To lose your mobile phone is unfortunate but to flush it down the toilet is especially careless, although common, if new figures are to be believed. Research suggests that 885,000 (drunk and sober) subjects of Queen Elizabeth helplessly watch their handsets disappearing into the ‘black hole’ every year. That’s roughly £342 million flushing (not contributing) to Her Majesty’s sewage network. The study also reveals that 810,000 mobiles were left in the pub each year, with 315,000 left in the back of a taxi and 225,000 on a bus. Pet dogs in UK apparently chewed their way through 58,500 handsets last year, while another 116,000 went through a spin cycle with the dirty laundry, reports The Telegraph.
How times change. The Vietnamese national telecoms operator VNPT has opened an office in the US, partly with the aim of tapping into the two million and more Vietnamese now resident in the country and who make 400 million minutes of calls to their ancestral homeland each year. Read more.
Initial enthusiasm for WiFi waned when cities that initially wanted to deploy free wireless networks realised the task requires experienced industry partners with a different view of the business model. Cities also discovered they had a political fight on their hands with carriers, other special interest groups and political parties arguing that government has no place in the telecoms business. Read more.
We have generally tried to focus on the fundamental issues of access to ICT infrastructure, and not the esoteric issues of Internet governance. However, after two and half years, we are beginning to think of broadening the scope a little. The anti-competitive uses of intellectual property have so far been discussed on this blog only in relation to attempts to claim a patent on the way the Sinhala language is standardized for the computer. Here is another aspect. A Patent Lie – New York Times Vonage developed one of the first Internet telephone services and has attracted more than two million customers.
Rohan Samarajiva and Helani Galpaya discuss how research can influence the policy process. We are an evidence-based policy organization. We work around: Inputs (money, people, etc etc) Outputs (reports, training courses, etc) Outcomes (positive changes in the policy process) IDRC: Putting money into research organizations which produce knowledge produces development. Not just putting money into ICTs. Ways that research can affect policy: 1.
For those who believed that privacy issues will take a long time come up in South Asia . . . The relevant definition is “the ability to control the boundary conditions of social interactions.” BBC NEWS | South Asia | India cell phone curbs welcomed Indian cellular phone companies and phone users have welcomed a government move to curb unsolicited calls and text messages from tele-marketers.
The broadband battle is being fought between “imperialist” telcos and “guerilla” Internet firms, a Yankee Group analyst told Tuesday. The established telcos focused on ARPUs and the idea of guiding consumers to a choice of apps on the network. “They are pretty much trying to think about voice, content and access as palette from which consumers can choose.” The guerillas are firms such as Google and Yahoo who don’t own a network and aren’t focused on ARPU, and whose apps run on PCs, mobile phones, PlayStations and all kinds of networks and devices. “They’re advertising-funded.
In one of the most detailed analyses of WiMax issued for Asia to date, the influential investment house says that it is “particularly optimistic about the prospects for fixed WiMax in developing markets in Asia, where the copper infrastructure is too weak or limited to provide broadband services using DSL.” It adds, “We believe that WiMax and other wireless broadband technologies will be particularly successful in markets with low broadband penetration, such as India, Malaysia, China, the Philippines, and Indonesia.” Read more.
The Grameen Foundation has announced a new online assistance center to help microfinance institutions (MFIs) bring the benefits of telecommunications to poor communities around the world. The Village Phone Direct Assistance Center, was launched in Nairobi, Kenya during the International Telecommunications Union’s “Public & Private Sectors Partnership Forum” (PPPF-Africa 2007) conference. It features a how-to manual, a message board, customizable templates and other information that will help MFIs work independently with local telecommunications providers to develop Village Phone Direct programs for their clients. Read more.
BBC NEWS | Technology | City wi-fi plans under scrutiny But as councils offer public wi-fi, questions are being asked about how much citizens will use them and how sustainable they are. City-wide wi-fi is the obvious next step from wi-fi hotspots, bringing them out of cafes and hotel lobbies to provide ubiquitous coverage in a town. But some analysts claim that few citizens are using public wi-fi while other call for more cautious rollouts. Companies such as BT and The Cloud are partnering with local governments in the UK to build city-wide wireless networks offering councils enhancements to public services and giving citizens the chance to connect to the web from wi-fi enabled devices. Powered by ScribeFire.
LIRNEasia and ISEAS organized an expert forum on ICT indicators in Singapore in March 2007. On the 26th of January, the Myanmar Ministry of Post and Telecom sent an e-mail to the ISEAS in Singapore, nominating an officer to attend. That e-mail reached ISEAS yesterday (4th June 2007; more than four months later). Does this not suggest a need to radically reform the Myanmar ICT infrastructure?
Plans to lay an undersea fiber-optic cable off eastern Africa could be the beginning of the end of crackling long-distance calls, slow dial-up Internet connections and universities without e-mail.Four projects are in the works to link 22 eastern, central and southern African countries to the world’s network of submarine cables and 21st century communications. They would enable cheaper international calls with no static and fast Internet access. The first cable could be finished as early as March. Read more.
Dhaka, June 1 (bdnews24.com)—Maritime thieves have stolen at least 11-kilometres Vietnamese portion of Thailand bound SEA-ME-WE3 submarine cable and sold the 100 tons of illicit cargo as scrap, reported VietNamNet Bridge online newspaper Tuesday. Such bizarre underwater international telecoms infrastructure robbery occurred on March 25 and since then Vietnam’s Internet users have been struggling with far slower speed. The broken cable system, named TVH, was built in 1993-1995, connecting Thailand, Vietnam and Hong Kong with a capacity of 560 megabits per second. The Vietnam Telecom International (VTI) got puzzled when the cable went down.
We have periodically carried stories on non-traditional uses of mobiles. Here is one about buying accident insurance that are bought and paid for through the mobiles. LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE – LBO The accident insurance cover package premiums are priced between five and 20 rupees which can be paid at any Dialog reload centre in Sri Lanka that entitles the connection holder up to 50,000 rupees worth of claims. The accident cover targets the population who does not have comprehensive knowledge of insurance and low-income families. Customers can apply for the ‘eZ insurance’ cover at the time of a reload and the cover expires when the credit of the reload finishes.
The Indian mobile market has added 20.55 million new customers in the first four months of 2007 – less than the 20.96 million recorded in the same period in 2006. There are two reasons for this shortfall. Firstly, in April 2006 Reliance Communications made an adjustment to the way it counted mobile subscribers, including its fixed-wireless customers in the figures for the first time and boosting its ranks as a result.
The usually well-informed LBO.LK appears to have gotten confused in the “fog of war” created by interested parties seeking to extract rents from the sale of 25% of SLTL shares by NTT to GTH, both private companies, and by the unfortunate opacity of the transaction (something that is quite surprising because SLTL is a publicly traded company and the interests of thousands of shareholders are affected by the transaction). The source quoted by LBO below appears to have been quite familiar with the ORIGINAL shareholders agreement signed between the Government of Sri Lanka and NTT in 1997, but appears to have been comatose since then. Provisions regarding no universal service obligations (USO) and international exclusivities were in that agreement and did bind the Government of Sri Lanka. The no-USO provision continues to date, though the international exclusivity ended with the issuance of external gateway licenses in March 2003.