Efficiency in radio technology and heterogeneous networks (HetNet) for wireless communication has long been talked of. I first heard of it at the London Communication Symposium in 2009 at the University College London (UCL) where HIPNet (Heterogeneous IP Networks) was vastly discussed – more in theory than in-practice, at the time. HetNets enable wireless networks of varying cell sizes, output power and radio access technologies to work together towards the goal of boosting network coverage and capacity. With many wireless operators believing that small cells would be an essential part of their future strategy, there is a big industry push towards HetNets. LTE Advanced will further drive the deployment and adoption of heterogeneous networks.
An unconfirmed Reuters report indicates that the Myanmar government may have met its end of year deadline for issuing licenses to Telenor and Ooredoo. A senior Myanmar Investment Commission (MIC) official said that operation licenses had been granted last week to Telenor and Ooredoo, the two international telecom giants selected through bidding mid last year, the Voice Daily reports. The two operators had earlier announced plans to invest about $15 billion and $ 2 billion respectively in the 15-year projects, it added.
Apps have attacked the lucrative harvest of voice with the tenacity of hungry locusts. Now they have targeted the farmhouse of messaging. And the device makers have joined the feast with independent messaging outfits. The revenue from messaging services fell by almost 4% in 2013 to just below US$104 billion. It predicts that the decline in messaging revenue will be more pronounced in North America and Western Europe where the greatest penetration of smartphones and data users has been prevalent.
The Skype-to-Skype international traffic has grown by 36% in 2013 to 214 billion minutes, according to new data from TeleGeography. International telephone traffic from fixed and mobile phones continues to grow as well, increasing an estimated 7% in 2013, to 547 billion minutes. While the volume of international telephone traffic remains far larger than international Skype traffic, Skype’s minutes are growing much more rapidly. Skype added approximately 54 billion minutes of international traffic in 2013, 50 percent more than the combined international volume growth of every telco in the world. Given these immense traffic volumes, it’s difficult not to conclude that at least some of Skype’s growth is coming at the expense of traditional carriers.
The telecom law has been passed, but it is incomplete and will probably require an amendment or a supplementary law within two years. The rules under the Law have been published for comment, but no information yet on their final form. The critical licences to Telenor and Ooredoo have not yet been issued. The regulatory agency is to be set up in 2015. A lot remains to be done.
Following the Court of Appeals ruling against its net neutrality order, the FCC is facing an existential challenge, says Tim Wu in an interview with the Washington Post. What could the FCC have done differently? The obvious alternative would have been to do what the FCC should have done and — in the future tense — now should do, which is to reclassify broadband under Title II authority. Other observers seem to think that’ll be hard to do, politically. There’s an effort to define it that way by the carriers, and to get people in Congress excited about that.
An old workaround bites back. Seems little alternative but to classify broadband as a utility. In a decision signed by two judges and joined in part by a third, the appeals court acknowledged that the F.C.C.
For too long, the field of privacy has been becalmed by religious fealty to a concept propounded by two New England aristocrats who were annoyed by paparazzi taking pictures of a party in a home. The ill-considered explosion set off by the NSA in its zeal to prevent all future acts of terror has opened up space for new thinking on the subject. An op-ed in the Washington Post is a good example: This is an anonymity problem: The NSA cannot create a dossier on you from your metadata unless it knows that you made the calls the agency is looking at. The privacy question is all about data-gathering: Should the NSA have access to nationwide metadata? The right answer to that question is yes.
One of the reasons we opposed the ill-considered efforts by ETNO and others to impose sending-party-network-pays charging on Internet traffic was the danger of balkanization: differential access to the Internet from different countries or splinternet. We beat back that effort in a temporary alliance with the US State Department, but little did we know that another part of the US government was actively destroying the basis of the Internet. It will cause massive negative economic effects to US tech companies, as described well in a Wired article. Zuckerberg is referring to a movement to balkanize the Internet—a long-standing effort that would potentially destroy the web itself. The basic notion is that the personal data of a nation’s citizens should be stored on servers within its borders.
Reforming MPT is essential to ensure its survival in the face of skilled and well-endowed competitors. Is a partner from a high-cost, high-price telecom market the best way to do this? Japan’s KDDI Corp and Sumitomo Corp are likely to partner of Myanmar’s state-backed telecommunications operator to expand services in one of the world’s least-connected countries, a Sumitomo official said. Sumitomo’s deputy general manager in Myanmar, Soe Kyu, told Reuters the companies were jointly invited into “exclusive” talks about becoming the international partner of Myanmar Post and Telecommunication (MPT), sharing its existing licence. No further details on the likely partnership were revealed.
A submarine cable snaps in every three days while a terrestrial cable gets severed in every 30 minutes somewhere in the world. The global economy counts annual loss of US$26.5 billion due to such disruptions, estimates Ciena. Therefore, route-diversity is the fundamental prerequisite of uninterrupted Internet. Early last year we reported the activation of cross-border terrestrial links between Bangladesh and India.
Over the past two years LIRNEasia has contributed to the collection, calculation and analysis of the International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) database on voice and data affordability, i.e. sub-basket calculations for fixed broadband, mobile broadband and mobile cellular services, in Asia, CIS and the pacific (approx 60 countries). The type of data provided by operators differs within and across countries; however, the sub-basket methodology allows for some comparison. The world development indicators (WDI) report uses some of these indicators along with others in attempt to measure the information society.
Since 2010, we at LIRNEasia have been engaged with problems of international backhaul. Renesys, an authoritative voice in this space, has a nice summary of developments in 2013. Here is their conclusion, influenced no doubt by the incredible damage done to US players in this space by the indiscriminate snooping of NSA. Increasingly, simply having inexpensive connectivity in our interconnected world is not enough. As enterprises become more sophisticated consumers of Internet transit, they seek connectivity alternatives that will keep their own customers happy.
I once invited Bruce Schnier to speak on cryptography at a Ohio State U conference. He came and gave a good talk. But he’s now a star. He exposed the NSA inserting back doors into national cryptography standards. Here is his big picture analysis: Not only is ubiquitous surveillance ineffective, it is extraordinarily costly.
We think about transaction-generated data (TGD) a lot. The essence is that data generated as a by-product of some activity (and which is therefore highly accurate) can tell us more about behavior (even future behavior) than all the questionnaires in the world. Behavior associated with music, closely tied to emotion,seems like an even better candidate than reading. During the next federal election cycle, for instance, Pandora users tuning into country music acts, stand-up comedians or Christian bands might hear or see ads for Republican candidates for Congress. Others listening to hip-hop tunes, or to classical acts like the Berlin Philharmonic, might hear ads for Democrats.
A few weeks back, we wrote about how late the NOFN train was running. It appears the USOF has accepted the reality that it cannot accelerate from 60 to 25,000 in 12 months and is asking for a two-year delay. We all know why government programs have tight deadlines. It has to do with the electoral cycle. What Nilekani achieved, Pitroda could not.