced significant growth in Asia in recent times. An enterprising graduate student took the trouble to poll senior scholars on what they believed to be the most important task for communication scholarship. The responses are here. My views are also included.
In Sri Lanka, the window for saving the post has probably closed. According to the latest Household Survey, a Sri Lankan household spends LKR 4/month on postal services and LKR 750/month on telecom services. You cannot build a viable business on that kind of money. There will always be a need to deliver packages (until teleporting is perfected), but this can be done by agile courier services, not the bloated government post office. Now that the US postal service is almost bankrupt, everyone is looking at Europe.
We’ve been talking about inclusive development for some time now. Here, our friend W.A. Wijewardene, defines inclusive development and distinguishes it from pro-poor actions. The Commission he refers to is the Commission on Growth and Development chaired by Micheal Spence, whose work has influenced ours in many ways.
The 2009-10 Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) is a representative sample survey based on responses from 22,000 households from all across Sri Lanka, except Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu and Mannar districts that were considered too dangerous because of uncleared mines. It is a veritable treasure trove of data on how Sri Lankans live, what the differences among the provinces are, and, when combined with data from past HIES, a source of trend data. It reports communication and recreation expenditures separately, but I decided to combine them since communication is recreation. When the different telecom related expenditures are combined, they amount to LKR 750 per month (around USD 7) and dwarf everything else. Households spend 17 times more money on telecom and Internet services than on books, newspapers and magazines.
The program we talked about few weeks back has been announced. It will spend USD 4.5 billion a year to connect 20 million Americans to broadband. In an effort to expand broadband Internet service, the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday approved an overhaul of its fund that subsidizes rural telephone service, turning it into one meant to offer broadband service to the millions of Americans who lack high-speed connections. The plan could lead to higher fees for consumers on their telephone landlines because the commission also approved changes in the complex compensation system by which telecommunications companies pay one another for completing or carrying calls on one another’s systems.
The New Zealand incumbent telco has separated itself into infrastructure and access companies, according to Telecom TV. This week it was announced that the incumbent telco will demerge so that Chorus, the firm’s fixed-line infrastructure arm, would be able to participate as an independent entity in the upcoming award of government contracts for the building of a national broadband network. It’s believed that this is the first time that an incumbent has undertaken complete separation. The new structure should mean that New Zealand avoids the ‘incumbent problem’ Australia suffered when full-scale war broke out between Telstra and the government around the role of the still vertically-integrated incumbent in the development of that country’s NBN. Shareholder approval for the complete services/infrastructure split in New Zealand was gained this week.