Fifteen years ago, 2G was still the new, new thing. I recall asking the engineers at the TRC to present a comparative assessment of 2G and CDMA. Who would have thought it would outlast 3G? All thanks to M2M. Tommi Uitto, SVP, global mobile broadband sales at Nokia, noted that operators are – even now – calling for an evolution of the legacy GSM standard to support its continued use in M2M.
While we are fully sympathetic with a focus on wireless in the access network, we have for long been advocates of bringing optical fiber as close as possible to the user and for moving from point-to-point or ring architectures in current fiber networks to mesh architectures. In this context, reports of a breakthrough in optical communication makes us happy. Of course, we understand it takes a little while to go from the pages of Science to reducing repeaters in actual optical fiber cables. One way to understand the challenge of sending data through fiber-optic circuits is to imagine a person shouting to someone else down a long corridor. As the listener moves farther away, the words become fainter and more difficult to discern as they echo off the walls.
Manila retains its second position among the top-ten BPO destinations worldwide. It remains ahead of Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune but ranks behind Bangalore, according to consultancy Tholons. The rapidly growing BPO industry now represents 6% of Philippines’ GDP and rivals remittances from migrant workers as the country’s largest revenue generator. BPO sector employs more than 1m people and the industry’s revenues, which currently stand at $18bn, could reach $25.5bn in 2016.
The incredible growth of ICT in Myanmar has been enabled by massive investments, business models and managerial skills. Yet, it appears that FDI in the sector is still not the largest. This is a good sign for the balanced development of the Myanmar economy. In the first five months of the 2014-15 fiscal year, telecoms accounted for 31 percent of total FDI of $3.32 billion, becoming the biggest single component in direct capital inflows, according to data issued by the Myanmar Investment Commission.
So in Socialist Cuba they charge for WiFi access, while we give it free. Over the past two years, the government has opened dozens of Internet cafes and introduced email service for the island’s million or so cellphone users. It signaled its willingness to expand connectivity this month in a leaked report that argued that lack of Internet access was holding back the economy. The report outlined plans to get broadband — albeit slow broadband — to half of Cuban homes by 2020. By July, the state-run telecommunications company, Etecsa, will open 35 hot spots, mainly in parks and boulevards of cities, the company’s spokesman told Juventud Rebelde.
We’re struggling to get regulators and policy makers in our countries to understand the importance of latency and to keep it below 300 ms. What Google is promising on the trans Atlantic route suggests we are not being ambitious enough> Details like the ability to pass information between Europe and the United States in less than 100 milliseconds, and a practice of fully backing up user data in nine different locations, make Google seem both cutting-edge and even bigger than most people suspected. But the company may also be borrowing a playbook from Amazon Web Services, which in 2013 started disclosing some mind-blowing metrics about its global computing network. At an event Tuesday for Google Cloud Platform — Google’s name for the computing, storage and networking it sells to business — Google will name the Taiwanese phone maker HTC as a customer. HTC has used Google to build a new kind of computing architecture that enables smartphone apps to update data fast and reliably to many devices at once, and look efficient even when the phones get poor reception.
ITU have established a new study group titled “ITU-T Study Group 20: IoT and its applications, including smart cities and communities”. The decision to create this group was taken by Telecommunication Standardization Advisory Group (TSAG) at its assembly at the ITU Headquarters in Geneva early this month. The Internet of Things (IOT) technologies are expected to connect an estimated 50 million devices to the network by 2020. The group will develop standards to take advantage of IoT technologies to address urban-development challenges. This will be done by standardizing architectures for IoT and developing mechanisms for interoperability of IoT applications used by numerous industrial sectors.
The telecom and broadcast licensing regime in Sri Lanka is obsolete. Broadcast licenses are issued under obscure provisions of the Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corporation and Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation Acts. The licenses have no terms and fees are to be informed in the future. Telecom service providers, including Internet Service Providers, are licensed under section 17 of the Sri Lanka Telecommunications Act, No. 25 of 1991 as amended.
CEO Helani Galpaya was invited as an expert participant at the UN-DESA (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs) and ITU (International Telecommunications Union) organised Expert Group Meeting held at UN headquarters in New York, June 8 – 9th. Helani was invited to talk about issues of access and affordability, and how they contribute towards the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). LIRNEasia and RIA household survey data, LIRNEasia’s broadband quality of service test data, big data research was used in the presentations and interventions during the two day meeting. Slides here. Numerous UN Agencies, members of Permanent Missions to the UN from various countries (e.
The speculation about Jio Infocomm has been going on for too long, it seems. Here‘s what Mukesh Ambani says it will be: And the benefit of its “legacy-free, next-generation voice and broadband network which can be seamlessly upgraded even to 5G and beyond” will be in extending digital connectivity to a wide set of Indian consumers. “In rural areas, we are prioritising connectivity to thousands of schools. This is to ensure that the benefits of our broadband initiative is first and foremost felt by the young students who stand to gain the most by accessing the information superhighway,” he said. “Jio’s true success will be measured by a whole new generation of entrepreneurs, stepping-up to leverage the digital assets that Jio has built.
We have this interest in cellar dwellers. Cuba has been in the bottom 10 of mobile and Internet for long. But entrepreneurs are still exporting services from that country. The NYT story does not spell out how they receive payments. There must be a workaround for that too.
According to Philip Graves, a market research consultant in UK, conducting focus group discussions and surveys in order to learn about people’s habits, wants and needs are misleading and dysfunctional. He cites several examples, including cases regarding Coca Cola, Mc Donalds, KFC and Google Search. He believes that asking people questions and noting down answers is not the best way to go about this, but rather, through observation and the big data gathered through the observation of peoples’ habits. The full text of item can be found here
Digital India Platform (DIP) will be launched in India soon to provide freelance opportunities to computer literate population in India. The Elance-oDesk’s Annual Impact Report 2014 ranks India as the first in top earning freelancer countries. Percentage of population using internet in India is 15.1% (2013) (International Telecommunication Union, 2013). This program will provide opportunities for computer literate to earn from the work open up for public.
LIRNEasia has publicly tabled the proposal of laying fiber along the Asian Highway for universal access to broadband in CommunicAsia on June 2011. At that time we called it LION or Longest International Open-access Network. Light Reading and Total Telecom were cautiously optimistic. The then boss of ITU, who also attended the event, gave cold shoulder to our initiative. Unsurprisingly the ESCAP took us seriously.
LIRNEasia organized and moderated two panels at CommunicAsia 2015 in Singapore earlier this week. Senior Policy Fellow Abu Saeed Khan will write about the session that he moderated. I was about to write about mine, when Don Sambandaraksa, one of Asia’s best telecom journalists, did this piece for Telecompaper: Myanmar currently has three mobile operators, namely Telenor, Ooredoo, and state-owned Myanma Posts and Telecommunications (MPT), which has partnered with Japan’s KDDI. Myanmar will soon have a fourth operator, ISP Yatanarpon Teleport (YTP). Demand for mobile services in Myanmar is on the rise.
We have been, officially, persuading the deployment of terrestrial optical fiber along the Asian Highway since 2011. Our point is very simple: Asian countries, unlike the ones in Europe, are interlinked exclusively through submarine cables. Deployment and maintenance of undersea networks keep Asia’s bandwidth manifolds pricier than Europe’s. As a result, the consumers of developing Asia cannot afford broadband. TeleGeography’s global bandwidth prices at major market places have been central to our argument for a pan-Asian cross-border fiber network.