LIRNEasia Mobile 2.0 research on potential use of mobile money services among the BOP in emerging Asia has been published in the latest edition of ITID (Vol. 6, Issue 4). The paper entitled, “M-money for the BOP in the Philippines” is authored by Erwin Alampay, LIRNEasia Research Fellow, and Gemma Bala. Abstract This paper explores the reach and use of m-money among the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) in the Philippines using survey data from LIRNEasia’s 2008 Mobile 2.
Whoever owns the last mile, calls the shot in telecoms. The operators were caught off-guard once the tsunami of applications (apps) hit their fortresses. The telecoms world was shaken by the tectonic shift caused by Apple and Google. United States of America happens to be the epicenter. Now the European mobile behemoths are asking for payments from the “culprits” of the other side of the Atlantic.
I am sitting in China, writing this. It may be a case of observer bias, but I find the Sri Lankan young people I deal with more nimble in thinking and in command of English than their counterparts here. Yet, according to a ranking by IBM as reported by LBO, China has made a dramatic jump from 13th position in 2009 to 5th position in 2010, while Sri Lanka is holding steady at 12th place. Is this a cause for self-congratulation or self-examination? Is the glass half-full or half-empty?
Governments are subsidizing millions and billions of dollars for the deployment of fiber up to the home, aka, FTTH. Such subsidies are based on the premise that fiber to the home brings substantial externalities. But Charles Kenny and his brother Robert Kenny claim that basic broadband has contributed significantly to economic growth is decidedly mixed, and points to low returns for (expensive) superfast upgrades. They think fiber to the businesses and government outfits make more sense than FTTH. The Kenny brothers accuse that the benefits of fiber have been considerably overstated while the other infrastructure remains ignored.
More the societies get connected, more the whistle-blowers like Wikileaks will become unimportant. Because the digital mavericks will be powered by the smart devices and ubiquitous networks to share all forms of information. Millions of Assanges will pop up here and there. Call them Citizen Journalists or whatever. The walls will keep collapsing around the gardens.
It is needless to explore the benefits of competition. But how far a sector can withstand competition? Or how much competition is good for competitiveness? John Kay said, In telecommunications your choice for 100 years was to take what the local telephone provider offered or to leave it. But consumers now have a bewildering variety of choice.
We have been talking about an alternative path to the Internet for the BOP in emerging economies. We said this path would be through the mobile phone and talked about how it was converging with the conventional computer, through smartphone and netbooks that would percolate down to the BOP through second-hand markets. But now people beginning to talk about this happening to TOP markets in rich countries as well. Below is Item 7 in a list entitled the ten businesses the smartphone has destroyed: There are plenty of studies that insist that smartphones will begin to replace the PC as the common vehicle for accessing the Internet. Analyst firm Informa Telecoms & Media projects that smartphone traffic will increase 700% over the next five years.
It appears that the net neutrality debate is leaving the ideological domain and finding a practical place in the middle. In a speech he plans to give Wednesday in Washington, Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman, will outline a framework for broadband Internet service that forbids both wired and wireless Internet service providers from blocking lawful content.
Today at the IITCOE workshop Ashok Jhunjhunwala made a strong argument that the Indian government must hive off the backhaul networks of BSNL and have them be managed by a separate company. Interestingly Masayoshi Son, the Japanese entrepreneur has made more or less the same argument in Japan. Great minds think alike. The government is expected shortly to unveil a scheme to loop the country with fibre-optic lines that will support internet access at up to 100 megabytes a second, ten times the speed of the technology being replaced. Mr Son argues that to guarantee fair access to this network—and thus the most efficient use of it—it should be run by an infrastructure firm hived off from NTT, owned jointly by all the telecoms operators.
The common wisdom is that mobile number portability is an unmitigated good. But the whole point of doing research is challenging common wisdom. Based on evidence, we found that MNP has little relevance for our constituency, those at the bottom of the pyramid. We said so to Indian media, saying it would be a good thing for post-paid and corporate customers. We now find those ideas reflected in Indian media coverage, though not always with attribution, as for example in the Times of India: MNP works best with post-paid customers, as they are the highest paying of the lot.
An external evaluation of the Pan Asian Networking program under which LIRNEasia was funded since 2006 has just been published on the IDRC website. There are many references to LIRNEasia, one of the larger projects funded by PAN, but I found the para below the most intriguing: Influence on telecommunications policy reform has been one of the strongest areas of the program’s outcomes, at least in terms of explicit causality, specifically from the work of LIRNEasia. According to many informants, however, LIRNEasia, is a special case given the organizational culture, the numbers of people devoted to working almost exclusively on policy issues, the specific policy arena in which they work, and the strong personality at the center of the group. While LIRNEasia successes are notable, the external review panel urges the program not to set LIRNEasia as a standard for outcomes, since their achievements would be difficult to replicate elsewhere. The quotation has been taken from the Findings Brief, prepared by the IDRC Evaluation Unit, though the same sentiments are also found in the External Review Report.
Consumers in Asia get less value for money than their counterparts in N America. One reason for this is that the key input of international connectivity is expensive (300% that in Europe and N America). More cables, undersea and terrestrial, are needed to bring these prices down. The Indian Ocean has fewer cables than the Atlantic and the Pacific. The Asian land mass has almost none.
I just received my copy of the book: Biosruveillance methods and case studies edited by Taha Kass-Hout and Xiaohui Zhang. I first met Taha in cyberspace when he was with InSTEDD, we had started a Google group: Biosurveillance, which we use as a knowledge-base. Their approach to disease surveillance was through “event-based surveillance” and our approach was through “indicator-based surveillance” but both converging at finding signals for timely public health alerts that would advocate early control measures. We had contributed three chapters in the context of the Real-Time Biosurveillance Program pilot (RTBP) – Chapter 9: “The role of Data Aggregation in Public Health and Food Safety Surveillance” – Artur Dubrawski Chapter 13: “User Requirements towards a Real-Time Biosurveillance Program” – Nuwan Waidyanatha and Suma Prashant Chapter 14: “Using Common Alerting Protocol to Support a Real-Time Biosurveillance Program in India and Sri Lanka” – Gordon A. Gow and Nuwan Waidyanatha.
Kentaro Toyama argues that so-called ICT4D (Information and Communication Technologies for Development) doesn’t ensure the alleviation of poverty. He presents a long list of failed projects – like telecenters and OLPC – to substantiate the argument. He says: Technology—no matter how well designed—is only a magnifier of human intent and capacity. It is not a substitute. The myth of scale is the religion of telecenter proponents, who believe that bringing the Internet into villages is enough to transform them.
The bandwidth prices in Asia remain more than 300% expensive than the western hemisphere, said TeleGeography that has been constantly reporting this constant gap. But the Asian leaders seem unmoved about this fundamentally flawed and potentially dangerous trend across the continent. TeleGeography reports only the wholesale prices up to the gateway. Once the backhaul and licensing costs are taken into account, the Asian Internet bandwidth prices become far more expensive. Spectrum had been the only raw material of ICT until the 2G mobile became pervasive.
PTTs wore the hat of “natural monopoly” until last century. They firmly believed, “I am monarch of all I survey; My right there is none to dispute.” That was ended during the post-mobile era. Internet has further disrupted the orthodox dominance. Since then the new breeds of giants kept on emerging: Google, Yahoo, Skype, Facebook, Apple and others.