There is no guarantee that companies always bet right, but I’d place weight on their wagers more than on those of armchair theorists who are still arguing for FTTH as the only solution. Ask Google why they want a big, Nexus 6 size phone, and the answer is ready: “We are moving from mobile first to a mobile only world.” The next wave of growth for the smartphone industry will come from emerging nations in Asia-Pacific, especially from India, China and Indonesia. In these nations, smartphones will be the only computer for a majority of the population, so, the industry must gear up to accommodate this new breed. At Google’s annual Asia-Pacific press event in Taipei this week, the search and advertising giant which seems to be nurturing increasing ambitions of becoming a device player, concentrated on this mobile first world.
The Economist is a plum. In all honesty, I was thrilled we were mentioned. I wish they had gone to people with real data on Africa like RIA, rather than those who simply speculate, but still, a thoughtful piece. While the claim re radio may hold true for Africa, it definitely is incorrect for the Indo-Gangetic plain. Once restricted to the tech-literate, these are now common and easy to use.
Last year, Helani Galpaya (CEO, LIRNEasia) made recommendations on improving The Alliance for Affordable Internet (AA4I)‘s Affordability Index. This year, on behalf of Helani, I attended the Affordability Index workshop in Cape Town. While the primary objective was to review the 2014 draft report, the working group members present at the workshop also voiced many concerns that are being considered by the A4AI. It is good to note that some of Helani’s comments from last year have been addressed. The fact that the objective data from organisations like the ITU are not timely has been acknowledged and the working group has been provided with a comprehensive list of indicators (with sources) used in the Index.
Telenor has made a move to offer zero-rated services to its customers in Myanmar through Wikipedia Zero and Facebook Zero. This will enable Telenor’s mobile users to get access to lighter versions of Wikipedia and Facebook without running down their prepaid credit balances. We have seen this issue (the running down of prepaid balances ) being a barrier to Internet use by BOP mobile users before, in other parts of Asia through our Teleuse@BOP research, and have highlighted the need for “Innovations in pricing strategies (akin to “sachet pricing”) … to enable prepaid users to make use of the [Internet] services without their prepaid balance being depleted through a single transaction” (see full paper: Are the Poor Stuck in Voice? Conditions for Adoption of More-than-Voice Mobile Services) This is one of many key issues we hope to explore in our upcoming national survey of ICT needs and uses in Myanmar. It will be interesting to see if and how zero-rated services will allow BOP mobile owners in Myanmar to overcome some of the cost hurdles in Internet use.
The telecom operators in Myanmar are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. The demand for SIMs is so high that call and data quality is compromised. If they restrict supply, a black market develops. If they don’t, their image gets sullied. I was pleased to read that Telenor had postponed its rollout in Yangon until it did some final tweaks on the network.
The Open Technology Institute (OTI) finds that customers in the U.S. continue to pay higher prices for slower Internet. It examines broadband prices and speeds in 24 cities in the U.S.
Recent budget announcement by President Rajapakse places high value on increasing higher education enrollments. Is this the right approach as Sri Lanka aspires to be a hub in the knowledge economy which requires an information savvy society? Information society indicators are limited by the type and quality of data that international agencies can collect. Not surprisingly, enrollment rates at primary, secondary and tertiary levels of education take the center place in knowledge society /economy indicators. There are at least three big gaps in these indicators.
LIRNEasia seeks to foster evidence-based reform. The evidence, in the countries we work in, points to most of the needed actions having to do with reforming the state, by getting it to pull back from its current role of stifling decentralized innovation. This has caused many on the unthinking “left” plying their trade in the non-profit sector to look at us with suspicion, if not outright hostility. But they do not see that a great deal of what we do is about regulation in various forms. If there were active standard bearers of conventional right-wing thinking in our region, I am sure they would be throwing rocks at us too.
A report from the Innovation and Information Technology Foundation has been used as the basis for a good report in the Daily Star on the situation in the worst offender, Bangladesh. Of course, it did not hurt that they sought our comments. Our comments were based on the findings of the Systematic Review we completed on the benefits of mobile phones. For instance, in Bangladesh, the telecom infrastructure providers pay 55 percent taxes to import capital equipment and 24 percent for optical fibre cable. Mobile handsets are slapped with 21 percent duty when they enter the country.
The development of knowledge workers is obviously important for the emergence of inclusive knowledge economies. We have been working on this, but it has not been front and center of our public communication. This will change in the next little while. The 2015 Budget Speech of the Government of Sri Lanka placed its central emphasis on the development of human resources, as befits a country moving into middle-income status. But the policy proposals require some focus.
Over-the-top players like WhatsApp, Facebook and Skype will cost mobile operators an estimated $14 billion in lost revenues this year. And it will be 26% more from 2013, according to a study of Juniper Research. It has detected that in a number of markets the mobile voice revenues had fallen bellow 60% of their value five years’ ago. The combination of IM, VoIP and social media are blamed for not only in lost revenues but adding costs due to the scale of signaling traffic. It suggests the operators to optimize their networks.
The affordability of broadband is something many people have been dabbling with. In 2013 the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) released a report with composite index that attempts to rank economies based on the affordability of the Internet. Here’s another take on the same, from the World Economic Forum. It is also interesting to note that there are 14 countries where the monthly price of broadband is more than 100% of the average monthly income. Moreover, there are 39 countries with an estimated aggregated population of more than 840 million people that have broadband prices higher than 5% of monthly income for all deciles…
Taking research to policy is our thing; social science is a means to that, not an end. Yet, we cannot help but think of how weak an instrument social science has become, especially in South Asia. Here is something I wrote in relation to some internal discussions a few months back: Expressed demand for social science may be difficult to demonstrate, but there can be little doubt that social science is critically important for informed policy making and implementation. As evidence-based policy making receives greater acceptance, demand will increase for high-quality social science graduates or for repurposing of graduates from other fields. .
The politicians of China, Japan, South Korea and Viet Nam have locked horn over the maritime rights in South China Sea. Simultaneously, the telecoms carriers of these countries have been laying optical fiber cables underneath the same disputed water to connect each other. Dubbed as “Asia Pacific Gateway” or APG, this cable lands at Tanah Merah (Singapore), Kuantan (Malaysia), Songkhla (Thailand), Da Nang (Vietnam), Tseung Kwan O (Hong Kong), Toucheng (Taiwan), Nanhui and Chongming (mainland China), Busan (South Korea), and Shima and Maruyama (Japan). These nine countries had 900 million Internet subscribers in 2013, representing 69% of the 1.3 billion Asian subscribers and 32% of the 2.
I’ve been asked by several people to comment on the choice of a Japanese standard for digital broadcasting in Sri Lanka, as part of the process of clearing the 700 MHz band of analog TV broadcasting and making the freed up spectrum available for more productive uses. I have not commented, partly because I lack the time to research the subject. But I have not made the effort to reallocate priorities in order to make time for this task because I know that refarming (which is what the digital transition is in essence) is inherently problematic and hard to do. There are pros and cons associated with all standards and there are vested interests that benefit or lose from any standards decision. I have lived long enough to know that there is no objective and undisputed superior standard.
We’re thinking about how we can leverage mobile network big data to help manage infectious diseases. Now the Economist has gotten on the case: Doing the same with Ebola would be hard: in west Africa most people do not own a phone. But CDRs are nevertheless better than simulations based on stale, unreliable statistics. If researchers could track population flows from an area where an outbreak had occurred, they could see where it would be likeliest to break out next—and therefore where they should deploy their limited resources. Yet despite months of talks, and the efforts of the mobile-network operators’ trade association and several smaller UN agencies, telecoms firms have not let researchers use the data (see article).