Clearwire enjoys every bit of its WiMax extravaganza at the investors’ expense. Lately Intel and Google have written off more than $1.3 billion. Clearwire hasn’t blinked. It used to pitch WiMax as a mobile substitute of DSL.
The profitability and surveillance potential of the state telecom monopoly has not been missed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, described by many as the pseudogovernment of Iran: The nearly $8 billion acquisition by a company affiliated with the elite force has amplified concerns in Iran over what some call the rise of a pseudogovernment, prompting members of Parliament to begin an investigation into the deal. Full story. In other countries, similar arrangements are emerging. In Sri Lanka, it is alleged that no-name companies with interesting connections have entered into joint ventures with the incumbent teleco on highly favorable terms.
The ICT arm of Sri Lanka’s largest community-based organization, Sarvodaya, launched its FarmerNet initiative last month. They have been kind enough to mention that the initiative had been triggered by a LIRNEasia presentation at a National Telecenter Alliance event. As an organization committed to catalysis, we are gratified. And we wish them well. The premise of the initiative is to create an efficient marketplace, using information technology to reduce transaction costs.
The colloquium was conducted by Tahani Iqbal, Research Fellow, LIRNEasia. Mobile number portability refers to the ability for customers to retain the same number, irrespective of the operator they choose to subscribe to. The most obvious benefit of this to customers is that it lowers switching costs. One question that arises is whether it shifts property rights to the customer – it may be still owned by the operator, but it raises an interesting debate. Other benefits to customers is that it would create a level-playing field between operators and increases competition among them.
Handsets using the open platform Android will soon be available from Verizon, according to NYT, leaving AT&T as the only US carrier not offering Android phones. A year after Google introduced its Android operating system on T-Mobile, the smallest of the major wireless carriers in the United States, it announced a deal to offer handsets with Verizon Wireless, the nation’s largest carrier. The carrier said Tuesday it expects to introduce two Android phones this year. It didn’t name the manufacturers, but one is expected to be made by Motorola. In addition, Verizon and Google said they would work together along with manufacturers to design handsets specifically for Verizon’s network.
We could not view this webpage, receive emails or use mobile phone unless Charles Kuen Kao invented the optical fiber 40 years ago. This British-American citizen of Chinese ancestry shares this year’s half of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Prof Kao, 75, was born in Shanghai in 1933 and moved to Hong Kong with his family in 1948. He went on to England to study engineering and work at STL – then the UK research centre of ITT, the US telecoms company – where he made his ground-breaking discovery in 1966. By 1971 scientists at the Corning Glass Works in the USA, a glass manufacturer with over 100 years experience, produced a 1 kilometer long optical fiber using chemical processes.
The Sunday Leader (Sri Lanka) had the story excerpted below tucked away in the business pages. It contains several lessons for public policy that will be discussed below. They include the importance of interrogating data to make sure that your conclusions make sense and of course the ever present problem of incentives. Some 1.2 million cellular phones were imported illegally into the country last year, causing a loss in government revenue, the B.
South Korea leads the world in providing broadband services, according to a study released last week. The United States did not make the top 10. The study, sponsored by Cisco, examined 66 countries and 240 cities. Broadband leadership was measured by various factors, including the number of wired households, where South Korea scored 97%. Hong Kong, which was rated number three in overall broadband leadership, had an even higher penetration, at 99%.
Broadband Quality of Service Experience (QoSE) has been an area of research interest to LIRNEasia since December 2007. In the process of our research, the software application, AT-Tester was developed as a testing tool in order to monitor broadband QoSE. It is available for free downloading. Users can test the quality of their connectivity and upload the results to server for viewing by others. The results or data uploaded are available in the public domain.
LIRNEasia’s thesis that most people will experience the Internet through mobile networks depends to an extent on cheap terminal devices. According to the Economist, Android is playing a role in bring low-cost producers into the smartphone segment. Prices are now on a downward spiral, says Ben Wood of CCS Insight, a research firm. Several other handset-makers are already offering cheap smart-phone-like devices. Android allows cut-price Chinese firms such as Huawei and ZTE to enter the smart-phone market, which they had previously stayed out of for lack of the necessary software.
Many were counting WiMAX out, but it appears that it has one last chance with the Sprint experiment. Through Clearwire, an affiliated company in which Sprint owns a 51 percent stake, Sprint is now offering the faster data service on laptops in Baltimore, Portland, Ore., and other cities for a total population of eight million people. By the end of the year, the service will be in 25 markets, including Chicago, Philadelphia and Dallas. A year after that, it hopes to reach about a third of the country’s population, including New York and San Francisco.
Developed countries are generally perceived to be the gardens of best practices. Most of these countries’ lawmakers and lawbreakers (Including the diplomats and consultants) frequently lecture us on how to do the right thing. But we hardly know about their dirty laundry. Mitchell Lazarus unfolds the regulatory dark side in the USA. The technical rules that deal with mature products are relatively general.
Hoarding is bad and spectrum is a limited resource. Therefore, the Swedish regulator will gradually implement a new model for spectrum charges that will penalise the operators who have not maximised the use of their radio spectrum. The new model for charges is technology-neutral and will be implemented gradually over the course of several years for various types of licence. Read more.
Mobile base station electricity costs could rise by nearly 55% over the next five years unless operators address network inefficiencies and reduce reliance on non-renewable energy resources, according to a new report from Juniper Research. Its author, Dr Windsor Holden, said: “Operators in Africa and Asia who continue to rely on diesel for off-grid generators will find margins increasingly squeezed as their networks expand and diesel prices rise. We believe that unless a transition to generators powered by renewable energy is effected, then many such networks may no longer be financially viable within a few years.” Other findings from the green base stations research include: Base stations are responsible for more than 70% of CO2 emissions in the mobile use phase Operators should increasingly seek to utilise feederless sites and distributed site architecture as means of reducing inefficiency Adopting measures suggested under the transformational model will enable operators to reduce base station CO2 emissions by up to 30% Cellular News reports.
Few months back I posted On Her Majesty’s (Fraudband) Service suggesting how the British ISPs deceive in terms of advertised and delivered speed. New research by broadband comparison site Broadband-Expert has revealed that, on average, UK mobile broadband providers are delivering just 24% of advertised download speeds to consumers who sign up for their mobile broadband services. BBC reports.
Foreign investors, including non-resident Bangladeshi citizens, have been again declared persona non grata in Bangladesh’s crumbling international telecoms business.The regulator has invited public consultation and clause 6.01 of the proposed IGW, ICX and IIG licensing guidelines explicitly forbids any form of offshore investment. The nine-month old political government is keen to build “Digital Bangladesh.” But its regulator is following the immediate past military regime’s roadmap to improve the illegal bypass accounts’ digits.