Consider it, “Writing on the wall.” The BOP not only rules the operators’ wallet. Obscure outfits has stormed into the handset world and wounded the giants. Quoting latest findings the Reuters said: Nokia and other established handset makers are quickly losing global market share to a push by Chinese no-brand vendors into emerging markets. It’s all about the form factor and rapidly declining cost of production.
Recent Quality of Service Experience (QoSE) tests carried out by LIRNEasia show that BSNL’s 256Kbps package (offered in Chennai) delivers more than promised in download speeds when compared to a 512Kbps package offered by the same operator in Bangalore. It also performs better in comparison to similar offerings by Airtel and MTNL in Chennai, Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai, including 512 Kbps and 2Mbps packages. Although most Indian packages we tested offer better value for money than similar offerings in neighboring Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Bhutan, there are significant quality differences among the eight Indian packages that were subject to this year’s QoSE testing. The majority of the packages tested within India failed to deliver even 80% of the advertised speeds, with Airtel’s 2Mbps package (tested in Mumbai) coming in last, being able to deliver a mere 20% of what was advertised. Access the QoSE and price benchmark reports here.
To learn about the state of broadband in Sri Lanka, one has to rely on the media and on company releases, not the normal source which is the Ministry or regulatory agency. Today LBO carried the following story: Sri Lanka Telecom, the island’s largest fixed access operator said it had added 80,000 new broadband customers in 2010 and its base of 200,000 customers was 70 percent of the market. About 20 percent of the operator’s wireline customers were now using its ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line) services, the telco said in a statement. From the above we can conclude that Sri Lanka has roughly 286,000 broadband subscriptions. We have no idea whether this number includes those using dongles, or simply those who subscribed to the “fixed wireless” options provided by LankaCom, Dialog etc.
We have been talking about the Budget Telecom Network Model for sometime. But as the Economist points out, the story is bigger than just telecom. South Asian innovation, driven by the need to sell to poor people, may remake the economic landscape in rich countries too. Most strikingly, Indian companies have produced a new type of innovation, variously dubbed “frugal”, “reverse” and “Gandhian”. The essence is to reduce the price of a product or service by a breathtaking amount—80% rather than 10%—by removing unnecessary bells and whistles.
LIRNEasia’s Senior Research Manager, Sriganesh Lokanathan, was invited to share LIRNEasia‘s work in increasing price transparencies in agricultural markets, at the Annual Portfolio Review (APR) for the Asia-Pacific division of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) which was held in Nanning, China from Nov 1-3, 2010. In addition he also led a discussion for around 30 IFAD practitioners and regional partners on ways to reduce information asymmetry in agricultural value chains. Given the large share of value chain projects in IFAD’s current portfolio, Sriganesh stressed the potential benefits (from connecting stakeholders as well as reducing information asymmetries) of incorporating Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) into IFAD’s poverty alleviation strategies. LIRNEasia’s own research has revealed considerable livelihood benefits for farmers from just the provision of real-time market price information to farmers via mobile phones. The presentation slides can be found HERE.
While voice revenues are declining, it appears that broadband will save the day. But only the day. The theoretical maximum of ADSL connections is 869,190 at this time in Sri Lanka. Many of the fixed lines cannot be used to supply ADSL or are connected to government departments, pensioner’s homes, etc. which may not want broadband, so the actual market size is lower.
Call it the funeral of MNP or whatever. But it’s truly ingenious by any standard. Spreadtrum Communications, a Shanghai-based and NASDAQ-listed company, has unveiled the world’s first “Single Chip Quad-SIM Standby Solution.” That means – you can run up to four different GSM connections in one mobile phone. Caroline Gabriel of Rethink Wireless explains furthermore.
LIRNEasia‘s recent Broadband QoSE tests report Dialog Telekom’s 1Mbps postpaid broadband package (HSPA) delivers higher download speeds than what was promised in comparison to similar offerings by Mobitel and SLT. However, it does not maintain this trend in measures for latency and jitter. Although there is a difference in underlying technology which most certainly impacts performance, the focus here is on the comparison between what is promised (advertised) versus the actual speeds delivered by the operator, among other important quality indicators. The latest QoSE report compares three similar broadband packages in Sri Lanka: Dialog Telekom’s postpaid broadband (1Mbps); Mobitel’s Zoom890 (1Mbps); and SLT’s Office (2 Mbps). The results can also be used for regional comparison as these tests were carried out across 11 location in 7 countries.
Improving the efficiency and inclusiveness of agricultural value chains is central to LIRNEasia’s current research. NYT reports on Nokia’s efforts in this area. Unfortunately for little countries, they are focusing only on big markets. On Saturday at dawn, hundreds of farmers near Jhansi, an agricultural center in central India, received a succinct but potent text message on their cellphones: the current average wholesale price for 100 kilograms of tomatoes was 600 rupees ($13.26).
LIRNEasia‘s m-health research pilot project has been featured in the October 2010 issue of FutureGov Asia Pacific magazine. Led by Nuwan Waidyanatha, the project explores the use of mobile phones for early detection of communicable diseases in selected cities in India and Sri Lanka. The full article can be downloaded here or read below: Sri Lanka has completed the trial of a mobile phone project which helps early detection of communicable diseases. The ‘Real-time Bio-surveillance Programme’ allows data on patients and symptoms of illnesses to be sent directly from hospital wards to the epidemiological centre through a web interface installed on mobile phones. Under the present manual system, set up in the 19th century, it can take more than two weeks for information of outbreaks to reach the epidemiological centre in the capital.
Verizon will pay the U.S. Treasury $25 million on top of more than $52 million in refunds to consumers for overcharging them. This penalty and refund are due to the operator “erroneously” overcharging the customers for mobile Internet use. The FCC chairman Julius Genachowski said in a statement the $25 million settlement was the largest in the FCC’s history.
We’d be lucky to be able get wireguided communications to 10 percent of homes in the countries we work in. But we can reach 75 percent plus homes with wireless even now. So we’re all for getting fiber to neighborhoods and are quite agnostic about the access network as long as it’s wireless. In places where they got money, life is not that simple. The bills to pay for those who get the answer wrong are quite high.
Intriguing idea reported by the Economist about breaking down work into small chunks and getting people to send it back using their mobiles. The polling feature developed for LIRNEasia by Respere could fit into this easily, though Eagle may have done that in his application. Mr Eagle hopes txteagle will do its bit by mobile “crowdsourcing”—breaking down jobs into small tasks and sending them to lots of individuals. These jobs often involve local knowledge and range from things like checking what street signs say in rural Sudan for a satellite-navigation service to translating words into a Kenyan dialect for companies trying to spread their marketing. A woman living in rural Brazil or India may have limited access to work, adds Mr Eagle, “but she can still use her mobile phone to collect local price and product data or even complete market-research surveys.
You meet new people. You add them in facebook. You chat with them, tag them in pictures, comment on their status updates and share information. Some of us even have our twitter account in our business card. So people may follow you and you may follow anyone whom you think is interesting and/or is informative.
It’s an interesting example of how sharply the neighbors at both the banks of English Channel differ from each other. Last month the French regulator, ARCEP, claimed that 3G coverage in 900 MHz is worse than 2100 MHz. We are clueless about the methodology of ARCEP’s survey. The law of physics, under no circumstance, could be customized in France. Meanwhile, the UK regulator, Ofcom, has changed its position on refarming the 900 MHz and 1800 MHz spectrum for 3G services.
15,000 km of fiber is pretty significant for a country the size of Sri Lanka. But this is exactly what the CEO is promising (and 10,000 is already in the ground). The beauty is that the whole thing has been done on a commercial basis with no subsidies, aid or whatever (though one could argue that the slowly disbursed universal service money generated by incoming and outgoing international calls could have contributed). In 2002-04, I was involved in planning a World Bank financed USD 20m subsidy scheme intended to accelerate the build out of fiber to cover the entire country (at that time we only had two rings, the larger connecting the Central Province to Colombo, and the smaller a metro ring around Colombo). Due to multiple factors, this component of the e Sri Lanka initiative never got implemented.