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.
Yesterday, Sriganesh Lokanathan and I spent the day at the inaugural event of a business analytics group, pulled together by the Sri Lanka Ministry of Higher Education and the School of Information and Business Analytics at Deakin University. Seven Sri Lankan universities were represented by faculty as were several Sri Lankan IT firms. When the issue of university-industry collaboration came up, Srinath Perera of WSO2 said that they were already collaborating effectively, including through the three-way relationship with LIRNEasia and University of Moratuwa. Clearly, partnerships are critical in a a field like big data where we are all operating at the frontier of knowledge. The data resides inside firms and government organizations.
The American president’s office-cum-residence is, actually, just another government office. The 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has long lagged behind in terms of using technology for efficiency. It has been “relying in large part on face-to-face meetings and mountains of paper to conduct business.” But things started changing slowly after the very first black president, who is also a Blackberry-freak, moved into the White House. Since Barack Obama took office, the White House has established a dedicated digital team, started tallying incoming phone calls electronically instead of by calculator and has begun using computer software to design floral arrangements.
Big data is getting bigger. It has moved from limited use by retailers such as amazon.com or wallmart and others analysing customer behaviour to just about every sector. Scientists have always crunched large amounts of data. The genomes of species and repositories of chemical structures and properties are two sources of big data for scientists.
Running telecoms transmission business is not the small and medium enterprises’ cup of tea. Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) denies this universal truth, as it revised the infrastructure sharing guidelines on July 7, 2011. It mandates a middleman, dubbed as Nationwide Telecommunication Transmission Network (NTTN), between the legacy owners of fiber networks and their customers. As a result, the cost of domestic backhaul has jumped by manifolds. The mobile operators and the ISPs have strongly protested the regulatory malpractice.
The overt hostility among European opinion leaders to attention-economy companies such as Google and Facebook is not translated into use behavior. Their policy makers do everything in their power to slow down the attention economy. And they still wonder why their companies can’t cut it. Google now has an 85 percent market share for search in the region’s five largest economies, including Britain, France and Germany, compared with less than 80 percent in 2009, according to the research company comScore. Google’s share of the American market stands at roughly 65 percent.
Nalaka Gunawardene asks good questions. So I paid attention when he tweeted: Where does urban end & rural begin in #lka? Not silly admin demarcations, but in REAL terms? What decides: Tele-density? Purchasing power?
A World Bank Report describes the problems faced by India as it seeks to power its economy to higher performance. What can be done? “Power is a very sensitive issue and it is tough to build consensus around reforms,” Pargal said. “We therefore lay out a menu of options for the government to consider.” Welcoming the study for highlighting the numerous complexities of the challenge within one report, Jyoti Arora, Joint Secretary in the power ministry, said a lot of thinking is going on regarding power issues in the government.
The New York Times reporter seems to do a better job than the experts queried by the Pew Research Center on foretelling the future on the Internet. Just as important is the kind of changes to the Internet and content that no one seems to have talked about. The experts seem to think of the Internet as a place that people go to, or a thing they visit periodically. That is increasingly less the case, and not just because, according to the Internet analyst Mary Meeker, some people now check their smartphones up to 150 times a day. Location-aware devices, wearables like health monitors that beam info to the computing cloud, and the sensor-rich world all mean that the habits of the Internet have blown out across the world.
We’ve been arguing that electricity is up for a major change and that the change is going to be driven by the infusion of ICTs into all aspects of electricity generation, transmission, distribution and supply. Here’s another example. Hopefully this does not require smart meters and that high consumption devices in our countries can work with the gizmo. IT’S July, and it’s starting to get hot. This month last year — on Friday, July 19, 2013 — New York City broke its electricity usage record.
ESB, the Irish electricity supplier, and UK’s Vodafone have formed a 50:50 partnership in building a new fiber-to-the-building (FTTB) broadband network. This €450 million (US$615 million) project will deliver download speeds ranging from 200 Mbps to 1 Gbps. The FTTB network of ESB-Vodafone will connect some 500,000 homes and businesses in 50 towns and cities (map) nationwide. It will plug the first group of customers in early-2015. This open access network will make Ireland the Europe’s first country in terms of 100% FTTB penetration.
Ownership matters. That is why we take special precautions when the incumbent telecom operator is owned by the government. There is a tendency for the government to want to look after its creature, even if it means that the “playing field” is tilted against private competitors by the regulator. It’s been a long time since the government of Fiji “privatized” the government department that provided fixed telephony services. But the new owner was not a truly private entity, but the Pension Fund.
Every time I hear people agonizing over the possible ill effects of big data, I think of Dhaka, a city that is being choked by traffic. We all know that the solutions to transport management are among the most difficult to implement. We know that, in fact, there are no perfect solutions. Public transport is part of the answer but not all of it. Congestion pricing, by itself, cannot solve problems.