General — Page 34 of 245 — LIRNEasia


Sri Lankan ICT entrepreneurs have been asking that inward payments by Paypal be facilitated. I’ve pushed it in various settings. Government has promised it would do this many times. But nothing has happened. Here is the latest promise: Speaking at the Sri Lanka Economic Summit organized by the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce under the theme, ‘The power of social media for exports’, Canagey emphasized they were committed in creating financial and social inclusivity through the platform.
The first nationally representative survey of ICT use in Myanmar was conducted by LIRNEasia in Feb/March of 2015.  The results were presented to stakeholders at a series of events and meetings held in Yangon and Nay Pyi Taw between the 28 – 30 July 2015. Download report here The links provide the updated slide-set, detailed methodology note, questionnaire in English and in Myanmar language.   Media ICT Survey: LIRNEasia nationwide ICT survey results released| Mitv News, Myanmar | July 29th 2015 LA on Democracy Today, Myanmar | August 6th 2015           LA on the Mobile Guide, Myanmar | August 5th                     LA survey data being referenced in an item about hate speech on Facebook | Eleven News, Myanmar |September 13th 2015 The English translation of this item can be found here.  
A few months back Telenor Group asked whether we would be interested in working up a document that would focus thinking on Digital Bangladesh and identify priority areas for cooperative action by different agencies of government and the private sector, including in particular Telenor’s Bangladesh affiliate Grameenphone. We did not have to think much because this was an opportunity to crystallize seven years of ongoing discussions and help advance the process of accelerated implementation. The government should relax the rules to attract more foreign firms to invest in Bangladesh, said a report developed by Grameenphone and its major shareholder Telenor Group with the support of LIRNEasia. The government should also form a well-planned spectrum roadmap and introduce tech neutrality to boost the telecom, IT and IT-enabled services, the report suggested. The report, Realising Digital Bangladesh, also advised the government to liberalise international gateways to allow one-stop shopping services and ensure the quality of services.
At a well attended meeting in Yangon on the 29th of July, Helani Galpaya, together with MIDO’s research lead Phyu Phyu Thi and U Htun Htun of Third Eye, who executed the field research, presented the descriptive statistics from the nation-wide representative-sample survey conducted in February 2015. The results are being released in Nay Pyi Taw today, 30th July. The presentation slides will be available here shortly.
LIRNEasia participated at the 2nd meeting of the A4AI Myanmar Coalition meeting yesterday at the MICT Park in Yangon. Four priority areas were identified as being important for debate right now; 1. A Universal Access Fund 2. Infrastructure development and sharing 3. Data and Research 4.
The Myanmar government is rushing to inject competition to the nascent mobile industry by inviting bids for the fourth license yesterday (July 27, 2015), said Reuters. Local firms, with registered capital of minimum US$2.37 million, may form foreign partnership and submit their proposal by August 24 (that’s less than a month). Under the state-owned monopoly, Myanmar’s mobile penetration was just 2.5% in 2011.
There were only seven million mobile phone users in 1989. Today the global mobile subscription has reached 7.1 billion, said the newly released data of TeleGeography. And the Asia-Pacific region is the major contributor with 60% annual growth during 1Q of 2014 and 1Q of 2015. The report also claims that the number of active mobile lines will cross the world’s population later this year.
One of the advantages Myanmar has in telecom is that it can learn from the experience of others, including countries that are/were similarly situated. This was the central proposition I advanced in my first piece on Myanmar telecom reforms, published in 2012 in Myanmar. Keeping to that theme, I spoke on what can be learned from the experience of others in designing and implementing universal service/access policies at a workshop organized by the Alliance for Affordable Internet on 27th July 2015 in Yangon. Presentation slides
So Amazon is bigger than Walmart. When will Alibaba overtake Walmart? That will be the day, since there’ll be no help from cloud services The surge added another $40 billion or so to Amazon’s market cap. That will almost assuredly propel it to be more valuable than Walmart for the first time when the stock market opens Friday, making this a deeply symbolic moment for e-commerce and the Internet. It is also a nice present for Amazon, which celebrated its 20th birthday last week.

Myanmar, here we come

Posted on July 20, 2015  /  1 Comments

Half of LIRNEasia will be in Yangon next week. Together wiith our lead partner MIDO and our principal funder IDRC, we will conduct a series of activities that mark a deepening of our three-year old engagement with Myanmar’s reform process intended to build a modern network nation. The work program is described here. The highlight of the week’s activities will be the presentation of the results of our baseline survey in Yangon and Nay Pyi Taw. I will be speaking on universal service at the A4AI event on the 27th.
I have never been able to understand the satellite fixation some of the decision makers in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have. But Myanmar’s plans for a geostationary satellite for broadcasting makes sense. Myanmar has a population density that is very low (76 people per sq. km, compared with 1,103 for Bangladesh and 309 for Sri Lanka) and it is a vast country (676,577 sq km v 143,998 sq km in Bangladesh and 65,610 sq km in Sri Lanka). A national broadcast satellite may make sense, though they should always compare the costs against the alternative of using channels on regional satellites.
I praised the TRCSL approach to shutting down mobile networks at specified times within the wildlife sanctuary of Yala. Possibly because of my previous writing critical of the shutting down of mobile networks, Nalaka Goonawardene has challenged my position on Twitter, saying it creates a bad precedent. This has set off a whole lot of Tweets with people asking whether it is justifiable to shut down networks during peak traffic times to avoid accidents and so on. First, I have to ask Nalaka and others to actually read the post. The post praised the TRCSL approach, not the action of shutting down the networks.
Having been regaled on the wonders of non-geostationary satellites by various delegations seeking licenses for Iridium and ICO and other systems that ultimately fizzled out, I was originally skeptical about O3B. But they answered my questions well (despite a messed up presentation at PTC a few years back) and I have been promoting this solution ever since. Happy to know they’ll break even on cash flow by middle 2016. Away from the headlines, Google — an initial O3b backer — has not raised its 5 percent equity share in the company but has kept up with the capital raises to avoided share dilution. What matters to SES shareholders is the money, not the technology, and at SES’s June 17 investor conference O3b Chief Executive Steve Collar gave a snapshot of the company’s current status.
I’ve been waiting for a good example of the application of Deng Xiao Ping’s approach to policy: cross the river by feeling the stones. Fine tune policy actions based on feedback. One has come up: in Sri Lanka of all places. The department of wildlife said sightings of large mammals such as leopard are usually conveyed to other vehicles using mobile phones inside the Yala park where wild animals had been run over by speeding visitors. “When a leopard or other interesting sighting is made by one vehicle, the news is rapidly transmitted by means of mobile phones, attracting large numbers of vehicles to the site, causing severe congestion and spoiling the experience for everyone,” the department said.
When Japan’s NTT bought 35 percent of the equity of the formerly government owned incumbent operator in Sri Lanka, it radically increased the pace of investment by the company. But this was using funds generated from within the company, primarily from the money earned from its exclusivity over international telecom services. Appears Myanmar’s incumbent has worked out a better deal. Myanmar’s state-owned operator plans to expand its network by increasing the number of base stations from 2,000 to 5,000 by Q2 next year. Its Japanese partners KDDI and Sumitomo will contribute JPY200 billion ($1.
In the context of some work we were doing with the support of Ford Foundation we conducted four case studies of national broadband initiatives. The four case studies were presented at the Expert Forum we convened in New Delhi in March 2014 and may have contributed to the rethinking of the becalmed NOFN project that has now been relaunched as Digital India. The comparative analysis has now been published as Gunaratne, R.L. et al.