Railtel Corporation of India, the communication arm of the Indian Railways, is planning to set-up cyber cafes at over 200 major railway stations across the country by the year-end, Railway Minister Nitish Kumar said on Thursday. “The first cyber cafe will be inaugurated on Friday at New Delhi Railway Station. Based on the feedback of the users, we are intending to extend to over 200 important stations in the country in the first phase by the end of this year,” Kumar told reporters at the commissioning of the “optic fibre communication link on Bangalore-Secunderabad, Secunderabad- Vijayawada-Chennai and Chennai-Ooty-Bangalore” here. The railways would also experiment by providing broadband Internet access on moving train, the first such instance in the world, he said. The service would be launched on a train this year.
Despite being a technical book that addresses complexity out of sheer necessity, the text remains readable, sometimes entertainingly so. Phrases such as ‘governance badlands of South and Southeast Asia’ sum up our grim reality, conjuring images that we are all too familiar with. The editors have also done an excellent job in cross-referencing across chapters, so that the book reads more than a mere amalgamation of chapters. I would have preferred the graphs to be larger and clearer, but then, this comes out from an academic publisher. As the editors say, the book is an introduction, not a conclusion, “to a new way of governing, especially in areas that rest on specialised, yet incomplete, knowledge such as infrastructure.
Remember in Star Trek Dr. Leonard McCoy, nicknamed Bones, would use a handheld device (shaped like a mobile phone) to scan the vital signs report of a patient; the little screen on the device would make some electronic noises and display some random illuminated pixels, which he would interpret to diagnose the condition of the patient; thereafter, he would use the same device or the wrist device to call “Sick Bay” tell them what to do with patient diagnosed outside of the facility. He would even transfer the diagnostic report to Sick-Bay for the on duty staff to pickup to get ready before the patient arrived. A team of researchers at the University of California, Berkley are using mobile phones that display faint blue dots on the screen received through a text message to diagnose signatures of Malaria. The Science and Technology article of the Economists tells the story about Dr.
LIRNEasia might not be as high tech as some of the big IT players but in our own way we have made a successful effort to make ourselves a virtual team. Not a choice – that was the only way we could operate in multiple countries (For example, in this cycle, TRE surveys will be in nine countries – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Maldives, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand; not to mention CPRSouth 3 in Beijing)without budgets comparable to what INGOs use to run regional networks. We also thought our own experiences will be useful for others. Hence the Virtual Organisation (VO) project. It had two aspects; developing the VO and using it to conduct LIRNEasia’s other research projects.
Africa is the world’s fastest growing market for mobile phones over the last three years with 65 million new subscribers in 2007 alone, according to the head of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Hamadoun Touré, ITU Secretary-General, said the figure is cited in the United Nations agency’s regional report entitled “African Telecommunication/ICT Indicators 2008: At a Crossroads,” which he presented at the opening of the ITU Telecom Africa trade fair here on Monday. A UN press release quoted Toure as saying, “Today, the African ICT industry is an exciting place to be. Market liberalization continues and most countries have established regulatory bodies to ensure a fair, competitive and enabling environment.” The report indicated that there were more than 250 million mobile subscribers on the continent at the start of 2008.
Chief ministerial candidate Rauff Hakeem told ‘Lanka Dissent’ that the Ministry of Defence has ordered service providers to interrupt mobile phone services in the Eastern Province, which goes to polls tomorrow (May 10th). He also said that the government was preparing to stage a massive vote rigging on election day and the move seems to prevent the outside world from getting information on those violations in the East. As a former Minister of Posts and Telecommunications, Mr. Hakeem said the Defence Ministry could give such orders only on matters pertaining to national security. The chief ministerial candidate added that he would initiate legal action against any service provider and other responsible officials if such undue interruptions are effected tomorrow.
This article summarizes the series of event leading up to the impact, the events during the devastation, and other noteworthy information pertaining to cyclone Nargis’ encounter in Myanmar (Burma). Before the impact 26-04-2008: The early signs of Nargis developing in the Bay of Bengal were detected by the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) and the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC). “Way back on April 26, we told them a cyclone was coming,” B. P. Yadav said, referring to general warnings of a growing storm.
There has been a continuing discussion on this website about “free” WiFi. We were of the opinion that sustainability depended on some kind of payment, directly or as part of a bundle of services. The lights are going out on the metropolitan WiFi networks in the cities that did not address this issue. The linked article, which refers primarily to use of WiFi by travellers, shows that the solutions are beginning to settle in a sustainable range. The battle between free and paid wireless Internet access is starting to look like a draw.
It would be the biggest thing to pass between India and South Africa since Mahatma Gandhi moved from one country to the other. This week it emerged that Bharti Airtel, the largest mobile-phone operator in India, is holding “exploratory” talks to buy South Africa’s MTN, the biggest operator in Africa. According to the Financial Times, Bharti has indicated it would be willing to pay about $19 billion for 51% of the company. That would make it the heftiest overseas acquisition ever made by an Indian firm, more than Tata Steel paid for Corus, a British steelmaker, and seven times the amount India invested in the whole of Africa over the ten years to 2004. The deal would unite the leading companies in the world’s two most promising mobile markets.
What these kinds of failures of warning (and of relief and response) do is destroy the legitimacy of the government. US First Lady Bush should know: her husband’s downward slide in popularity had much to do with fiasco of the Katrina response. Myanmar’s military rulers were under fire Tuesday after revealing more than 10,000 people died in the cyclone that battered the secretive and impoverished nation, with thousands more missing. As relief agencies scrambled to get food, clean water and supplies into a country that normally scorns foreign aid, US First Lady Laura Bush accused the regime of not doing enough to warn its people about the storm. The criticism from Bush, one of the most prominent critics of Myanmar, came after the junta acknowledged the death toll was far higher than first announced — and made a rare appeal for help from abroad.
NEARLY a third of Hong Kong’s households watch television via the internet, according to a new report from Telecommunications Management group, a consultancy. Because internet protocol television (IPTV) uses the same technology as that which links computer networks, smaller countries with high broadband penetration tend to have more subscribers. As well as plain old programmes, viewers can also enjoy other services such as on-demand video. So far, Europe accounts for over half of the world’s subscribers. http://www.
Those who are old enough might remember the days where you lived in a house that had no telephone. When you want to take a call you went to post office or a public place where telephone facilities are available. In India, Sam Pitroda’s name went into history for the ubiquitous, yellow-signed Public Call Offices (PCO) that enabled cheap and easy domestic and international public telephones all over the country in 1980s. Nearly two decades later the rapid expansion of mobile phones has finally brought that era to an end. Not surprisingly, public pay phones are rarely used these days.
LIRNEasia’s sister organization in Africa is meeting May 6-11 in Cairo to plan its future research activities and disseminate finding from the research already done. LIRNEasia’s Executive Director will participate, presenting on governance, interconnection and banded forbearance and also sharing experiences on conducting studies on teleuse at the BOP and on telecom regulatory environment. Workshop Agenda
Contrary to jingoistic claims that foreign owned telcos draining out local resources, the telecom sector continues to bring in new investment from outside. In Pakistan, at one point, 50% of the FDI was telecom. If the breakdown is provided, it may well be that the telecom sector accounts for 50% of FDI in Sri Lanka too. “The BoI recognized Dialog Telekom as the company with the highest level of realized investment in 2007 totalling 328 million dollars in 2007.” Dialog Telekom, which has over four million subscribers, secured the top slot in investment rankings for the third year in succession having being recognized as Sri Lanka’s largest investor in 2005 and 2006 with investments of 90 million dollars and 150 million dollars.
The globalization paradigm leads people to see economic development as a form of foreign policy, as a grand competition between nations and civilizations. These abstractions, called “the Chinese” or “the Indians,” are doing this or that. But the cognitive age paradigm emphasizes psychology, culture and pedagogy — the specific processes that foster learning. It emphasizes that different societies are being stressed in similar ways by increased demands on human capital. If you understand that you are living at the beginning of a cognitive age, you’re focusing on the real source of prosperity and understand that your anxiety is not being caused by a foreigner.
LIRNEasia International Advisory Board member and regular faculty at LIRNE.NET courses, Dr Tim Kelly, will be joining infoDev as a Senior Policy and Regulation Specialist, effective July 2008. He will guide infoDev’s analytical agenda on encouraging access to ICTs and the mainstreaming of ICTs into key sectors, such as education and health. Tim made significant contributions to the field during the time he headed the Strategic Planning Unit of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) by pushing for the exploration of cutting-edge policy and regulatory issues. For example, I had the pleasure of working with him on an expert workshop on fixed-mobile termination in 2000, an effort that led to good results worldwide.