In its 2005-06 budget (Khaleda Zia) the Bangladesh government imposed a regressive Taka 900 tax on each SIM that was issued. We describe the tax as regressive because, if it was passed on to customers, it would hurt the low-user segment (generally the poorer segment) of the market more, because it’s a fixed tax that does not vary with use. The mobile operators did not quite understand what the government wanted to do and decided to absorb the tax. They made various pleas and protests and got the tax reduced to Taka 800. Finally, in 2008, they decided they had enough and decided to pass on most of the tax to customers.
This might not be good news for the proponents of Net Neutrality. Barack Obama has recently edited his website with significant revisions to the technology plans. Guess what goes out. A large paragraph on Net Neutrality! (which is reproduced below): [quote] Users must be free to access content, to use applications, and to attach personal devices.
Considering five fundamental rights applications yesterday (Sept 22), the Supreme Court issued an interim order against the implementation of the Environment Tax, reported Lanka Dissent. The petitioners were Ven. Maduluwawe Sobhitha Thera, Ven. Kiniyawala Palitha Thera, Telshan Network and Swarnavahini. The SC ordered the immediate suspension of the gazette notification announcing the new tax, and fixed December 01st as the next day of hearing.
Business Standard | Priyanka Joshi / Mumbai September 21, 2008, 0:31 IST Internet search giant Google hopes to hook the millions of cellular phone subscribers in India who do not use data or SMS-based services with its voice-based search. It is conducting pilot projects in Hyderabad and Delhi, and is expected to roll out more in Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkata shortly. The company is expected to add audio playback for search queries on local news and entertainment.
LIRNEasia is, among other things, a research organization. Good research is what goes through peer review. But peer review requires a lot of genuflection to the prior literature (not that easy to do, sitting in Sri Lanka/India/etc, and lacking access to all the relevant journals (despite the wonders made possible by Google). It takes a horrendously long time. So it is with some pleasure that we see that peer review is being melded with blogging in the hope of accelerating the process: “Although Web 2.
When I started teaching, a weekly visit to the library was a necessary ritual. Physically leafing through the indexes and abstracts, writing down the classification numbers (I still fondly recall the HE 7700s), and then walking into the stacks to pick up the books, scan for others that may be of interest that didn’t come up from the indexes, sitting in some corner trying to decide which ones to haul back to the office . . . these were familiar and pleasurable activities.
This is an old idea in a new photograph. Taken from the Saturday on-line edition of Daily Mirror.lk. One hand typing is fun. Not to mention modem-free Internet.
One local telco CEO recently whined about being viewed as a cigarette manufacturer. “Everybody wants to tax us, as if mobiles are a product more hazardous than cigarettes. Tobacco kills, mobiles don’t; communication facilitates better living conditions and saves environment because it reduces transport. It is gross unfair both are seen in the same light.” As Wikipedia tells us, cigarettes are a significant source of tax revenue in many localities.
According to a recent report households that do not have broadband access could be spending a fortune on other household goods and services. Over recent years an increasing number of consumers have started to use the Internet to find the best deals on everything from holidays and cars to household goods, entertainment, finance, services, and more. The increased Internet access that has come about as a result of more and more people getting onto broadband connections has meant that consumers have been able to scour the web to get the best deals, thus saving money on other products and services. A recent report from the Post Office service has suggested that homes that do not have broadband access and therefore are not able to get online to look for these savings could be paying far more than they need to for many of their goods and services, with some spending more each month due to lack of savings than it would cost them to get online via broadband. In fact the research suggests that some households without broadband could be spending around seventy pounds a month more for their goods and services than those that do have broadband and are […]
The study was conducted by Ms. Helani Galpaya. She first went over the overview of the Maldives, both in general and telecommunications. Previous monopoly partially privatized, and Dhiraagu is established in 1988 and continues to dominate the market. 10% of GDP is attributed to communication services, of which telecom is dominant.
I am guilty of not being on any of the social networking sites. All the invitations I receive, I designate as junkmail. It’s not luddism, nor incompetence, nor arrogance. Just simple lack of time. Just to deal with my email and tend to this website, I need 26 hours a day.
US trade group, 3G Americas has published a research report focusing on restrictions on the use of SMS as an emergency alert service. It says there are serious limitations in third party Emergency Alert Systems (EAS). In particular, because of the general architecture of CDMA, TDMA and GSM cellular networks, such systems will not be able to deliver a high volume of emergency messages in a short period of time. ”SMS is touted as being able to deliver critical information during disaster events, and such services have been purchased by universities and municipalities hoping to protect the general public,” stated Patrick Traynor, Ph.D.
India has been portrayed as a beehive of innovation, where engineers at Indian subsidiaries of global technology companies design sophisticated new products for global markets. The reality is quite different, as most companies do mainly product maintenance and testing, and development of small components of products in India, according to Sudin Apte, an analyst at Forrester Research, and Vinay Deshpande, a developer of the Simputer, a handheld computer designed in India. Their sentiments are shared by a range of others in IT in India. “The situation is a lot better than it was some years ago, but most Indian operations of multinational companies are still far away from defining and architecting products,” Deshpande said. Read more.
Government has released the 2008 second quarter economic performance data, which shows, again, that the telecom sector is growing the fastest, at 23.2 per cent (as against 21 per cent, 2007 Q2), followed by mining and quarrying at 19.6 per cent. In his weekly newspaper column in the Lankadeepa, Mr Udaya Gammanpila, the Chairman of the Central Environmental Authority and the main proponent of mobile-specific taxes, has posed the question to me why the mobile sector keeps growing even as they keep loading taxes on it. For example, the mobile subscriber levy of 10 percent of every bill was in effect in 2008 Q2.
The Aspen Institute has published a report entitled, ‘m-Powering India: Mobile Communications for Inclusive Growth’ co-authored by Mahesh Uppal and Richard P. Adler, which documents the discussions from the Aspen Institute India/ C & S Joint Roundtable on Communication Policy held in Kovalam, India in February, 2008. LIRNEasia’s Executive Director, Rohan Samarajiva, participated at the event, which brought together senior representatives from the telecommunications industry, government and academia. The objective of the meeting was to develop policy proposals that would contribute to the development of low-cost and high-quality telecom infrastructure needed to facilitate seamless transactions of mobile commerce. A summary of the main recommendation (as documented in the report) is given below.
The study was undertaken by Payal Malik. The liberalization was done in 2000, and there has been a large increase in the total number of subscribers. Mobile increases expediently from 2004, this is partly due to the TRAI allocating CDMA subscribers into the mobile category as opposed to fixed. Year on year growth scores show that the mobile sector is growing as well. Rohan: It is useful to get the CAGR scores for comparison as well.