LIRNEasia has from the beginning seen the value of looking at all infrastructures, and indeed looking at their inter-relationships. Given their places on the adoption curves, we do not believe that electronics can consume 15% of electricity at the BOP in emerging countries, but given the long gestation times of energy projects and reforms, it appears opportune to start thinking about this issue now, rather than later. The proliferation of personal computers, iPods, cellphones, game consoles and all the rest amounts to the fastest-growing source of power demand in the world. Americans now have about 25 consumer electronic products in every household, compared with just three in 1980. Worldwide, consumer electronics now represent 15 percent of household power demand, and that is expected to triple over the next two decades, according to the International Energy Agency, making it more difficult to tackle the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming.
India’s security agencies have recommended a ban on international Internet telephony until a system to trace the calls is in place, officials said, the latest move to plug security loopholes after the Mumbai attacks. India fears that militant groups operating from overseas could use Internet telephony to bypass security systems during the planning and execution of attacks, officials said. “Since it is impossible to trace Internet telephone calls from foreign countries, we have asked the Department of Telecommunications to block such calls until a system is in place,” said a senior Intelligence Bureau official, who could not be identified. More in Reuters.
India’s MTNL and BSNL have been losing fixed subscriptions for years; Sri Lanka joined the club recently. Now we see the heirs to AT&T throwing in the towel. I guess it was like this when the railways replaced the canals. How long will it take for policy makers in emerging Asia to see where the wind is blowing? Roll over in your grave, Alexander Graham Bell.
LIRNEasia’s 2005 research on India’s Universal Service Obligation (USO) policy, conducted by Payal Malik and Harsha de Silva, has been cited in a presentation to the US House of Representatives, in March 2009. The paper presented, entitled, “Using Competitive Bidding to Reform the Universal Service High Cost Fund”, can be downloaded here. As a policy-oriented organization, we are indeed pleased that our research is being used to influence policy, not just in emerging Asia but in other regions as well. LIRNEasia’s paper, “Diversifying Network Participation: Study of India’s Universal Service Instruments” can be downloaded here. More on the study can be found here.
Mobile is the most logical vehicle to deliver affordable broadband. Ovum warns the success or failure of mobile broadband in an emerging market may still be outside an operator’s control. Besides competition, the costs of fuel supplies to remote base stations or international connectivity must be taken seriously in the business plan. “Governments have a major role to play in providing an environment conducive to success; spectrum policy is the clearest example of this, either through its release to operators or through global harmonisation to benefit from economies of scale”, says Daniel Subramaniam, analyst at Ovum and co-author of this report. Governments also hold the keys to unlock several other stimuli for deployment and uptake.
This is the telecoms profile of Bahrain. The tiny Gulf state’s regulator has penalized the incumbent for refusing competitors accessing its international gateway, according to Reuters. Bahrain Telecommunications Company – like any other incumbent – is claiming innocence. The fact remains that if Batelco doesn’t pay within 30 days, the multimillion dollars penalty jumps upward. The clock is ticking for Batelco as the sword is hanging over its head!
It has already happened in the UK and New Zealand. Now Telstra has been asked to voluntarily separate its wholesale and retail arms. Otherwise, the Australian government will do the amputation – with or without anesthesia. The incumbent is, predictably, grumbling about it. Ovum has urged the government to play it right.
Lead Economist, Harsha de Silva and the AgInfo work that he has been leading at LIRNEasia has been featured in the International Development Research Centre’s (IDRC) 2008-2009 Annual Report. Read the full feature here (page 16)
A search is on for the right metaphor. What is the new role for government — a platform? a vending machine, into which we put money to extract services? a facilitator? And what, indeed, is the new role for us — the ones we’ve been waiting for?
Bird-band has outpaced Broadband when a South African technology outfit named Unlimited IT has proved it was faster for them to transmit data with a carrier pigeon than to send it using Telkom , the country’s leading internet service provider, BBC reports. The 11-month-old pigeon, Winston, took one hour and eight minutes to fly the 80 km (50 miles) from Unlimited IT’s offices near Pietermaritzburg to the coastal city of Durban with a data card was strapped to his leg. Whereas, including downloading, the transfer took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds — the time it took for only four percent of the data to be transferred using Telkom’s ADSL. Unlimited IT performed the stunt after becoming frustrated with slow internet transmission times. The company has 11 call-centers around the country and regularly sends data to its other branches.
The engineers are skeptic about mobile broadband because they think it’s hard to manage an all-IP network. The voice-centric good old TDM networks are lot easier to handle. The investors lack interest in mobile broadband because 3G licenses are quite expensive. They prefer to continue the legacy of GSM as the ROI is pretty good. Most of the governments are obsessed with auctioning the 3G licenses because of the guaranteed windfall.
Levels of trust between utility regulators and operators around the world are improving, claims a survey, though the report also warns that trust remains a fragile commodity which can easily be broken. The report, produced by KPMG and EIU, examines the level of trust between regulators and operators across five utility sectors – telecoms, power, water, transport and post. Few key findings of this survey include: 75 percent of regulators see themselves as strong performers regarding the consistency of their decisions and rulings. Only 30 percent of operators share that view. A net 32 percent of regulators feel that trust between the two parties has improved in the past year whereas a net 18 percent of operators share that view.
Farouk Abdul Aziz Al-Kasim, a migrant Iraqi geologist, and his Norwegian counterpart drafted Norway’s petroleum regulation during a fishing trip in 1970. Norway’s parliament wasted no time and unanimously approved it to govern the hydrocarbon sector. This created the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate, the oil industry regulator, and Statoil, the national oil company (now known as StatoilHydro). The Norwegian regulatory model retained the private sector’s competitive drive and its expertise. It also ensured enough regulatory independence to rein in the state oil company as well as its private-sector peers.
We wrote a few weeks back that fixed-mobile substitution that was decreasing fixed subscriptions in India and Pakistan had arrived in Sri Lanka. Instead of waiting for more fixed phones to be disconnected, Sri Lanka Telecom is taking proactive steps to keep its customers. Shows that competition delivers what court cases and regulation cannot. Sri Lanka Telecom, the island’s dominant fixed line operator, said it was offering lower rates and discounts in new subscriber packages amid intensifying competition among phone companies. In its new post-paid tariff plans called ‘V talk’, call rates to fixed and mobile phones have been reduced up to 35 percent and monthly rental reduced up to 48 percent, the company said in a statement.
Broadband user testing is nothing new. Tools to measure the speed of a link were available even in pre-net days. Later, they became more user-friendly, more sophisticated and better looking. Today you can pick one from a gamut of tools to instantly find out the speed of your link. Then why AT-Tester?
Full participation in the global Internet Economy requires electronic connectivity of considerable complexity. Today, due to a worldwide wave of liberalization and technological and business innovations in the mobile space, much of the world is electronically connected, albeit not at the levels that would fully support participation in the global Internet Economy. Yet, many millions of poor people are engaging in tasks normally associated with the Internet such as information retrieval, payments and remote computing using relatively simple mobiles. Understanding the business model that enabled impressive gains in voice connectivity as well as the beginnings of more-than-voice applications over mobiles is important not only because widespread broadband access among the poor is likely to be achieved by extending this model but because it would be the basis of coherent and efficacious policy and regulatory responses… This is an excerpt from a background report by Rohan Samarajiva, to be presented at “Policy coherence in the application of information and communication technologies for development,” a joint workshop organized by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Information for Development Program (infoDev) / World Bank from 10-11 September 2009 in Paris. The report has been published in the OECD’s Development […]