Myanmar takes another giant leap in telecoms. Burst Networks of Myanmar has engaged Swedish telecom infrastructure specialist Flexenclosure to build a multi-million dollar Tier 4 data center. This customized prefabricated modular facility will be built in the Thilawa Special Economic Zone in Yangon. Construction will take place at Flexenclosure’s factory in Vara, Sweden, with deployment in Myanmar in early 2016. It will comply with the Uptime Institute’s highly stringent classification of redundancy, fault tolerance and availability.
With 70 percent of mobile users having smartphones, Myanmar is possibly the fastest growing Internet market in the world. With rudimentary international links, this can cause all sorts of problems. One (partial) solution is content delivery networks. Internet users in Myanmar have received a speed boost as Norway’s Telenor and local company Yatanarpon Teleport (YTP) go live with Google Global Cache (GGC). This represents the first active content delivery network (CDN) resource in one of the last untapped telecommunications markets in the world.
The state of Internet in the Philippines has been subject to scrutiny by civil society and more recently the Senate office which has led the national regulatory authority to take action (link) through multiple stakeholder consultations. LIRNEasia research, through research fellow Grace Mirandilla-Santos, has been instrumental in the memorandum circular issued by the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC). Being a pertinent topic in the Philippines Grace was invited to the 13th Youth Congress on Information Technology 2015,the biggest IT event in the country, attended by computer science, IT, and engineering college students nationwide. Her presentation titled “PH Internet is bad and it’s not your fault” is available here. Photo credits: Noel Feria
Bangladesh keeps talking about launching a satellite. Sri Lanka threw some money at it, but backed off. Myanmar is talking. Now India wants to gift SAARC member countries with a satellite to be launched using ISRO’s innovative, low-cost launch capabilities. Something Keynes wrote about economics gave me the answer to the puzzle of why our region’s decision makers are so enamored with telecom satellites.
Yesterday, there was a significant announcement in Bangladesh: Robi and Airtel announced they were discussing a merger that could result in the creation of two more or less equal sized competitors to the market leader, Grameenphone. Here is my full response: This is what I said in response to a question about the number of operators in a market four years back. The market should determine the number of suppliers in a market, not government officials. This requires two things: (1) an orderly policy on market exit, whereby, for example, suppliers have clear rules on what can be done about the assigned spectrum, existing customers, and so on; and (2) transparent license and renewal procedures that allow for as many licenses to be issued as possible within the constraints of spectrum. These principles are as valid today as they were then.
The first I heard of this issue was back in the 1980s when the Government of Canada wanted banks and companies to store data within the country and not in the US where it was cheaper. One of the arguments was the need to simplify access to data for law-enforcement purposes. Technology has changed much, but the issues remain the same. Now it’s the United States Government that wants access to data stored by US companies wherever the data is. Russia wants all companies operating in Russia to store data within Russia.
A trade body is sure to know subscriber numbers. But how good is it on Internet users? May be they actually mean subscribers? India has added 52 million Internet users in first six months of the year, taking the total user base to 352 million as on June 30, 2015, industry body IAMAI said on Wednesday. Interestingly, 213 million (over 60 per cent) users accessed the worldwide web through mobile devices.
It used to be that people contributed to or initiated policy debate through the media. Now it seems that Linked In or Facebook posts are the preferred medium. There is a shortcoming in this approach in that it is not truly public, but it may bleed into the public media through journalists who participate in these private fora. Something is better than nothing. My eyes were drawn to one of the three points raised recently for the attention of Sri Lanka’s ICT Agency: ICT is not another subject anymore.
First meeting of the Working Group on the Asia-Pacific Information Superhighway was held on 1 and 2 September 2015, at the Songdo Convensia in Incheon, Republic of Korea. It was co-organized by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) and the National Information Society Agency of the Republic of Korea, with the support of the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning of the Republic of Korea. More than 40 officials from 20 governments, international and regional organizations, international financial institutions and representatives of the private sector attended this event. China Telecom Global, Rostelecom and KT came along with the Chinese, Russian and Korean government delegates. Bangladesh, Iran, and Myanmar, for the first time, have sent senior officials to draft the master plan of Asia-Pacific Information Superhighway initiative.
We have three press releases on the Myanmar teleuse baseline survey pointing out three particular stories. Press releases are available in both English and Myanmar as follow ; Fewer women own phones compared to men. But due to shared use, the usage of phones is not very different between men and women. 99% of Ward/Village Leaders carry Mobile Phones. Only 89.
My favorite definition of Internet is from Jim Cowie: “The Internet is a robust virtual infrastructure comprised of tens of thousands of communicating enterprises, each seeking to maximize profit according to local rules and business conditions.” And the Data Centers function as the factories-cum-warehouses of Internet. Thousands of servers and routers being stacked across the vast space emit enormous heat in the air. That’s why highly sophisticated air cooling systems are installed to maintain proper temperature and Internet. Any glitch in the power supply system results disastrous consequences.
We have isolated 3 stories which came out of our Myanmar teleuse baseline survey findings which we thought should be placed in the spotlight in the form of press releases. And they are as follows; Fewer women own phones compared to men. But due to shared use, the usage of phones is not very different between men and women. 99% of Ward/Village Leaders carry Mobile Phones. Only 89.
Last week I was told that the authorities/companies in Gujarat had succeeded in shutting down Internet without shutting down voice service. This was thought to be some kind of technical achievement. Now it’s on the other end of India. With the death of 1 more person, the death toll in Churachandpur district during the current violence has increased to 8. Curfew is still on with heavily armed state and central forces personnel patrolling the streets.
Two members of CPRsouth, Ibrahim Kholiul Rohman and Hasib Ahsan Nadeem, have collaborated on an evidence-based op-ed published in Indonesia’s leading English daily. I am very pleased about this. This kind of decentralized initiative is what we sought to foster through CPRsouth. But decentralized initiative also means that the policy recommendations may not be in line with what LIRNEasia would say, based on its research. Here is one such divergence.
Luckily, the unlimited/”all-you-can-eat” culture was not part of the Internet landscape in Asia. Even in its birthplace, it has been in decline, except in the imaginations of the passionate and uninformed. Here is a piece that illustrates the retreat from unlimited. T-Mobile also practices what is called network deprioritization. In areas where networks are congested, T-Mobile will look for the highest data consumers — those who have surpassed 21 gigabytes of data — and give priority in providing higher speeds to those who have consumed less data.
When the paper by Shazna Zuhyle and Grace Mirandilla was presented at CPRsouth 10 in Taipei a few days back the discussant, Reg Coutts from Australia, asked why the paper supported action by the regulatory agency as a remedy for the manifest problems of quality in the Philippines market. My answer, on behalf of Shazna and Grace, was that regulatory action was an interim solution until the international backhaul problems were resolved. It was incomplete. I am happy that Grace has filled he gap in my answer. Another underlying problem was the duopoly in the access market.