Doing good research is of utmost importance. Conveying the research results to the right audience is equally important if change is to be effected. LIRNEasia’s study on Broadband Quality of Service Experience (BBQoSE) began in 2007. Since then, more than six rounds of testing has been conducted in over five countries, using the AT-Tester (developed by the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras). LIRNEasia has used multiple means on conveying the results.
In early April, Nirmita Narasimhan, Program Manager on accessibility at the Center for Internet and Society based in Bangalore, visited Sri Lanka at LIRNEasia’s invitation. Below is an excerpt from her reflections on the visit and her interactions with the Telecom Regulatory Commission, the ICT Agency and the Jinasena Trust: Why is there such a communication gap between persons with disabilities and the policy makers? Even in India, we come across projects where the government of India is spending precious funds developing technology which they feel is required for the blind, while the blind in fact are already using more advanced technology. For instance, there is a project of the government to develop a special browser for the blind, when the blind and visually impaired are already navigating the internet using screen readers like Jaws and NVDA. My meetings with the regulator and other agencies confirmed for me that persons with disabilities in Sri Lanka and India are facing similar problems.
Here‘s how you enforce it. Developers caution that independent networks come with downsides: repressive governments could use surveillance to pinpoint and arrest activists who use the technology or simply catch them bringing hardware across the border. But others believe that the risks are outweighed by the potential impact. “We’re going to build a separate infrastructure where the technology is nearly impossible to shut down, to control, to surveil,” said Sascha Meinrath, who is leading the “Internet in a suitcase” project as director of the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan research group.
I recently learned that a colleague, John Ure, who has been active in telecom reforms efforts in Hong Kong for many years, has been appointed to head the Asian Internet Coalition. Appears they have been quite active in East and South East Asia, with emphasis on privacy and intellectual property issues. I hope they will link up with our friends at the Center for Internet and Society in Bangalore and become active in South Asia as well.
The train displaced the canal barge. The airplane displaced the train as a means of long-distance travel. Such is the way of the world. Now the telegram has gone the way of the canal. Who would have thought that government could function without telegrams?
The trigger for this post was a call from an outlying area in Sri Lanka. A concerned citizen had got hold of my number and wanted my advice on the effects of cell towers an an observed increase in lightning strikes in his area. I told him that people tend to associate new things like cell towers with increases in lightning strikes, without factoring in the possibilities that (a) there was really no change in lightning strikes, there just appeared to be an increase; and (b) other factors may have changed, including the houses that were being hit by lightning. I said that I could not agree to explanations that went counter to basic physics, namely that high objects such as cell towers would not attract lighting and would instead cause lighting to hit objects that were lower in elevation such as houses. I directed him to several government agencies, including the Telecom Regulatory Commission which was said to have launched a nationwide study on the subject.
TCO 2011 study update_wallet share Every year Nokia conducts the telecom equivalent of the Economist’s “Big Mac” study; it compares the total costs of using an identical basket of services over a mobile phone in multiple emerging economies. It used to cover 77 countries, but now they’ve pared it down to 50 major emerging economies. If only the voice and SMS services are counted (plus 1/36th of the cost of the cheapest Nokia phone in that market), Bangladesh is the winner. A Bangladeshi user will pay only USD 1.91/month as against the average of USD 11.
So AT&T is claiming that it can rollout 4G networks only if it is allowed to buy T Mobile (and combine the frequencies assigned to both). So what they really want is spectrum? As smartphones and tablets proliferate, so too have apps like one by Facebook that draw in ever-rising amounts of data. Monday’s letters cite AT&T’s contention that the T-Mobile deal will allow the carrier to expand its nascent 4G network to cover 97 percent of the country and an additional 55 million Americans. “The access aspect of this is so, so important,” Fred Humphries, Microsoft’s vice president for United States government affairs, said by telephone.
Today’s New York Times carries a fascinating study on how large numbers of users walking around with mobile phones, constituting a cheap sensor network. Urban planners, technology companies and officials from local governments see potential in projects like these that mine data collected from phones to provide better public services. Boston is developing a system called Street Bump that uses a smartphone’s accelerometer and GPS system to detect when a driver hits a pothole and then sends that information to city officials. Techniques like this may help cities collect data that until recently would have required expensive network sensors.
Bhutan goverment has implementing a ‘112’ emergency health call center. It is their first eHealth solution and people can request for an ambulance or ask for medical assistance through the service. With the help of the World Health Organization, the Ministry of Health had contracted an Indian software company to pilot the Hospital Information Management System (HMIS). The operating procedures are similar to common practices in developing countries; where the health indicators are hand calculated, then those aggregates are entered in to a computer at the hospital. The monthly aggregates are burned on to a CD and sent via post or emailed to the Ministry of Health for analysis.
Chanuka Wattegama has made a strong case for MNP to be examined at a public hearing. LIRNEasia has some relevant research, but the material below is all Chanuka’s. I was traveling and did not see this piece until today. While not unfamiliar to North America and Europe, Pakistan and India were the only South Asian countries to implement MNP. Pakistan maintains a central database with all its mobile user data.
So it appears the al Assad government is becoming more like the Mubarak government. The Internet shutdown severely disrupted the flow of the YouTube videos and Facebook and Twitter posts that have allowed protesters and others to keep track of demonstrations, since foreign news media are banned and state media are heavily controlled. Both land lines and cellphones are so frequently monitored by Syria’s feared secret police that Skype had become a major means of communication among activists, and its loss as a tool may be a blow to the protest movement. Government Web sites, including those for the Ministry of Oil and the state news agency, SANA, remained online. Two-thirds of Syria’s Internet network went offline at 6:35 a.
China is a big country. By definition, its ethnic conflicts are localized. The newest is Inner Mongolia. And the mobile networks are being shut down, only in the affected region: “First they shut down our Internet, then they interrupted our cellphone service and finally they imprisoned us at school,” said the student, an intense, foppishly dressed literature major who was not on campus when the lockdown took effect last Saturday. “The students are afraid, but more than that, they are angry.
I’ve been thinking about m applications for two full days. Not the normal crowd I hang with, regulators, ministry officials, operators; but people who are starting new companies and various people helping them. People working on energy startups, agri-market incubators, and, yes, also ICT entrepreneurs. Two ideas that came up: Most people who think about m apps are still stuck on the Apple App Store. Great model but requires two things LIRNEasia’s people (BOP in emerging Asia) do not have at the present time: smartphones and credit cards to make payments from.
One problem with our Teleuse@BOP research is that people who use the findings tend to shed the nuances. We do not know the percentage of Pakistanis with multiple SIMs, only the percentage of those at the BOP. But I am confident the general claim being made is not erroneous. Pakistan has been ranked top among the regional countries in 2010 with the highest number of cellular phone subscribers having more than one connection of different operators, Lirneasia study reported recently. As per the estimates, the subscribers possessing multiple SIMs are estimated to mark 23 percent share in the overall stated base of the country.
An op-ed written by Harsha de Silva, LIRNEasia’s consultant lead economist, has been published in the Daily Star in Bangladesh. Harsha emphasizes the need to ensure that an environment is created to encourage investment by the private sector to build on the success of delivering voice connectivity on wireless to take broadband to the people of Bangladesh. Digital Bangladesh is the centerpiece of the government’s ICT policy. Therefore, the government must consider the evidence, in both Bangladesh and in fast-developing Asia, on what infrastructure is likely to make Digital Bangladesh possible. Will Digital Bangladesh become a reality on wireless network platforms operated by well capitalised and managed mobile operators, or on some government-managed wireguide-based platform?