Was the title of a talk I gave to the Colombo West Rotary Club today. Was reinvited after 9 years. Then we had less than 300,000 phones in the country. Now close to 9 million. Doing better; but can do much better.
Strange is the day I come out in support of taxes; and today is very strange. But please read this in context: we wish the 10% tax had not been imposed on mobiles; but there was absolutely no reason to tax mobile while exempting fixed; that is why I support the extension of the tax to fixed CDMA. But for some reason the government seems to have difficulty in doing anything right the first time. Why, for God’s sake protect fixed wireline? These are most privileged people in the country.
Not everyone is convinced that Indian telecom market is developing fast. “In Beijing I see everybody having a mobile in hand, male or female, old or young and rich or poor..”. says one Chinese participant at WWRF, “…I do not see Indians using mobiles like that” (He is surprised to learn in South Asia not every user owns a mobile phone!
In the great tradition of banning everything that moves, Minister Sumedha Jayasena has stated that the government is considering banning the use of mobile phones by children. Isn’t this an unjustified intrusion by government into a decision best left to parents? And doesn’t Mrs Jayasena have more important things to do, like enforce existing (and ignored) prohibitions on child labor? In a country where law and order is deteriorating, the government has no business trying to take away the right of parents to be in touch with their children. Ethalaya බාලවයස්කරුවන්ට සෙලියුලර් තහනම් වේද ?
At Wireless World Research Forum meeting currently held in Chennai, there were two presentations on Mesh Networking. While Chanuka Wattegama of LIRNEasia spoke about the Sri Lankan experience, Sharad Jaiswal of Bell Labs, India presented a similar initiative in Bangalore. There were many similarities between the two on the approach. VillageNet, the Bangalore initiative, is a low cost IEEE 802.11 WiFi based mesh network designed for connecting villages in rural India, providing low-cost broadband Internet access for wide regions.
The Colloquium that was a follow-on from the discussion held in Kandalama regarding KPIs was conducted by Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara and Shamistra Soysa. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are those that help in measuring the success of the day to day activities of an organization. This means that the KPIs would lead to KRIs. First the mission statement was reviewed, with comment on the structure to highlight the important areas. Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara noted the critical success factor that would feed into the strategies and thereby facilitate the mission statement.
Chennai, Nov 6. Perhaps not surprisingly, the messages from most of the speakers are the same at the Wireless World Research Forum, currently held here. Asian telecom markets are booming; (Where else you see one country adding 7 million new mobile customers per month?) this is the right time to take ICTs to rural and less privileges sections of the society; affordability too, not just technology is a key issue, and wireless, not wired is perhaps the sure solution that can make the transformation. More or less, that is the bottom-line emerging.
Given that Asian countries are taking the lead in mobile software applications (in Sri Lanka, already using open source), this is a very exciting development. LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE – LBO A Google-led international alliance announced Monday it is releasing open-source software that will free developers to bring the full power of desktop computing to mobile devices. The Open Handset Alliance bills “Android” as the first comprehensive mobile operating platform that software developers are free to adapt in any ways they wish for video, audio, social networking and other features. “We are developing a very open system and will distribute all the codes to allow people to innovate on mobile devices,” Google co-founder Serge Brin said in a conference call with the press and other alliance members. “I’m really excited about this and I can’t wait to see what the next generation of innovators is able to do with these tools.
Asian evidence says the best explanation for the take up of texting is the ratio of price of a voice call to cost of a text. Is this also the explanation for the UK? BBC NEWS | Technology | Britons sending 1bn texts weekly Britons are now sending more than one billion text messages per week according to the latest figures from the Mobile Data Association (MDA). The figure is 25% higher than a year ago and is set to shatter forecasts for how many text messages have been sent to and from handsets this year. That weekly total is the same as the number sent during the whole of 1999.
UNCTAD has released “Manual for the Production of Statistics on the Information Economy” which it claims to be a reference for national statistical offices and other producers of official statistics on business use of information and communications technology (ICT). The Manual provides a guide to data collection and analysis, international standards, and definitions. It also offers model questions for surveys on ICT use, and it reviews important institutional issues related to compiling ICT statistics. Download it free.
The Sri Lanka telecom regulator has taken a welcome step to consult stakeholders on a regulatory agenda. Interesting list has been generated (my top item, transparent licensing within a defined framework, is missing, but I won’t complain just yet). The test of this exercise is twofold: What will be the highest priority items and how quickly and effectively will those items be acted upon? LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE – LBO Sri Lanka’s teleco operators are pushing the industry regulator to remove technology limits and allow networks to share resources as part of a broad plan to liberalise the market further, officials said. The wish list — prepared during an industry pow-wow with the telecom watchdog last week — also includes prickly issues like allowing free incoming calls for seven million mobile phone users, re-aligning spectrum and allowing users to keep their own number when switching to rival operators.
Google Phone – New York Times Mr. Rubin is one of the primary architects behind another product that also smacks of potential über-coolness — the Google Phone. As Google’s “director of mobile platforms,” Mr. Rubin oversees dozens of engineers who are developing the software at the company’s sprawling campus here. The software embodies the promise of extending Google’s reach at a time when cellphones allow consumers to increasingly untether themselves from their desktop computers, as well as the threat that greater digital mobility poses to Google’s domination of Internet search.
Excerpt from an article contributed to Montage, Sri Lanka’s only English language news magazine. LIRNEasia is starting a small research initiative on establishing benchmarks for broadband quality. Real broadband « Montage So what do we want the operators to do? When you sell us a 512 Kbps residential connection or a 2 Mbps business connection, try to give us something approaching what you promised. Most of the time.
There was a big story about SMS use declining in India. The response to a question whether Sri Lanka SMS use is declining like in India was answered in the negative by Supun Weerasinghe, the new CEO of Dialog Mobile (Hans Wijayasuriya is now the Group CEO). The question was triggered by the decline of SMS and VAS revenues from LKR 1,468 m in 2006 3Q (8% of total revenues) to LKR 1,223 m in 2007 3Q (5% of total revenues).
i4d : The first monthly magazine on ICT4D Our vision is to build a new outsourcing model to provide employment in rural India with the following objectives: New sources of skill enhancement – currently the opportunities available in rural areas are either related to agriculture or skills like masonry. Such opportunities will introduce the rural workforce to a new set of skills. Increasing the purchasing power – new sources of income from the rural BPOs will ensure greater purchasing capability and help improve the quality of life in rural areas. Increasing the income earning capacity of rural Internet kiosks – Additional revenue from DesiCrew would also make the existing Internet based businesses more viable. Reducing the gender divide – Educated young girls and housewives who cannot traverse distances can be brought into the workforce, hence enabling the enhancement in existing household income levels.
i4d, a reputed Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) magazine, recently featured an article co-written by LIRNEasia researcher Ayesha Zainudeen based on LIRNEasia‘s Teleuse at the Bottom of the Pyramid study conducted in 2006. The article highlights the study’s main findings with a special emphasis on the gendered aspects of telecommunications use at the BOP. Phones at the bottom of the pyramid: Telecom Accessibility – i4d Magazine In a 2006 five-country study, which was conducted by LIRNEasia, researchers asked 6,269 respondents in Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Thailand about their access to, and use of telephones. Those surveyed were all users at the lowest socio-economic strata in the countries, at ‘the bottom of the pyramid’ (BOP). Their responses revealed many differences between users in the five countries, but more interestingly, inter-country inequalities in phone use between men and women.