Indonesia is emerging as a hot broadband market, mainly as a result of the increasing availability of high-speed 3G and HSDPA mobile services. According to Arjun Trivedi, the head of business in Indonesia for Nokia Siemens Networks, high speed mobile services are now the dominant form of broadband access in the country. He says, “In Indonesia today, there are slightly more than a million broadband users. Quite a substantial number of these – we estimate some 60 per cent – are wireless broadband users, principally using HSDPA. We also estimate that there are about 400,000 fixed broadband users and a little over 600,000 mobile broadband users.
The Colloquium hopes to assess how the project can be sustained within the Sarvodaya arena. Chaminda Rajakaruna opened the presentation with a brief introduction to Sarvodaya. Sarvodaya is a widely expanded grassroots levels organisation. He went on to present the vision of the Deshodaya as well. Purpose of the intervention was to take the mssge behind Sarvodaya and Deshodaya to the media through text, video and audio.
Lakbima News, 10 August 2008: An article published in the Lakbima News documents an interview held with Prof. Rohan Samarajiva on the proposed mobile phone taxes in Sri Lanka: “Economic incentives are used to help the environment. The objective of such measures is not to make money – the sole objective should be to prevent people from doing things harmful to the environment. But if we take the two per cent envy levy on mobiles – for this to qualify as an incentive, it should modify certain behaviour…the behaviour that is modified is the use of mobile phones.”
Nicholas Negroponte said, in the context of the United States, that all that was carried on wireguides would shift to wireless (e.g., telephony) and all that was carried by wireless (e.g., television) would shift to wireguides.
When he built Parakrama Samudraya a millennium ago, King Parakramabahu the great did not have to depend on the Internet. How lucky! Had it been so, he would have achieved few great feats. The pitiable Broadband services at Polonnaruva looked as if we have not made any advances since the days of the Great King. Both SLT and Dialog boast about their island wide networks.
The Telecoms Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has recommended that the country’s Department of Telecommunications allow MVNOs to operate in the sub-continent under a new licensing scheme. In a major new policy document, the TRAI lays out a plan to permit interested companies to establish MVNOs, negotiate network leasing agreements with existing mobile network operators and to select from three different available service models. The MVNO licenses will be issued under conditions very similar to those currently applicable to existing MNOs and with similar eligibility terms including FDI caps and limits on service areas. This means MVNO licenses will effectively be tied to the operating licence of their MNO partners with the main difference of approach being in the entry fees payable by MVNOs compared to existing MNOs. Read more.
The new Competition Commission of Pakistan has entered into competition with the Pakistan Telecom Authority. If the FCC had sole authority over telecom in the US, we wouldn’t probably have the Internet in its present form. That’s a controversial statement, but one that can be defended. AT&T was broken up and space created for the efflorescence of multiple providers of communication services and products by the Antitrust Division of the US Department of Justice, not by the FCC. I state this upfront to indicate that I am not against telecom operators being regulated by multiple agencies.
LIRNEasia’s ‘Rapid Response Program’ is exactly what the name suggests. We react to immediate information needs of telecom regulators, at short notice. The response might not be lengthy and as comprehensive as we would like it to be, but nevertheless helpful, as Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) have realised. LIRNEasia saw BTRC’s move to issue three new Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) licenses a positive development, as Bangladesh is certainly not a country that can boast of quality and affordable broadband. This is what we learnt from our research: Exceptionally high cost of broadband remains a key barrier that prevents the development of the BPO industry in Bangladesh.
From Sify.com Frederick Noronha (IANS) | Thursday, 07 August , 2008, 11:40 Bangalore: India is growing by leaps and bounds when it comes to mobile use, but it could be doing better, the authors of a new book on policy roadblocks to communication growth in South Asia have said. LIRNEasia executive director Rohan Samarajiva and researcher Ayesha Zainudeen, editors of the book ‘ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia: Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks’, told IANS in an interview that over the study period, India’s mobile connectivity was overtaken in per-capita terms by both Pakistan and Bangladesh. “There is still a large gap between rural and urban telephone growth, as highlighted in the book, due to flawed policy implementation (at the time of writing),” said Samarajiva.
Perhaps a phone call to the Pakistan Telecom Authority may help the TRC design a practical solution. Unregistered SIMs that are not connected to specific human beings/legal entities are a problem in any country. Operators should not issue such SIMs, in Pakistan or in Sri Lanka. Focused action on these SIMs, if any, will yield better results for security than taking photographs of millions of people, as Mobitel plans. State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan The initiative taken by Senate’s Standing Committee on Interior to curb unregistered Subscriber Identity Modules (SIMs) Card culture has resulted in blockage of eight million unidentified connections, said Senator Talha Mehmood, Chairman of the committee, here on Friday.
What is the correct computer literacy figure in Sri Lanka? Is there one figure? We ask this because we hear different answers. According to HE the President of Sri Lanka it is pretty impressive at 25%. This what he said in the 60th Independence day speech as reported by Daily News the next day: “We have given our nation every opportunity to link with the technologically developed world.
Instead of a either/or response, a thoughtful contribution from Vint Cerf, now at Google: Google backs ISP-guaranteed minimum data rates One side effect of the FCC’s recent move against Comcast’s P2P “delaying” technology has been to make discussions about the dark art of network management even more pressing (and they were pretty pressing before). If Comcast can’t use TCP reset packets to limit the number of BitTorrent connections a client can spawn, what legitimate techniques can ISPs use to deal with congestion ? Google’s Vint Cerf, one of the grandfathers of the Internet, today weighed in withn his answer: transmission rate caps.
Mobile payments provider, Obopay has inked a deal with Grameen Solutions to deliver banking services to a billion of the world’s poorest people by 2018. The Grameen-Obopay Bank A Billion Initiative will provide access to affordable financial services, including cross-border remittances, money transfer, payments, savings and credit accounts. Cellular-News reports more. The Economic Times of India questions: Do we need regulations for these payments or do we need technological standards than operational guidelines? In case we need regulations and guidelines for mobile payments; we also need regulations for internet and phone banking.
Emboldened by its recent legal victory over net bully Comcast, the San Francisco based digital right defence organisation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched a throttling detection tool aptly dubbed the “Switzerland Network Testing Tool” (Switzerland = neutrality). The software immediately lets users know if their ISP is throttling downloads, cutting VoIP calls or otherwise tampering with the unlimited, neutral broadband connection they are paying for. Read more.
Orwellian drama continues – with some mobile operators taking it to a level far beyond the expectations of the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka with the two magic words ‘National Security’ wining everyone’s blind approval. Now Mobitel wants a photograph of every subscriber – either to register or re-register. (Wasn’t it irresponsible for Mobitel in the first place to provide a connection to somebody not registered with them? – beats us!) They have shutterbugs ready for tasks at their outlets.
It is evident from Mobile Benchmarks south asia that Sri Lanka has low mobile prices, but not the lowest. Looks like the Sri Lankan operators are working on changing that. The OECD methodology that is the basis for the mobile benchmarking by LIRNEasia treats a minute as a minute, while the proposed pricing scheme differentiates. We will start working on a solution. The approach used by the operator makes sense within the budget telecom network business model that we are beginning to describe.