The language on ICTs in the 2012 Sri Lanka budget (paras 50-53) is pretty vague. Basically, LKR 500 million will be added to efforts to provide IT education and all government departments and agencies will have to work with the ICT Agency when they introduce IT into their systems. And, there are plans to set up a technology city in Hambantota that will hopefully attract IT and ITES firms there. But the really good stuff is in Para 53. The Telecommunications Regulatory Commission will implement policies and strategies to encourage telecommunication companies to give priority for the development of broad-band network facilities.
For several years, the Telecom Regulatory Commission has been the biggest contributor to government revenues. It continues to be biggest in 2011, though it has come down considerably in 2011 from the massive yield in 2010, according to the 2012 Fiscal Management Report. In 2010, TRC contributed LKR 13,800 million, 44% of total revenues from government enterprises. In contrast, all the state banks combined contributed LKR 5,315 million, 17% of the total. The Port (26th largest container port in the world) yielded nothing, zero.
It is possibly a credible reason for the cheerleaders of “Dear Leader” to celebrate. Egyptian tycoon Naguib Sawiris has said that he regrets getting involved in the Canadian telecoms market. “It was a bad idea,” he said referring to the Canadian law that mandates majority ownership and control of the telecoms networks to the native residents. He has blasted at Canada’s draconian protection policy in an interview with the CBC’s Amanda Lang. Mr.
For the longest time Myanmar was not at the bottom of the world mobile rankings. That was because North Korea had a lock on that slot. Now North Korea has zoomed ahead, according to Reuters. Time for Myanmar to issue a few licenses. Preferably more than one.
Postal services everywhere are in trouble. South Asia is no exception. What one does to remedy the situation is the important question. The Indian government seems to think that training 10 officials from the SAARC will do it. And that the solution involves greater cooperation among money-losing, inefficient administrations.
Telephony and electricity have been always intertwined. AC (alternating current) won over DC (direct current), but DC lived on in the wireline network, where it powered the telephone independently of the electrical grid. Now, with increasing interest in data centers and in their energy efficiency, DC is coming back, according to the NYT. But those constant conversions cause power losses. For example, in conventional data centers, with hundreds of computers, electricity might be converted and “stepped down” in voltage five times before being used.
The office of the Pacific ICT Regulatory Resource Centre (PIRRC) was officially opened for business on 10 November 2011 on the campus of the University of the South Pacific (USP) in Suva by Ms. Elizabeth Powell, Permanent Secretary for Public Enterprises, Communications, Civil Aviation and Tourism, Government of Fiji. Earlier this year, LIRNEasia won the contract to establish the PIRRC with initial funding from World Bank and relocated its Senior Policy Fellow M. Aslam Hayat to act as PIRRC’s founder director. The distinguished guests included Regulators and representatives of Pacific Island Countries, Representatives of the World Bank, the Pacific Islands Telecommunications Association, the International Telecommunications Union, the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat and the Japan International Co-operation Agency as well as the Vice Chancellor and representatives of USP.
LIRNEasia’s signature has been a focus, you could even say a single-minded fixation, on taking the results of its research to the policy process. There is a line between evidence-based advocacy and just plain advocacy that we have tried not to cross. The NYT article below, explores that line in the context of Amicus briefs by law professors in the United States. It is important to think about the line, to worry about it, and to try to stay on the right side. Of course, the safest course is that of eschewing advocacy altogether.
We got into roaming because TRAI asked us to. This was just after the SAARC Summit in Colombo in 2008. I thought there’d be more talk about roaming since another SAARC talkfest just ended. But looks like TRAI has decided the neighborhood is not worth the trouble. They want cheap roaming in Europe.
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.