With foreign journalists barred from what is one of the world’s most closed states, much of the worldwide media coverage is coming from exiled newshounds in countries such as Thailand and India — and their clandestine contacts on the inside. Technology ranging from the latest Internet gizmo to satellite uplinks to camera phones are ensuring pictures of the massed marches of monks and civilians and the response by security forces is on TV screens around the world in hours. The contrast to Myanmar’s last major uprising, in 1988, could not be more stark. Then, as many as 3,000 people were killed when soldiers opened fire on the crowds but it took days for the news — let alone pictures or video footage — to emerge. “The difference is night and day,” said Dominic Faulder, a Bangkok-based British reporter during the 1988 uprising.
Paper titled ‘Wireless Mesh Networking as a means of connecting rural communities: advantages, constrains and challenges – an analysis based on a case study from rural Sri Lanka’ co-authored by Chanuka Wattegama (LIRNEasia) and Rehana Wijesinghe (Enterprise Technology) has been accepted to be presented at the Wireless World Research Forum Meeting to be held 5-7 November, Chennai, India. The objectives of this paper are to discuss the appropriateness of Wireless Mesh Networking in a rural environment in empowering the community, the design and implementation challenges and how they were addressed, related policy issues including the unlicensing of 2.4 GHz and 5.1 GHz bands and explore the possibilities of replicating the Mahavilachchiya model. WWRF (http://www.
BY VERONICA S. CUSI, Businessworld THE PHILIPPINES was the second fastest-growing market for broadband worldwide in 2006, according to a study by UK-based research and consultancy firm Ovum. This was primarily due, however, to the fact that broadband is just taking off in the country, and Ovum said growth could be significantly higher if regulators allow more competition that would lead to cheaper services. Greece took the top spot in the study, and the other countries in the top ten list were Indonesia, India, Ukraine, Ireland, Thailand, Vietnam, Russia and Turkey. Total broadband growth in the Philippines from 2005 to 2006 was at 157% while Greece’s was 168%, Datamonitor affiliate Ovum said.
LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE – LBO “We hope to have 100 percent population coverage within the next 12 months, from 90 percent we have now,” Wijayasuriya said. “About 60 percent of our 450 million dollar investment pipeline for the next two-years will go into mobile, the rest into new areas like WiMax, cable TV, fixed-line telephones and grow our Internet business,” Wijayasuriya said. Powered by ScribeFire.
Asia Times Online Most Internet accounts in Myanmar are designed to provide access only to the limited Myanmar intranet, and the authorities block access to popular e-mail services such as Gmail and Hotmail. According to the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a joint research project on Internet censorship issues headed by Harvard University, Myanmar’s Internet-censorship regime as of 2005 was among the “most extensive” in the world. The research noted that the Myanmar government “maintains the capability to conduct surveillance of communication methods such as e-mail, and to block users from viewing websites of political opposition groups and organizations working for democratic change in Burma”. An ONI-conducted survey of websites containing material known to be sensitive to the regime found in 2005 that 84% of the pages they tested were blocked. The regime also maintained an 85% filtration rate of well-known e-mail service providers, in line with, as ONI put it, the government’s “well-documented efforts to monitor communication by its citizens and to control political dissent and opposition movements”.
Computer enthusiasts in the developed world will soon be able to get their hands on the so-called “$100 laptop”. The organisation behind the project has launched the “give one, get one” scheme that will allow US residents to purchase two laptops for $399 (£198). One laptop will be sent to the buyer whilst a child in the developing world will receive the second machine. The G1G1 scheme, as it is known, will offer the laptops for just two weeks, starting on the 12 November. The offer to the general public comes after the project’s founder admitted that concrete orders from the governments of developing nations had not always followed verbal agreements.
TelecomTV – TelecomTV One – News The problem with this view is that Google has, apparently, already tried and failed several times to get a satisfactory price on capacity from existing trans-Pacific cable providers. The company certainly understands the unit costs of fibre networks as it already owns such infrastructure in the continental United States and, as the world’s Internet leviathan, is reportedly frustrated that it can’t get a decent price on the trans-Pacific route – although that is hardly surprising given that most of the capacity on such pathways is controlled by the very Tier 1 telcos that regard Google as a freeloader and undeserving beneficiary of much of the value of the Internet economy. Google doesn’t want to build a cable to sell bandwidth to third parties (although that could be a natural consequence and corollary of its plans), but because, as a voracious generator and recipient of Internet traffic, it wants to control its own destiny . And as our Friday report indicates, Google doesn’t want to build the cable unilaterally. Rather it would much prefer to share the price of construction and deployment with consortium partners so it can gain access to a fibre pair on […]
Software That Fills a Cellphone Gap – New York Times Rural cellularization may not sound like much, but Mr. Bose is a follower of Clayton M. Christensen, the management guru, who also happens to serve on Vanu’s board. Mr. Christensen told him that the best place to start a new business is where there isn’t yet an established market.
Sign of the times? No longer are universal service subsidies offered for bare bones basic service; broadband is being considered for subsidy. With massive amounts piling up in the USF, they need to be innovative to get it out. Of course, there is another option: reduce or eliminate the US levies. TRAI issues draft recommendations for broadband growth Dismayed by the poor penetration of broadband services, telecom regulator TRAI today brought out a new draft that recommends subsidising the service in remote and hilly areas.
AFP (via Google) Home to some 1.5 billion people, South Asia is paying a high price to access the Internet as service providers have been slow to deliver cheaper broadband connections, analysts say. The region has embraced telephones, mobile phones and computers and India has a flourishing software and outsourcing industry, noted industry watchers at the first South Asia Broadband Congress here earlier this month. But South Asia has lagged behind in hopping onto the broadband bandwagon, observed Sanjay Gupta of India’s Midas Communication Technology. Powered by ScribeFire.
This past weekend I spoke at the second Knowledge Forum for journalists organized by Sri Lanka Telecom Limited, Sri Lanka’s largest fixed and broadband service provider in Habarana. Over 40 journalists from print and electronic media participated in this two and a half day event. A majority of speakers were from within the Company, but they had invited 3-4 speakers including me to speak on related subjects. I made a presentation on Teleuse@BOP and also participated in an interesting discussion about congestion around the time of some form of “disaster” event, such as the recent false warning on a tsunami. In LIRNEasia’s thinking, the media play an extremely important role in policy and regulation, because they constitute the symbolic environment within which stakeholders act.
It has been a practice at LIRNEasia to write an assessment of the responses to potentially tsunamigenic events in the region. We commented on Nias and Pangandaran. Now that the discussion on the response is starting, here is our take: Lessons from the Sri Lanka tsunami warnings and evacuation of September 12-13, 2007 The tragedy of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was the absence of any official warning. The September 12th Bengkulu earthquake shows that this is unlikely to be the case in the future. We have seen that the new institutions created since the 2004 tsunami have the will and the capacity to act.
The National Disaster Warning centre (NDWC) Thailand, has defended its decision not to issue an early tsunami alert after the 8.4-magnitude earthquake off the west coast of Indonesia’s Sumatra Island on Wednesday evening. Instead, the NDWC made a broadcast three hours later telling people there was no cause for alarm. Centre chairman Smith Dharmasarojana said yesterday the delay was based on a thorough analysis of the situation. The NDWC decided against a sudden TV broadcast to warn people about a possible tsunami because it predicted the quake, which struck about 6.
It is unlikely that the thin-client vision can be realized in the developing world in the short term unless connectivity and power supplies get a lot better, fast. However, the basic concept may become operationalized through the mobile. For Networks, Thin Is In – New York Times A decade ago, the network computer — also called the thin-client computer — was promoted as a replacement for personal computers and desktop software. Thin clients have no hard drives to store desktop applications, like Microsoft’s Word or Excel, permanently. The leading supporters of the inexpensive, terminal-style machines were Microsoft’s archrivals at Oracle and Sun Microsystems.
BBC News| Technology Swedish company TerraNet has developed the idea using peer-to-peer technology that enables users to speak on its handsets without the need for a mobile phone base station. The technology is designed for remote areas of the countryside or desert where base stations are unfeasible. … The TerraNet technology works using handsets adapted to work as peers that can route data or calls for other phones in the network. The handsets also serve as nodes between other handsets, extending the reach of the entire system. Each handset has an effective range of about one kilometre.
Looks like some people can’t get out of the old habits of trying to regulate everything and anything. The license raj is not quite dead, sadly. Parents are best positioned to make these kinds of decisions, not blowhard Babus. The state should not try to micro-manage people’s lives. Leave the decisions to those best positioned to make them; don’t issue regulations that are impossible to enforce.