This time it’s on account of elections in Congo. For an overview of the phenomenon, see CDT’s map and timeline. We first wrote about this problem in 2006. Then it was worked up into Gyanendra’s Law and its various exceptions. Image source
BSNL is on life support courtesy of the Indian taxpayer, whatever fictitious paper profits it conjures up. The authors of a recent op ed in Hindu Businessline see through the fiction. The government firms had their own share of sops such as (i) year-ahead early start in the assignment of both 3G and Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) spectrum in 2009 and (ii) reimbursement of about Rs. 10,000 crore of licence and spectrum charges during 2001-06, as part of commitment to BSNL corporatisation. However, the 6.
In our teaching-focused comparative work on electricity, we found there was a fundamental difference in the way the problem of costs was approached in Sri Lanka and on the sub-continent. In Sri Lanka, the focus was on the costs of NOT having power. In India, the focus was still on the costs of inputs, per se. That is, they cared about the costs of switching on another power source to meet peak demand. On that basis, they got along with load shedding and low prices, around half that charged from Sri Lankan subscribers.
We generally know how to measure performance in the telecom sector: increased connectivity in voice and data; lower prices; improved quality of service experience; and greater choice. Similar in electricity. In each of these cases we can also identify the factors that led to improvements in performance. Recently I was thinking about the healthcare sector. This sector has commonly accepted, internationally comparable indicators such as the infant mortality and maternal mortality rates.
I had been invited to moderate a panel discussion on consumer rights in electricity, in the context of a recently issued charter of consumer rights and obligations. This was set to be a ho-hum affair, until the country experienced its third nationwide blackout within the last six months. This resulted in the shutdown of the 900 MW coal-powered plant, which means that the system will be in distress for 4-5 days until they get it fired up again. Since 2002, Sri Lankans have got used to uninterrupted power which they pay a lot. There is a lot of anger.
Even before we officially launch the gender study, it is being used in Myanmar. A recent report on gender and connectivity by GSMA and Sri Lanka based think tank LIRNEasia said that mobile phones have come to symbolise status in Myanmar. “Despite the cost barrier, people are often not interested in keypad phones or less expensive smartphones, which are also perceived as low-quality,” said the report. Mr Meza said that outside Myanmar’s cities, the phone would find its audience. “In Yangon people will go out of their way to get … the latest iPhone, Samsung, HTC [device], but the country has 680,000 square kilometres so life doesn’t end in Yangon.
Appears to have been landed at both ends, la Seyne-sur-Mer, in France and Tuas in Singapore. The contracts were let to different parties, Alcatel Lucent and NEC, for the France-Sri Lanka and Sri Lanka-Singapore segments respectively. It is not evident from the web that the landings have been made in Sri Lanka yet. SingTel has announced it has completed the landing of the SEA-ME-WE 5 subsea cable at Tuas in Singapore. The 20,000km Southeast Asia – Middle East – Western Europe 5 cable is expected to be complete by the end of the year.
We at LIRNEasia have been more interested in the outcomes of new forms of communication, especially by those hitherto excluded, than on the modalities of communication. But that does not mean we’re uninterested. Why we post looks informative. TO SOME, Facebook, Twitter and similar social-media platforms are the acme of communication—better, even, than face-to-face conversations, since more people can be involved. Others think of them more as acne, a rash that fosters narcissism, threatens privacy and reduces intelligent discourse to the exchange of flippant memes.
This paper, authored by Muhammad Muazzem Hossain (MacEwan University, Canada) and Md. Raihan Jamil (University of Alberta, Canada) is based on an analysis of the Bangladesh data from the Teleuse@BOP4 survey conducted by LIRNEasia in 2011. Using this data, Hossain and Jamil explore factors affecting intention to use ‘more than voice’ or ‘MTV’ services among BOP mobile owners in Bangladesh. MTV services are defined as direct or indirect use of mobiles in services other than voice. The authors take a different methodological approach to the same question that LIRNEasia researchers explored in 2011 using the Sri Lanka, Philippines and Thailand data, as shown further below.
Everyone who stops to think knows that trade in services is under-counted. Services do not go through customs points in ports and airports and do not have measurement systems honed over centuries. But like the drunk who was looking for his keys not where he dropped them, but where there was light, we all have a tendency to talk about trade using only data on goods trade, because that is what is available. I’ve done it myself, despite having worked on services trade since the 1980s. That is what caught my eye in this little piece on how to explain why international trade (in goods) appears to have flattened out.
I’ve been invited to participate in a panel discussion to commemorate the 130th birth anniversary of a giant of Sri Lanka media, D.R. Wijewardene on the 26th of February at 4 PM at the Kadiragamar Institute, Horton Place, Colombo 7. I thought I would talk about an industry that missed the bus and is rapidly sliding to its death, the post office. And ask whether the newspaper industry can escape a similar fate.
In honor of Mobile World Congress, which may hit 100,000 this year if the transport strike does not crash the whole thing, everyone is running stories on 5G. Why not us? The work is being done at the University of Surrey, where a leafy campus is dotted with rundown Brutalist-style buildings. Here, researchers and some of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Samsung and Fujitsu, are collaborating to offer mobile Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than anything now available. Their work on so-called fifth-generation, or 5G, wireless technology is set to be completed in early 2018 and would, for example, let students download entire movies to smartphones or tablets in less than five seconds, compared with as much as eight minutes with current fourth-generation, or 4G, technology.
The past weekend, I was quoted, not altogether coherently, in a piece on Google’s Loon pilot in Sri Lanka. LIRNEasia Founding Chair and Founder Director of ICTA, Rohan Samarajiva made a few comments about the Google Loon project. He said, “I am no fan of outmoded notions of national sovereignty. A fragmented Internet where local data storage is mandatory is not the kind of Internet I prefer”. The Google Loon project is expected to offer easily-available Wi-Fi across the country and connected for instance through ISPs like Dialog or Mobitel with some part being free and the rest charged.
For bill payments over electronic means to work, it is necessary for the payee to have an electronic system. Some parachute advisers identified mobile payments as a low hanging fruit in the early days, even before the telecom reforms had started. But it took years to pluck this fruit because work had to be done on the pre-conditions. Not only was it necessary to get phones into the hands of the consumers, it was necessary to modernize the billing systems of the payee organizations. ConnectNPay, a joint venture between Myanmar’s MCC Group and Singapore’s Leo Tech, has since May provided an e-link between service providers, such as utility companies, and payment partners, such as banks.
When I was presenting some of the findings from our Myanmar survey, someone from the audience raised a question about how much poor people were spending on smartphones. The implication was that it was a luxury. Here are some insights and stories pulled together by the World Bank. If you look inside the bag of any refugee on a life-threatening boat trip to Europe, you see a few possessions that vary from one refugee to another. However, there is one thing they all carry with them: a smartphone.
Our survey caught these trends last year. But the stories are good too. “The Myanmar market has K30,000 smartphones on offer, but people want using phones to be easy,” he said. “The cheaper phones don’t have good touch-screens and can’t store a lot of data compared with K200,000 handsets.” “Now mobile phone users are going online, using apps,” he said.