The Libyans are about to share the best gift of Eid – freedom. If blood is the currency of liberty, the Libyans have overpaid compared to the Tunisians and Egyptians combined. Renesys’ CTO Jim Cowie, writing in the Huffington Post, has been trying to track what’s been happening to the country’s Internet connection in the midst of the chaos. Stop Press: the net is back. Read full report.
A research article that will shortly be published in Information Technology and International Development got me thinking about Engel’s Law, which states that as income rises, the proportion of income spent on food falls, even if actual expenditure on food rises. The article is by Aileen Aguero, Harsha de Silva and Juhee Kang. It’s not about food prices, per se, but about some extensions that allow the identification of necessary goods and luxuries. Their interesting finding is that voice telephony is a necessity in Asia (in the six countries covered by LIRNEasia’s teleuse@BOP research), while it is still a luxury in Latin America. How could the same thing be a luxury in one place and a necessity in another?
Everyone has got an opinion on Google’s takeover of Motorola Mobility. But according to a report, it has the blessings of Martin Cooper, the man who invented the mobile phone. We had one post on him, but given all the effort we devote to mobile phones, that surely is not enough. One link led to another and then to a very nice piece that not only tells about Martin Cooper, but also locates the equipment that made the first mobile call possible.
The “mobiles in support of Sentinel Site Surveillance (mS-cube)” project, following the success of the Real-Time Biosurveillance Program (RTBP), investigated the scalability and institutionalization issues. The mS-cube project was carried out in the Wayamba Province of Sri Lanka. The Infectious Disease Control (IDC) nurses, in the province, were given training on the “mHealthSurvey” mobile application and provided with mobile phones for submitting digitized all outpatient and inpatient health records. The findings are that the relatively older IDC nurses find it difficult to enter data with the mobile keypad and do not have an incentive to submit all patient records (i.e.
In the 13 years I lived in the US, I saw the postal service change. It was a horrible, rude bureaucracy when I moved there; and I saw the reengineering at work in the last few years. Counter staff were actually trained to smile and be nice to customers (and those who could not be converted, were sent to back offices where they could “go postal”). You stood in a line, staff would come up to the line with handheld devices to serve customers with minor needs such as a sheet of stamps, shortening the line for people with complex problems that had to be dealt with at the counter. They started selling wrapping paper and tape and creating spaces for people to wrap gifts according to USPS rules.
Market share is never the final determinant of market power. It is used as a screen for further investigation and/or to shift the burden of proof. So, for example, an HHI (Herfindahl Hirschman Index) greater than 1700 or 1800 is triggers anti-trust investigations by the US government in the case of mergers and acquisitions. In the case of determining significant market power in telecom regulation (LIRNEasia is quite skeptical about the value of this approach in developing countries), market shares of around 35-45 percent shift the burden on the operator to prove that it does not have market power (the ability to set and maintain prices in simple language). But in Bangladesh 20 percent market share is the magic number.
It’s nice to know we’re in the post-PC world. It’s just two years since we were being asked to participate in debates about mobile vs PCs. And just one year since Steve Jobs called the PC a truck. Now the debate has shifted. We know what world we live in.
It seems that all governments under threat fear communication media. Instead of the kill switch, Cameron of the UK seems to be proposing a narrower ban: social media use by miscreants. How does this work? Does the government know who is planning mayhem and who is not? Does it shut down base stations in affected areas, or does it target specific people?
For those who think spectrum is a headache unique to Bangladesh, here’s relief from Greece: The auction has been discussed and planned for more than a year and predates the country’s financial crisis, said the official, a senior administrator at the Hellenic Telecommunications and Post Commission, the regulator holding the auction. He did not want to be identified, citing his agency’s policy. The auction’s goal, the official said, was to level the playing field in Greece among the three operators going forward as they introduce faster third- and fourth-generation mobile services. Vodafone and Wind already hold licenses for 900-megahertz spectrum, and Cosmote uses the 1.8-gigahertz band.
When I wrote the op ed that was published in Daily Star yesterday, I did not know the anti-competitive “Market Competition Factor” had been decided. Today’s Daily Star gives the numbers. Looks unusually good for Citycell that not only pays 1/5th the price per MHz that Grameenphone pays but can also make do with less frequencies because it is a CDMA operator. According to the definition of the MCF prescribed by the telecom ministry, if an operator has more than 20 percent market share, it will have to pay additionally, while an operator with less than 20 percent share will pay at a reduced rate. The MCF for Grameenphone now stands at 1.
We have been talking about the need to prepare for qualitatively higher volumes of data in Asia as more people start using 3G networks. Our proposals have focused on adding to international backhaul capacity in order to reduce prices of this key input that is now 3-6 times more expensive than capacity in Europe and North America. The New York Times discusses how the data flood is playing out in the US. The projections are that the networks will have to carry the total traffic they carried in all of 2010, in just two months in 2015 in the US. Cellphone plans that let people gobble up data as if they were at an all-you-can eat buffet are disappearing, just as a new crop of data-gobbling Internet services from Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, Apple and the like are hitting the market or catching on with wide audiences.
Building on the previous blog post, I wrote up an op-ed on the latest developments of the Bangladesh license renewal drama that has been published in the Sunday Daily Star. What mistakes are made when incentives are not properly analyzed. More proof that the Bangladesh Ministry of Post and Telecom has a serious problem of capacity. The “market competition factor,” as presented, penalises operators with more customers. It creates a disincentive to add low-revenue customers and, indeed, an incentive to shed marginal customers.
Sometimes we can get ideas for services for the BOP from what the rich do with their smartphones and computers: The same day, my brother sent along a link for a new app (leafsnap) that allows users to identify trees by submitting photos of leaves. What a smart way to juice that nature walk, I thought. The next day I saw a Twitter message from Pierre Omidyar (@pierre), the eBay founder, in which he attached a photo and asked, “What is the name of this purple and white flower bush?” Seconds later he had his answer: lilac. Then my sister wrote to ask how she could identify the bird building a nest on her deck.
The long dragged-out drama of license renewal in Bangladesh has taken one step toward closure, according to the Daily Star. The government yesterday finalised the process of how it will charge four mobile operators — Grameen-phone, Banglalink, Robi and Citycell — for renewing their licences for the next 15 years. A high-profile meeting presided over by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina decided that the operators will pay at the rate of Tk 150 crore for per megahertz of airwave, which will be multiplied by the total allocated spectrum and a ‘market competition factor’. The meeting held at the Prime Minister’s Office also decided to give 3G (third generation) technology licences through auction. The per-MHz amount has been set arbitrarily.
CPRsouth, LIRNEasia’s primary vehicle for capacity building, places great weight on the practice of “standing on the shoulders of giants,” also known as conducting literature reviews, and referring to previous work through citations. Is this an importation of an alien Western practice? Is there an alternative? Our objectives and those of Wikipedia are not the same. Still, it may be interesting to see if there is anything to be learned from the Wikimania debate.
The whole point of a public lecture is to catalyze thought and action. It’s been three months and the first evidence I saw of anything being catalyzed was the phone call I got from Bandula Mahanama, the speaker we invited from Polonnaruwa. He had some plans about reducing risks from the Minneriya reservoir and wanted me to come. He and his colleagues from six farmer organizations wanted a Colombo partner. I went with Lakshaman Bandaranayake the CEO of Vanguard Management who has been our steadfast partner on all dam-safety related projects.