Babus in public offices sit by the pile of files catching dust. Because, the Babus are busy with drinking tea, chewing beetle-leaf, reading newspapers and gossiping with colleagues. This is the general profile of public offices in South Asia. Public offices are neither zoo nor theme park. Yet a notice hangs at the Babu’s door saying, “Visitors are not allowed.
Developed world’s bastions of consumer electronics have fallen like house of cards. Thanks to the proliferation of cheaper components. Off-shoring of manufacturing to developing world has also built its capacity to produce cheaper devices and even counterfeit. Control of mobile terminals is now at terminal stage. The market has been fast migrating to the world of solution and applications.
In November 2013, the Myanmar Ministry of Communication and Information Technology called for comments on a set of draft rules that would govern the liberalized telecom sector. LIRNEasia submitted Comments on Draft Rules Dec 2013_1 covering all but one of the topics.
Contrary to the news report that I based my earlier post on, the Internet use data comes from a preliminary report of the 2011-12 Census. It is based on five percent of the responses from each district. Unfortunately, the data are presented in a somewhat confused way. The first column is simple enough: ability to access Internet from the house. The second column is the problem.
There was a time when voice telephony was seen as a public utility, requiring government involvement in supply. In most parts of the world, the end result was waiting lists and poor service. Now the same refrain is being sung re broadband. Why not take a look at Hong Kong? Here is where to start.
The full report of the 2012-13 Household Income and Expenditure Survey is not yet public, but LBO had got hold of the Internet data: About 11.4 percent of households in Sri Lanka have internet access at home, with 9.2 percent accessing through other means with communications centres were playing a key role, official data shows. The highest internet access was in the Colombo district at 26.9 percent of households with 15.
In a recent contribution to a just-published UNCTAD report on cloud computing we said: The other aspect of the problem is whether data are subject to the laws of the jurisdictions where the cloud computing companies are located. For example, take the case of a company in Country A using the services of a cloud computing supplier registered in Country B, which dynamically stores and processes the Country A firm’s data on server farms located in Countries C, D and E. Country A may not be happy to have the laws of Country B apply to the data and that its police may go trawling therein. The applicability of the laws of the country where the storage and processing occurred poses a new set of problems, because even determining which country has jurisdiction may be difficult in light of dynamic resource allocation. This was well before Snowden changed the entire discourse.
Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission has been dictating the termination rate of international voice traffic. This foolish act has made bypass pervasive and unstoppable. Now BTRC has trespassed into the central bank’s domain to dictate the fees of mobile banking transactions. Even the central bank doesn’t dictate the costs of mobile banking transactions. The telecom regulator is, however, reluctant to recognize the market.
In September 2012, for the first time we explained to ESCAP the fragility of Internet in Asia. In response, the UN outfit had engaged Terabit Consulting to study the state of connectivity across Southeast Asia. The study found that Vietnam’s international connectivity is “Somewhat weak” at regional standard. It said more specifically: “Viet Nam’s submarine cable connectivity is significantly less than other Asian nations.” Last Friday (December 20) Vietnam’s Internet connectivity was shaken when its branching unit to the Asia America Gateway (AAG) was severed by the anchor of a ship.
Both the horses are to be similar in size and strength while pulling a carriage. That was missing between India’s Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF) and Reliance. As a result, Reliance has walked out of its rural mobile coverage project under the scheme of USOF. The issue dates back to 2007 when a scheme was launched under the USOF to provide subsidy support for setting up and managing 7,871 infrastructure sites, or telecom towers, in rural and remote areas in 500 districts of 12 states. RCOM and RTL had entered into an agreement with the USOF in June that year, under which they took responsibility for setting up nearly half of these towers.
Singer is synonymous with sewing machines. Like Xerox for photo copiers. And now Singer is selling more phones than sewing machines. And more smartphones than feature phones? Not quite yet.
I am a fan of Mitchell Lazarus. This engineer-cum-lawyer, who is also a PhD in psychology, has brilliantly narrated the evolution of PSTN. He believes that regulating IP telephony is as challenging as “updating the rules of the road from horse-and-carriage traffic to modern automobiles.” It’s all about regulating the interconnected and non-interconnected VoIP services. There used to be a marked difference between the two: where interconnected VoIP needed no special skills, the typical non-interconnected VoIP customer was a highly computer-literate person with a headset plugged into a laptop.
The Alliance for Affordable Internet (AA4I) launched their Affordability Report to showcase their newly developed Affordability Index. LIRNEasia’s CEO Helani Galpaya was invited by AA4I to participate in a panel at the launch of the report at the ICTD conference that took place in Cape Town, South Africa in December 2013. Composite indices that compare and rank countries have value because they get the attention of policy makers and regulators – those at the bottom of the table are indignant (and are hopefully moved to improve matters on the ground so they do better next year) and those at the top use it for publicity. In both cases, it is a good way for research organizations or others to start a meaningful dialog with a government or a regulatory agency, to start identifying what actions are needed for the country to perform better (and rise up in the ranking) in the future. The value of these indices increases when they cover a large number of countries.
Connected to the earlier post on taxes, is this one about Vodafone India getting served a USD 600 million retroactive tax bill. While Vodafone maintains no tax is due on the 2007 acquisition, it has told the government it is willing to explore the possibility of a “mutually acceptable solution”. Vodafone further points it has become one of India’s largest investors, spending more than £12.8 billion in building its business in the country since 2007. The operator is also one of India’s largest taxpayers.
So I was asked why Airtel was quitting Sri Lanka, the first foreign market they entered. Here is the summary of what I said. Perhaps because it was its first foreign excursion, Airtel was very slow to roll out. In May 2007 they signed an investment agreement. I commented then that the amount committed was too small for a rapid rollout.
Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and I have been debating privacy since the early 1990s. We both had chapters in Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape, which remains a seminal book on technology and privacy, published in 1997. Just last month, we continued our conversation at IGF in Bali. He was not so forthright in Bali, but now he is putting into words what we have been kicking around in our internal discussions. At the just-concluded IAPP Data Protection Congress in Brussels, the audience heard a bold proposal from closing keynoter Viktor Mayer-Schönberger: “The naked truth is that informational self-determination has turned into a formality devoid of meaning and import.