In Sri Lanka, the incumbent teleco is a healthy company that gives decent service, lots of patronage benefits and some contributions to Treasury. It did not shed any employees, other than through voluntary schemes. In Bangladesh and India, the incumbents are at death’s door. The difference is that Sri Lanka government partially privatized the company in 1997, giving management control to the Japanese investor. Thanks to another Japanese partner, it looks like the Myanmar MPT company will not join the incumbents requiring life support.
There will be two events to mark the launch of the Myanmar translation of Information Lives of the Poor, co-authored by Laurent Elder, Rohan Samarajiva, Alison Gillwald and Hernan Galperin and published by IDRC. The first is at the Sky Palace Hotel , 3, Yarza Thingaha Road, Datkhinathiri Township, Hotel Zone, Southern Nay Pyi Taw, Nay Pyi Taw, http://skypalace.asia/home.html phone number is (95) 67 422122, (95) 9 49 210 703. We plan to start at 1430 on the 24th of July.
I wonder what Carlos Afonso, who was so upset when I said at IGF2009 in Sharm El Sheikh that most people in developing countries would be accessing the Internet over mobile devices, would have to say now? China had 632 million Internet users at the end of June, an increase of 14.4 million since the end of December, according to a semiannual report published on Monday by the official China Internet Network Information Center, which is known as CNNIC. Of those, 83.4 percent reported gaining access to the Internet with mobile phones, exceeding for the first time the 80.
As someone old enough to remember the 1984 Apple ad that assailed IBM as big brother, I am willing to bet Big Blue will pull through and to be amused by Apple collaborating with IBM. The areas IBM is betting heavily on include data analytics, cloud computing and corporate mobile and social computing. At a meeting with analysts in May, company executives called them its “strategic imperatives.” They span IBM’s services, software and hardware businesses and mostly contribute to the revenue of the services and software units. Steven Milunovich, an analyst at UBS, estimates that these businesses account for 21 percent of IBM’s revenue.
For the last few years, I have been reluctant to publish in academic journals and edited volumes, where the content that I contributed would not be available on the web. I have now some doubts about the wisdom of this position. If one assumes that citation is a proxy indicator that someone out there is reading what one writes, one could conclude that the more cited articles are the most read. I dislike publishing in platforms that do not make content available on the web because I think that fewer people can read what I publish there. So, it would be reasonable to hypothesize that my work that is freely available on the web, on platforms such as SSRN and in open journals, should be read more and should generate more citations.
It started with the infamous “SIM tax” in 2005. Although mobile covers nearly 100% of population and geography, a highly ambiguous Social Obligation Fund (SOF) was created in 2010. Consequently the telecom regulator has been illegally amassing huge wealth since 2011. Now the tax authorities have decided to impose 1% surcharge on mobile usage to “promote rural education.” And for the first time, the taxmen will be collecting a sector-specific toll.
There is a good article the mobile revolution by Nalaka Gunawardene in Sri Lanka’s best business magazine, Echelon. No surprise, he draws extensively on LIRNEasia research ranging from teleuse at the bottom of the pyramid through the work on the budget telecom network business model to our estimates of how many Internet users there are. This is where you would look for the excerpt and the link to the article. But Echelon is a young publication and they need to get their revenue model working. There is a lag between the ad revenue generating print version (out this week) and the possibly cost-causing online version.
Quality of Service Experience (QoSE) is generally not what ISPs worry about. QoSE however, is what affects the user’s broadband experience. LIRNEasia’s broadband benchmarking efforts have consistently been about QoSE. In a recent launch of its new service Google aims to provide statistics based on streaming media via YouTube, that will help users make informed choices of ISPs. It seems however that this service uses a ‘push’ mechanism as opposed to a ‘pull’.
It appears that the smartphone market may be turning into a commodity market sooner than thought. Samsung’s response to its predicament could shape the entire smartphone market. If Samsung aggressively cuts prices to improve sales, it could pressure other competitors like Nokia, HTC and Motorola Mobility to lower prices, too. That could lead to lower-quality products or even slimmer margins for the smartphone business as a whole. Already, in many recent financial quarters, only Samsung and Apple have made a profit from smartphones.
A fascinating interview with the Chinese financier Zhang Lei by the Financial Times highlights the need to learn about and keep up with China’s ICT industry. Now Zhang is taking the Chinese template offshore. “The Chinese model, which is mobile-driven, is more suited to emerging markets than the US model, which is desktop driven,” he says. “The socio-economic profile is more similar. We can help companies like Tencent go abroad and accelerate the growth of the mobile internet elsewhere and others also can leapfrog.
Interesting that Ooredoo SIMs cannot be used on feature phones, while Telenor is trying to cover that segment as well. “Cheap SIM cards of two foreign telecom companies will attract people. Ooredoo’s SIM cards cannot be used on Java system handsets as their system is 3G Advanced. But the 3G system will be suitable for almost all Android phones. So far, it has yet to impact the mobile handsets market,” said an official from the Mobile Image handset shop.
LIRNEasia research is extensively quoted in this Sunday Times article by Nalaka Gunawardene. The past decade has seen the highest number of telephone connections being given out across South Asia. It happened thanks to what researchers call the ‘budget telecom model’, where low cost technologies coupled with business process innovations helped telecom operators to reduce costs. First, regulatory reforms lowered or removed entry barriers for more operators to enter markets. Then intense competition brought down sign-up and call charges, so phone users started calling more.
Interesting interview with Ooredoo’s Myanmar strategy chief: Flagging up the likes of mobile health and money services, Swierzy told Mobile World Live there was a big opportunity to go beyond the traditional talk and text model. “We think we can get Myanmar using advanced services more quickly than other markets,” he said. Qatar’s Ooredoo, along with Telenor, fought off stiff international competition to win a telecommunications licence in Myanmar. The plan is to make 3G commercially available first in the cities of Yangon, Mandalay, Naypyidaw – and the corridors that link them – by the end of this (Q3) quarter. Swierzy doesn’t see lack of consumer mobile knowledge as an issue in Myanmar’s main cities.
Literacy is the ability to read and write in a specific language. Power of a language depends on the opportunities it offers. That’s why the Arab-Latin fusion was central to the dawn of modern civilization. Carly Fiorina, then CEO of HP, elaborated it at the end of her speech: Although we are often unaware of our indebtedness to this other civilization, its gifts are very much a part of our heritage. The technology industry would not exist without the contributions of Arab mathematicians.
The broader plan is to reach a minimum download speed of 2 Mbps by 2015. But for now, the Telecommunication Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has upped the minimum download speed from 256 Kbps to 512 Kbps (article available here). They have also re-defined this metric in the amendment to the regulation; a data connection that is able to support interactive services including internet access and has the capability of minimum download speed of 512kbps to an individual subscriber from the point of presence (POP) of the service provider intending to provide broadband service LIRNEasia’s most recent report on broadband quality of service experience diagnostics illustrates the actual speed achieved as a percentage of the advertised. All three fixed broadband plans tested in Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai under-perform consistently. The mobile broadband plans, including Airtel’s LTE, performs much worse.
Myanmar is in the midst of a dramatic transformation under the Thein Sein administration. ICTs are front and center, with both Ooredoo and Telenor set to launch services within weeks. In an op ed published in Myanmar in May 2012, almost a lifetime ago given the scale of the changes, I said: “Starting late means that most of the mistakes have been made, by others. In the world of policy design, we spend the most effort working around previous mistakes.” To avoid mistakes and capitalize on the first-comer advantage, it is important that the lessons of those who walked the path of telecom reform earlier be available within Myanmar in a form that is accessible to all.