The new Ministry of Telecom and IT has published newspaper advertisements requesting ideas on how ICT may be advanced in Sri Lanka. LIRNEasia promptly responded, submitting a selection of policy briefs developed last year. We encourage others to respond as well.
I lived in the US at the peak of the scare stories focused on Japan. I now live in Sri Lanka at the peak of scare stories focused on India. The following should be educative to the scare-mongers: Economic events and market trends are notoriously unpredictable. In the early 1980s, the Japanese high-technology assault on the American computer and semiconductor industry seemed scary. “What are our kids supposed to do?
When we do not push stories, but yet our research gets picked up by the media, that’s real success. Tahani Iqbal’s work on mobile number portability was completed in 2009, but was yesterday cited in a story on the launch of MNP in India. A study paper by LIRNEasia, a regional ICT policy and regulation think tank based in Sri Lanka, says that ARPUs in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and even Sri Lanka are at an all-time low, especially amongst prepaid users, ranging between just $ 2-5. “There is very little room then for MNP to drive price competition and push tariffs that are already at rock-bottom,” said the paper, authored by Tahani Iqbal. Iqbal says that MNP implementation is a costly venture, with high recurring costs due to the technology involved.
I just got back from observing extended focus groups on the knowledge and information gaps faced by small-scale rubber growers in the Galle and Monaragala districts of Sri Lanka. The locations were quite remote, if one checks the map of Badalkumbura (we were several km further to the interior). The remoteness is exemplified by the fact that it took me six hours of driving to get back to Colombo. It is too early to talk about the results of the focus group research, which will be released in due time. What struck me was how Sri Lanka had changed in terms of telecom.
Regulation doesn’t exist in Somalia. Yet its air wave is overcrowded with 11 mobile networks. And there is no interconnection. Now the Somali government has planned regulate its ultra-free mobile phone market. Moreover, it is ambitious of taxing the operators “to boost growth and investment,” Information, Posts and Telecommunications Minister Abdulkareem Jama told Bloomberg News.
We are part of an ongoing conversation with Amartya Sen, Randy Spence and others on the freedom-enhancing possibilities of ICTs in general (including the question of whether the conventional Internet is better than the mobile Internet in this respect). Looks like it is a bigger conversation. Last week Morazov’s book was reviewed, this week Clayton Shirky enters the fray. Second, his essay distinguishes between short-term goals and long-term objectives. Most debates over cyberspace versus sovereignty get bogged down by looking for immediate effects.
A subsidiary of the incumbent telco has launched WiMAX 16e service in Sri Lanka. The launch has come after a long preparation period, but if the price and quality parameters are right, the chances of success are high since broadband is about to take off. Sky Network CEO, Mahinda Herath said that WiMAX 16e broadband service offers a superior broadband experience for households, the corporate sector and SME. He said the offering will soon incorporate other value added features such as usage and quality of service based charging models and web-based payment options. “Our vision is to give each and every person in Sri Lanka access to high-speed broadband connectivity and digital content anywhere in the island at any time,” Herath said yesterday while addressing an audience at the launch of the new product.
The military junta that runs (and ruins) the poverty-striken African country of Niger has hatched the brilliant idea of raising some special telecoms taxes. Niger, says Cellular News, is one of the world’s poorest countries and currently has a phone penetration of just 23 per cent. So a few extra taxes on the providers would presumably be just the thing to speed up more personal infrastructure development like palatial houses, SUVs even personal jets! You never know. Just remember – rulers know the best.
Mitchell Lazarus practices law in Washington D.C. He also holds two degrees in electrical engineering and a doctorate in experimental psychology. His article – Radio’s Regulatory Roadblocks – is an outstanding piece. He also wrote The Great Radio Spectrum Famine thereafter.
“The mobile phone can be an instrument of liberation even against heavy odds, and this is a subject on which the authorities are, understandably, scared. Communication is snapped in order to keep the population in a state of voice-less and communication-less submission” Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen makes the above statement about a liberating potential of mobiles. Here is the counterpoint: Social networks offer a cheaper and easier way to identify dissidents than other, more traditional forms of surveillance. Despite talk of a “dictator’s dilemma”, censorship technology is sophisticated enough to block politically sensitive material without impeding economic activity, as China’s example shows. The internet can be used to spread propaganda very effectively, which is why Hugo Chávez is on Twitter.
A pioneering e-commerce provider in Sri Lanka has tied up with QTel/Wataniya to offer its services in the Maldives, and in the process also facilitate trade in medical services. E-Channelling has entered into an agreement with Wataniya Telecom Maldives, owned by Qatar Telecom (QTel) as part of its global expansion programme, it said. The deal is to provide software services to automate medical ‘channelling’ services in the Maldives and is E-Channelling’s first international project. “QTel has given an undertaking that after completion of the project in the Maldives they would look into replicating the software solutions in all other 17 countries jointly with ECL,” the statement said. The four-phase project will first make available ‘e-channeling’ services to Maldivians to consult Sri Lankan doctors and get health check-ups and other medical services in 25 partner hospitals in Sri Lanka.
That conventional voice traffic would decline on international routes was known (except to the people who came with elaborate schemes to control it). How fast was where the guessing was. Telegeography has some numbers: New data from TeleGeography show that growth in international call traffic has slumped while international traffic routed via Skype continues to accelerate. International phone traffic grew an estimated 4 percent in 2010, to 413 billion minutes, down from 5 percent growth in 2009, and a far cry from the 15 percent average growth rate achieved during the previous two decades. Where did the growth go?
Good data is hard to come by in Afghanistan. In addition to some data (this below from an Asia Foundation demand-side survey), the report emphasizes the need to encourage mobile money remittances and the availability of agri-market prices. Nine years ago, Afghanistan had between 10,000 and 20,000 fixed lines, and mobile telecommunications were virtually nonexistent. Since then the country has seen explosive growth in mobile subscribers, network providers, and physical infrastructure. The total number of subscriptions is approximately 13 million for a total population of roughly 29 million people, and the annual growth rate of subscription is estimated at 53 percent (2009–10).
In the early 1990s, I wrote a conference paper that included a discussion of whether or not prisoners should be allowed to use phones; whether that use should be supervised; and how it should be charged. A revised version of the paper read at Columbia was published: Samarajiva, R. (1996). Consumer protection in the decentralized network, in Private networks, public objectives, eds. E.
We talk of the cloud, but do we talk about the same thing? The Economist has a good piece on definitions and measurements. The “cloud of clouds” has three distinct layers. The outer one, called “software as a service” (SaaS, pronounced sarse), includes web-based applications such as Gmail, Google’s e-mail service, and Salesforce.com, which helps firms keep track of their customers.
LIRNEasia has always been about more than ICTs; it has been about hope in the heart and money in the pocket. Our current focus on the role of knowledge in agriculture value chains will further remove the ICT veil. In this light, I was pleased to read an affirmation of our thinking and approach by the world’s premier repository of knowledge on development, the World Bank: We see a similar trend in the global development landscape, with developing countries assuming important roles alongside traditional development partners. These new partners are contributing not only aid, but more importantly are becoming major trading partners and sources of investment and knowledge. Their experiences matter.