Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company Limited, (BSCCL) has signed an MoU with BSNL as a first step to export IP Transit bandwidth to the northeastern states of India across the eastern land borders of Bangladesh. Initially BSNL will procure 10 Gbps bandwidth from Bangladesh and a three-year agreement will be signed very soon. This February, the Bangladesh government decided to export the unused internet bandwidth, following a request from India in July last year seeking 40Gbps bandwidth for eight eastern Indian states. The BSCCL had earlier projected a monthly earning of around Tk4.83 crore ($643,000) from the export of 40Gbps bandwidth; but the MoU for only 10Gbps bandwidth brought down the estimated monthly earnings to only Tk1.
Bangladesh has abundant international Internet bandwidth while Bhutan generates surplus electricity. Newly appointed Bhutan’s Ambassador to Dhaka, Pema Choden, has expressed interest in importing surplus bandwidth from Bangladesh. In that meeting, the State Minister for Foreign Affairs M Shahriar Alam also showed interest in Bhutan’s plentiful electricity to meet the growing energy demand of Bangladesh. Both the neighbors are now poised to be the friend in mutual needs. Bangladesh currently consumes only 40Gbps of its 200Gbps capacity of the SEA-ME-WE 4 submarine cable.
In its recent public consultation, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) aim to set minimum download speeds for the different type of wireless technologies offered. This was based on the download speeds achieved and reported by the service providers over the last three quarters. The methods used while carrying out the diagnostics is not known. Further, it is perhaps more important to understand the consumers needs when access the Internet over the phone – is it for downloading or for browsing. There is no doubt that download speed matters, but latency also should be given some thought as that is what really affects the QoS for web browsing.
The New York Times reported some exciting new changes that are in the works in New York, whereby the entire electricity model is being rethought. New York State is proposing to turn its electric utilities into a new kind of entity that would buy electricity from hundreds or thousands of small generators and set prices for that electricity and for the costs of running the power grid. The proposal anticipates a radically different electric system, dominated by decentralized production, much of it of renewable, intermittent energy sources like solar or wind power. The Public Service Commission is considering how the utilities would have to change. Instead of distributing electricity themselves, the utilities would effectively direct traffic, coordinating distribution of electricity produced by a multitude of smaller entities, according to an outline published last month by the commission, which regulates utilities.
A media conference was held on the 25th April 2014 at Holiday Inn Resort, Goa to launch the resource repository on broadband policy and regulation and to disseminate the research conducted under the Ford Foundation funded project on ‘Broadband Policy and Regulation Conducive to Access by the Poor’. It was attended by journalists from PTI, Indian Express, India Forbes, Telecom Lead and Cyber Media stationed in multiple locations in India. The conference commenced with an introduction to the project and the media launch of the web-based Broadband Policy Resource Centre (http://broadbandasia.info/ ). The topics covered included what India can learn from the National Broadband Network initiatives of Malaysia, Australia and Indonesia, an analysis about the current status of the National Optical Fiber Network of India and why the Indian app market has not been as successful as expected and how it can be improved.
The attention economy requires that major investments be made to acquire the attention base and then to monetize it. Although the attention economy has been around at least since 1830, people are still not used to the model. They may be right about the business model – in which case Twitter becomes a perfect case study in the economics of information goods. The key to success in cyberspace is to harness the power of Metcalfe’s Law, which says that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its users. In layman’s terms this means that the faster you can acquire users the quicker you reach the point of becoming the winner who takes all.
Myanmar’s international connectivity has been choked due to her exclusive reliance on nearly dysfunctional SEA-ME-WE3 cable. Link with a decent submarine cable became imperative when this South East Asia’s last greenfield telecom market allured foreign telecom starlets. Finally, Myanmar has joined the SEA-ME-WE5 consortium in March. Interestingly, Myanmar was also named as one of the partners in Asia Africa Europe 1 (AAE1) submarine cable systems long before it formally joined the SEA-ME-WE5 consortium. Now the Myanmar Post and Telecommunications (MPT) is contemplating to join the AAE1 consortium.
I was a little surprised by the report in the Hindu Business Line that the Department of Telecom is planning to set up a testing and payment infrastructure for mobile apps, along with a subsidy/investment scheme funded from the Universal Service Fund. I was surprised about the DoT taking the lead when apps seem to be more within DEITY’s subject area. I was also surprised that funds from the USF were being used, when one would think that converting the universal service fund into an investment vehicle is an unusual choice. I was also surprised that many of the topics had been discussed in great detail by Rajat Kathuria and Sughanda Srivastva at the Expert Forum we conducted in Delhi on March 12th, 2014. DoT senior officials were present, but it seems that a month and half is little too short a time for policy recommendations to be transformed into actual policy in India.
National Telecom Policy of 1998 still governs Bangladesh. It has prompted the Telecom Reporters’ Network Bangladesh (TRNB) to organize a round table discussion titled “Revision of Telecom Policy” yesterday. Rohan Samarajiva was the keynote speaker in this event. Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology Minister Abdul Latif Siddique and BTRC chairman Sunil Kanti Bose along with the telecom sector’s key officials were present. Rohan has urged to improve the indicators of Bangladesh by setting milestones in the revised telecom policy.
Nine mobile operators have agreed to accelerate the implementation of interoperable mobile money services across MEA regions. Bharti Airtel, Etisalat, Millicom, MTN, Ooredoo, Orange, STC, Vodafone and Zain will implement the GSMA’s Mobile Money Interoperability (MMI) program. These operators represent 582 million mobile connections across 48 countries in the Middle East and Africa regions. As of December 2013, mobile money in this region showed following growth: The regions accounted for 58% of the world’s 218 mobile money deployments; Sixty-six percent of all registered accounts and 73% of active accounts are located in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and North Africa; Mobile money users in these regions accounted for 77% of global transaction value in June 2013, performing 341 million transactions totaling US$5.7 billion.
We rely on Kingdon’s concept of policy windows a lot. To effectively take research to policy, the necessary condition is a policy window: some kind of opening created in the “minds” of the relevant decision makers. It does not require much knowledge to postulate that current Indian election that will yield a new Prime Minister and Cabinet, whatever be the outcome, is such a window. But there is more. All the parties are promising improved governance and delivery of government services using ICTs, as the attached slideset shows.
In mid 2012 the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) issued a public consultation on standards for quality of service (QoS) related to mobile data services. LIRNEasia responded. Nearly two years since, the issues that prompted the public consultation persist. Consumers are being wooed by telecom companies in advertisements regarding high speed wireless data services and product packs in which they are promised speeds of up to 7.2 megabit a second or 21 megabit a second.
Issue of discrimination coming up in big data policy review. The value of big data is in understanding the consumer. But with understanding comes the ability to discriminate. Not all discrimination is bad. But some may be.
A recent case gave hope to those who wanted the n=all collection of telephone transaction-generated data to cease. But only court that can overrule Smith v Maryland is the Supreme Court. Now a FISA court has explicitly declined to follow Judge Leon. So n=all continues. A telephone company asked the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in January to stop requiring it to give records of its customers’ calls to the National Security Agency, in light of a ruling by a Federal District Court judge that the N.
Africa lags far behind in every front of ICT indicators, according to the latest report of ITU. Subsequently a recent study of Analysis Mason said, “Every African country has international fibre connectivity, but lack of competition at the national level is keeping prices high.” The study has detected that 35 of the 48 Sub-Saharan countries have no competition among national fiber providers. Eight have limited competition – that is, two providers besides the mobile companies, usually the incumbent fixed-line operator and either the government or the electricity transmission company. Only five countries (Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe) can be said to have effective competition among multiple players.
Contrary to popular belief, higher bandwidth and high download speeds does not necessarily mean better performance in terms of latency or round trip time (RTT). RTT is the measure of how long a packet takes to reach the destination server and return to the client (i.e. the PC or laptop or any device used to make the request). So the less time it takes the faster the web page will load (in other words, the lower the RTT the better).