Today, at a ceremony to sign a large number of investment agreements at the Board of Investment of Sri Lanka, it was revealed that Bharti Airtel, Sri Lanka’s fifth mobile operator, is planning to invest USD 150 million. This amount is below industry expectations and suggests that Bharti will start slow, with a conventional rollout concentrated in the Northwestern, Western and Southern provinces. Pity.
Iran’s ICT Minister Mohammad Soleimani has said his country’s Internet penetration had a 60% growth last year compared to year before last, reaching 16%. Therefore, he claimed Iran’s Internet penetration is above that of Malaysia today. But an industry analyst is reluctant to say “Yes Minister.”
Hong Kong’s Office of the Telecommunications Authority (OFTA) says that it wants to auction off spectrum in the 2.3GHz band for wireless broadband – and is also considering what to do with the 2.5GHz band. In what it described as its “third consultation” on broadband wireless access, OFTA says it wants to allocate 85MHz of spectrum between 2.305 and 2.
Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, Associate Professor at Harvard’s John F Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachussetts, has criticised the increasing global tendency for everything on the Web, in telephony and in computing to be recorded, archived and kept forever. He said, “In March 2007, Google confirmed that since its inception it had stored every search query every user ever made and every search result ever clicked on. Like the Soviet state, Google does not forget. Google remembers forever.” He adds, “If whatever we do can be held against us years later, if all our impulsive comments are preserved…our words and actions may be perceived years later and taken out of context…the lack of forgetting may prompt us speak less freely and openly.
Informa: TM doubles international budget Telekom Malaysia (TM) has earmarked to spend MYR8 billion (US$2.3 billion) this year expanding its international mobile businesses in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, which is considerably more than the MYR2.8 billion it spent on its overseas units last year. TM chief executive Datuk Abdul Wahid Omar said TM’s foreign operations are expected to make 30% of group revenue this year, compared with 25% in 2006. However, the group is planning to trim its 87% stake in Sri Lankan mobile operator Dialog Telekom to not less than 80%, Wahid is quoted as saying.
Data and 3G may not be a priority in Asia: discuss. No, we’re not referring to Japan, Korea or Hong Kong. Not even China. This time we’re looking at the area’s so-called emerging markets – markets like Indonesia where the market-leading operator Telkomsel and third-ranked player Excelcom launched 3G services in early September. Or the Philippines, where rival operators Globe and Smartcom have been offering 3G for a slightly longer period.
The Indonesian government is to limit foreign investment in premium call, premium SMS and courier services as they are “businesses to be set aside for domestic small-and medium-scale enterprises.” The Indonesian Communication and Information Minister, Sofyan Djalil, said, “As we know, foreign investors can control up to 95 percent of businesses in all the telecoms sectors, but we have decided that foreign investment in jut a few telecommunications sub-sectors should be limited and left to local entrepreneurs.” Read more.
Licenses have been granted to consortium members for building the Palapa Ring–backbone that will connect the Eastern part of Indonesia that currently relies on satellites with the rest of the country. It is not clear how the licenses were granted and what are the fees and obligations of the license holders. Furthermore, technical and financial feasibility studies are yet to be completed. No access regimes have been developed that will govern how non-consortium members will be able to access the Palapa Ring and on what terms. There couldn’t be a worse possible way of launching such a complex, capital-intensive project that is supposed to transform the ICT infrastructure of Indonesia.
In the US, despite seventy years of telecoms legislation, some things haven’t changed that much. That’s why, in some parts of West Virginia it’s still harder to get telephone service than it is to buy a jug of moonshine liquor. The US Communications Act of 1934 legislated that all people in the United States should have access to “rapid, efficient, nationwide communications service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges.” Then, sixty-two years later, the Telecom Act of 1996 broadened the established definition of universal service to include an affordable, national telephone service, to rural health care providers and eligible schools and libraries. But it still wasn’t enough.
A version of the increasingly popular Linux operating system Ubuntu will be developed for use on net-enabled phones and devices. The Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded project aims to create the open source platform for initial release in October 2007. The operating system will be developed by members of the Ubuntu community, along with staff from chip giant Intel. Its development was prompted by the growth of power hungry portable devices that place new demands on software. “It is clear that new types of device – small, handheld, graphical tablets which are Internet-enabled – are going to change the way we communicate and collaborate,” said Ubuntu CTO Matt Zimmerman.
Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops – New York Times Many of these districts had sought to prepare their students for a technology-driven world and close the so-called digital divide between students who had computers at home and those who did not. “After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.” Powered by ScribeFire.
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China has just 530 point-of-sale (POS) terminals and ATMs per million people, far below the 10,000 per million found in the United States. Accordingly, cash is used in 83 percent of all payment transactions in China, compared with just 21 percent in the United States. With most of these terminals and ATMs in China’s cities, practically all rural transactions are cash based. One way to wean rural consumers off their reliance on cash might be to add more ATMs and POS terminals. But it would cost at least $2 billion and add just 130 terminals and ATMs per million people.
The latest figures from the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority show that March 2007 was the best month for proportionate growth in the mobile market in Pakistan since the sudden change of gear in November 2006. The monthly growth rate in the first ten months of last year averaged almost 7.5% but dropped to below 5% in the final two months, a trend which continued into January and February 2007. Whilst growth in March did not reach the heights seen last year, the rate was back over 5% – 5.2% to be precise – as customer numbers climbed to 55.
Not Negroponte’s USD 100 one-laptop-per-child, which is now priced at USD 175, but a thin-client application that depends on software from a distant server. Makes sense if you have reliable connectivity, I guess. Made in India PC for just about $100 The machine, launched by Chennai-based Novatium Solutions in 2004, costs a little over $100 as of today in the US currency, thanks to the depreciation in the greenback, but it was priced at less than $100 till a few months back. Novatium is targeting 10 million users in the next five years for this innovative product, company CEO Alok Singh told PTI from Chennai. The company has already started a successful commercial pilot for its NetPC computer in Chennai, he said.
Pasted below is a communication from Harsha Purasinghe of MicroImage that may be of interest to readers of this website. “We are pleased to inform you all that Dialog Telekom launched the Sinhala & Tamil Mobile Browser and their Content Portal “SINHALANTHAYA” during New Year week. The browser can be downloaded by visiting http://www.dialogwap.com using your mobile and going into Application Download Area.