Researchers at Northwestern University have found that broadband prices in America have remained nearly stagnant since 2004. Duopoly in most urban markets is blamed for the lack of incentive to lower prices. It has also generated an argument: Why Isn’t the Price of Broadband Obeying Moore’s Law?
On the eve of Nuwan Waidyanatha’s big dissemination event in Colombo, it was nice to see very high profile coverage for his work in one of India’s leading newspapers, the Hindu: The detection of spread of respiratory tract infection in conjunction with a viral fever in Sri Lanka that caught the attention of the health departments and escalating diarrhoea cases in Tamil Nadu were detected in a matter of a day after the onset of the outbreaks. Through alert systems in the pilot project, such situations were communicated to the local community and health departments, who then publicised preventive measures and treatment. Potentially, the RTBP reduces the time to identify a potential disease outbreak to just a day.
Fiber put in place for smart grid applications is making possible Gigabyte speed broadband, according to NYT. The high-speed Internet service is piggybacked on top of the utility’s smart-grid network, which was the reason for stringing the fiber optic cable to homes in the first place. Smart grids are advanced electrical networks that can improve energy efficiency, enable variable pricing based on the time of day, and reduce disruptions. They require digital networks for two-way communications, and computerized meters in homes. EPB had already begun a smart-grid program before the Obama administration included billions for grants for smart-grid projects in the economic stimulus program in 2009.
Rohan refers to Ryanair while discussing budget telecoms. CEO of this Irish aviation maverick wants to gain more altitude at lesser cost. Read more.
For the perpetually connected, the experience of being unconnected is salutary; but not pleasant. The Sinharaja Forest Reserve is a world heritage site about three hours driving distance from Colombo. I spent two days there and unexpectedly found myself unconnected, except for a single location in the hotel that allowed the sending and receiving of texts if the phone was held high! It is not that the place is completely disconnected from electronic networks. I paid for the hotel using a credit card, which was processed through a fixed line.
A significant contribution to the m-money debate has been made by Chanuka Wattegama, until last month LIRNEasia’s Senior Research Manager and the person responsible for managing the Mobile 2.0 research module. The tightly argued piece contains many references to LIRNEasia work and is a perfect example of the success of LIRNEasia’s catalytic role. Worth reading in full by anyone interested in the subject. Ours is an anxious society that expects the protection of every electronic money transfer by the financial regulator.
The Indian farmers are exploiting mobile services and becoming more efficient. Weather forecasts and other information – critical to their livelihood – are being delivered through 2G networks. Thanks to the Indian operators’ innovative endeavor to tap the potentials at BOP. Daily Star reports quoting AFP. Extremely cheap connection (US$0.
Research ICT Africa (RIA) has recently published a policy paper entitled, ‘Gender Assessment of ICT Access and Usage in Africa‘, based on findings from a nationally-representative household and individual-level survey of ICT use in 17 African countries. The full paper can be downloaded here. LIRNEasia Senior Research Manager, Ayesha Zainudeen, was selected to review the paper; her written assessment is available here. An excerpt of the executive summary of the paper follows: What is clear from the Research ICT Africa (RIA) Household and Individual Access and Usage Survey is that the diffusion of ICT is highly uneven concentrating in urban areas and leaving some rural areas almost untouched. Access to these technologies is constrained by income as is usage, and as they become more complex, they are increasingly constrained by literacy and education.
Something that has been going on South Asia (efficiently or not) is now going to happen in China too, according to the NYT. The Chinese government on Wednesday began to require cellphone users to furnish identification when buying SIM cards, a move officials cast as an effort to rein in burgeoning cellphone spam, pornography and fraud schemes. The requirement, which has been in the works for years, is not unlike rules in many developed nations that ask users to present credit card data or other proof of identification to buy cellphone numbers. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said that about 40 percent of China’s 800 million cellphone users were currently unidentified. Those users will be ordered to furnish identification by 2013 or lose their service, according to The Global Times, a state-run newspaper.
In 2006, when I expressed skepticism about government claims that Jaffna was getting a fiber optic network in the middle of the war, I was assailed. Unless SLT has built a second cable in 2009, in addition to the one they built in 2006, I was right. This would be the right time for Mr N.P. Perera, or whoever he was, to apologize.
A month or so back, I wrote the following Voice calls will be “free” in the future. The quotation marks signify that nothing is really free. In the natural evolution of the industry, there will come a time when customers will pay for connectivity in various forms, either by data volumes or time. Voice will simply be one among many applications they can use as part of this connectivity bundle. I didn’t think the future would come so soon.
We would like your comments and suggestions in helping us define a methodology for benchmarking ILC prices. As part of our annual international voice and broadband price benchmarking reports (Indicators continued) we have decided to include ILC prices for selected countries within the region (Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia). The first step was to compare available ILC benchmarking methodologies and use this comparison study as a base to create our own. The lack of freely available information on the same (Sources explored were OECD, ITU, APCC and TeleGeography), prompted us to define a methodology irrespective to what may be available elsewhere. What we’d like to compare are leased line prices for given speeds (E1: 2Mbps, DS-3: 45 Mbps or STM-1: 155Mbps, where applicable) from the cities LIRNEasia works in, to cities around the world based on traffic flow – another data set that is not freely available.
We have been saying for sometime that telecom operators urgently needed to think beyond their core voice business. Mobile, beyond voice, is what we wrote about incessantly in the past two years. Here’s more reason: Google entered a new business beyond Internet search on Wednesday with a service within Gmail to make phone calls over the Web to landlines or cellphones. The service will thrust Google into direct competition with Skype, the Internet telephone company, and with telecommunications providers. It could also make Google a more ubiquitous part of people’s social interactions by uniting the service for phone calls with e-mail, text messages and video chats.
Last week, LIRNEasia’s lead scientist and the director of the knowledge to innovation project, Dr Sujata Gamage, made a presentation to the annual sessions of one of Sri Lanka’s oldest social science associations, the Social Scientists’ Association (SSA), on the literature pertaining to Research to Policy and how to take research to the policy process. Given the preoccupation of those associated with the SSA with the ethnic issue in the past decades, the very fact that they invited Sujata to react to the papers that were presented suggests a transition is underway from Right to Protect (R2P) to Research to Policy (R2P). The presentation is likely to be useful for anyone wanting a quick and comprehensive overview of the literature. It uses the work being done at LIRNEasia on the delivery of government services with IDRC support as an exemplar and is possibly the first publication of some of the findings of her research on self-organizing networks that are emerging among Sri Lankan local government authorities.
The Kim-family-owned North Korea has the world’s lowest mobile penetration despite having issued a 3G license to Orascom. Right next to them at the bottom of the league table is Myanmar, which used to charge a horrendous fee to get connected only to postpaid. Now it appears that they have started offering some kind of non-renewable prepaid. Even mothballed Myanmar is coming along, albeit slowly. Until recently, its military rulers did not permit pre-paid mobile services on its network.
There was talk that India would get 4G mobile before 3G mobile, given all the delays in licensing. That won’t happen. But 4G is not pie in the sky, according to the Economist: WHILE much of the world is still rolling out the third generation (3G) of mobile networks, some countries have already moved on to the fourth (4G). Russia offers an intriguing example. Yota, a start-up with no old voice business to protect, has built a 4G network from scratch, burying 3,000km (1,864 miles) of fibre-optic cables to connect its wireless base stations.