According to the ITU ICTeye, which is now carrying 2008 data, Pakistan’s surge to overtake Sri Lanka has petered out, leaving the Maldives (143 active SIMs/100 people) as the undisputed leader in mobile connectivity (apparently all adult Maldivians carry two active SIMs; there are only two operators in the Maldives), and Sri Lanka second with 52 SIMs per 100 people. On the fixed side, assisted by CDMA phones that are counted as fixed, Sri Lanka is the leader (17 connection per 100 people), followed by Maldives (15 per 100). Like in cricket, the middle of the rankings are the most interesting. Both Pakistan (50/100) and Bhutan (37/100) are ahead of India (29/100) in mobile. This shows that India cannot afford to let up the pace of 10 million connections a month for some time.
From: http://www.bangkokpost.com/business/telecom/26138/ict-promote-3g-services The Information and Communication Technology minister has advised TOT to begin promoting its third-generation mobile phone services to win customers before the 3G auction is called by the National Telecommunications Commission. The minister, Ranongruk Suwunchwee, said TOT must market its 3G service on the 1.9 GHz spectrum to attract people to the services, which are scheduled to be available on a trial basis next month in limited areas of Bangkok.
I have always been interested in why people refuse convenient technologies that most of us take for granted. I recall visiting Amish country in Pennsylvania with a friend, Diane Zimmerman, who had written a book on their refusal to use the phone within their homes. Now the NYT has done an interesting piece on those whose refuse to use mobiles. Given our teleuse@BOP work, I found this piece about what is likely to tip a non-owner into ownership quite interesting. It is the “crisis.
Two years ago customers flocked to Etihad Atheeb Telecom, which paid USD139 million for Saudi Arabia’s second fixed-line license, bringing to an end a monopoly enjoyed by Saudi Telecom (STC). Now a group of young Saudis has organized a boycott of STC, in protest of persistently high prices and poor service, while the newcomer’s managers complain that fair competition remains a far-off goal. Ahmed Sindi, new entrant Etihad Atheeb’s chief executive, said: We have a lot of problems with the incumbent operator, and we are not seeing enough actions from the regulator to stop it. We do not have access to critical infrastructure like dark fibre; we do not have access to conduits of transmission between various cities because the pricing is very high; and interconnectivity has been delayed massively. With a young, rapidly growing population and up to 7 million expatriates, Saudi Arabia’s telecom market is one of the most coveted by local and international companies.
LIRNEasia has been pretty successful at doing policy-relevant research and communicating the results to the policy process. Interestingly we have gone deeper into the use of statistics over this period, without giving up on institutional analysis. In this context, it is quite interesting to see how the debate is playing out in the context of a US Senator’s move to prohibit federal funding of social science. What remains, though, is a nagging concern that the field is not producing work that matters. “The danger is that political science is moving in the direction of saying more and more about less and less,” said Joseph Nye, a professor at the John F.
m-Health Real-Time Biosurveillance Program (RTBP) interviewed Medical Officers in Kurunegal District in Sri Lanka and Sivagangai District in Tamil Nadu, India, during the months of September and October, 2009. These interactions revealed that outpatient health record entry in real-time by Medical Officers, using the mobile phone key pad is inefficient and the idea was rejected by them. The aim of the RTBP is to collect digitized patient disease, syndrome, and demographic information from the point of care to rapidly detect disease outbreaks. Village Health Nurses in Tamil Nadu examine at most 70 patients a week. Ninety percent of the Village Health Nurses opt to jot down the records on paper and later enter them leisurely after the day’s work is complete.
This is no news, but we now have evidence. Overall, North American broadband users are certainly luckier than their South Asia counterparts. (Please note exceptions!) All four North American broadband packages tested for the Oct 2009 release performed better than any of the nine South Asian ones for value for money in accessing an international server. In other words, the USA and Canadian users pay less for the same amount of bandwidth even ignoring PPP.
A report on Benchmarking National Telecom Regulatory Authority websites, edited by the late Amy Mahan, former Senior Researcher and coordinator of LIRNE.net, is available for download here. The report takes a detailed look at the state of regulatory authority websites in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and North America and identifies benchmarking indicators for evaluating them. Among its co-authors are LIRNEasia’s Senior Research Manager, Chanuka Wattegama, and former researcher, Lara Alawattegama. As a founding member of LIRNE, Mahan worked to ensure dissemination of the network’s research and coordinated research practices across its partner networks.
The FCC has engaged Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society to study net neutrality and its impact. Here is the draft report. Most of the highest-ranking countries use net neutrality policies, under which the incumbent carriers have to allow competitors to lease capacity on their networks and offer their own services, the Berkman report said. By contrast, the U.S.
The Finns have done it again. Accessing to Internet at minimum (not up to) 1 Mbps speed is the birthright of every Finnish citizen, announced the government. It makes Finland the world’s first country ensuring high speed broadband access a fundamental right, Telecom Asia reports. The government has also planned to make the 100 Mbps broadband connection a legal right for each countryman by the end of 2015. Finland launched the world’s first commercial GSM network in 1991.
The European Court of Auditors’ latest report reveals that billions of euros funding into research networks have been wasted. It says the EU’s flagship research programme spent €17 billion, almost half its budget, on two types of pan-European project without setting clear objectives. Some people in Brussels must have been smoking wrong stuff. That’s Europe’s problem. But the EU often lectures us on good governance and wise spending.
New Zealand’s Commerce Commission has won a high court battle against Telecom NZ, with the court agreeing that the operator abused its market power to deter competition. The Auckland High Court held that Telecom charged disproportionately high rates for wholesale access to its data transmission access lines during the period between 2001 and 2004. This action – which was a breach of New Zealand’s Commerce Act – prevented ISPs from offering competitive retail prices for high-speed data services. Telecom’s wholesale charges were often higher than its retail prices during this period, the court found. The court found that Telecom aimed to deny competitors access at prices that would allow them to develop their own data transmission networks.
The Vietnamese government has been uncomfortable with the exaggerated number of subscribers the industry claims. Growth rate and market share are the fundamental motivation of such misleading statistics. Last year the government said, “Enough is enough.” Lately the country’s Ministry of Information and Communications (MoIC) has revealed around half of the SIM cards recorded as customers by the operators are actually in use, according to Cellular News. There is nothing wrong about it as the usage of multiple SIM is part of life across the developing world.
Sri Lanka’s 1919 Government Information Center, serving 20 million people gets around 3000 calls a day, compared to New York City’s 311 service which is serving perhaps the same number of people but gets 50,000 calls a day. Long way to go .. . .
That is the phrase I brought back from Harvard Forum II that I attended on behalf of LIRNEasia a few weeks back. In 2003 they held Harvard Forum I (which, among the LIRNE.NET group only Alison Gillwald attended). One of the results was the funding of organizations like LIRNEasia that seek to remove policy and regulatory barriers to the use of ICTs. This time the focus was on “what next.
This comprehensive report on smart grid developments seems most pertinent as Sri Lanka recovers from another nationwide blackout caused by the inability of the state owned monopolist to manage its grid (and to restore power despite repeated attempts). Of course, smart grids are not simply about reducing blackouts; they can reduce the massive waste caused by T&D losses and also introduce time-sensitive pricing to reduce peak-load demand. LIRNEasia has its eye on the intersection of energy and ICT as future area of work. WHAT was the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century? The motor car, perhaps, or the computer?