It appears that India’s Department of Telecom is rethinking auctions as the mechanism for assigning spectrum: After failure of two rounds of airwave auction, the Department of Telecom (DoT) is now exploring pricing methods for fixed priced allotment of spectrum, said an internal note. An ‘expanded committee’ will ascertain ‘concept, operational parameters and conditions’ for a market-related process for giving away spectrum, said the note reviewed by ET. My first reaction was that this would be contrary to the sweeping ruling given on the 2G auction by the courts, but it appears there is wiggle room: However, in September last year, the Supreme Court had said in its opinion on queries raised by the government through a Presidential Reference that auction was not the only way to allocate natural resources like spectrum. Further, maximising of revenues were secondary to serving the public good with regard to awarding allocating natural resources. Full report.
Three months ago the Communication and Information Technology Commission (CITC) of Saudi Arab has vowed to ban all VoIP applications that bypass networks. Now the regulator has lowered its axe on applications like Skype, Viber and WhatsApp. As a result, the oil rich Kingdom’s vast population of foreign workers will have to count huge cost of calling home. The regulator issued a vaguely worded directive in March warning that such tools as Viber, Whatsapp and Skype broke local laws, without specifying how. CITC did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday or when the earlier announcement was made in March.
Technology is a catalyst, not an element, of increasing productivity. The desire of improvement is central to all successes, where technology accelerates the rate of achievement. Bangladesh government can truly claim the credit of dramatically improving the child and maternal mortality rates through an efficiently run nationwide scheme of immunization. Political goodwill has been the driver of this success. One physician, Dr.
South Asia is a tad short of two billion people, I keep reminding people. That is bigger than Africa. But we are not highly connected. I am sure there is more intra-East Africa travel than within S Asia. Europe, is smaller than Africa even if we include the population of Russia within it.
For most of its existence the South Asian Telecom Regulators’ Council (SATRC) has been a talk shop, not particularly noted as being on the leading edge of anything. Therefore I was very pleased to see that it is being cited as the pioneer in implementing the APT’s 700 MHz band plan that will provide enough low-frequency spectrum for quick rollout of wireless broadband, an absolute necessity for a region that has very little wires connecting homes (and still not able to justify the costs of FTTH given what people are willing to pay for broadband). The only down note is about Sri Lanka (which prides itself as the first to introduce new technology in the region) keeping out of the South Asian consensus along with Iran. This is perhaps because the government handed out the 700 band frequencies to a large number of private TV broadcasters for nothing (for Treasury) over the past few years and is thus constrained. According to the Ericsson Mobility Report (November 2012), LTE networks are expected to cover 60% of the population in Asia Pacific by 2017, up from an estimated 1.
China Mobile has unfolded its suits of applications to combat the OTT players like Skype, Line, Whatspp and WeChat. Its mobile app called “Jego” is now available for iOS and Android devices. It offers free VoIP, SMS, push-to-talk voice messages, photo sharing, video calling, and other services. Dereck Li, business development manager of China Mobile’s international unit, said the new service targets international users and aims to compete with Microsoft-owned Skype in the IDD and video calling markets. For instance, Skype pay-as-you-go calls to China cost around $0.
It has a bit of background. Warid Telecom of Abu Dhabi had acquired the 6th mobile operating license in Bangladesh, through open auction at US$ 50 million in 2005. The license was bundled with 15 MHz. spectrum in 1800 MHz. band.
It has been business as usual in Istanbul, the largest gateway of Eurasian telecoms traffic. Turkey, unlike Egypt, has not killed the goose that lays golden eggs in terms of telecoms revenue and reputation, despite civil unrest. Jim Cowie, the CTO of Renesys Corporation, has written in his company’s blog: We examined the reachability of social networking sites from our measurement infrastructure within Turkey, and found nothing unusual. We examined the 72-hour history of measurements from inside Turkey to these sites, and found no change in normal behavior. In short: Turkey’s Internet does not appear to have changed significantly in reaction to the current protest events.
Unlike the dictators, deposed by Arab Spring, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a democratically elected and highly accomplished statesman. “Before first winning power in October 2002, the AKP (Erdogan’s party) spent 22 months interviewing in depth 41,000 people across the country. Now, even allies admit, Mr Erdogan listens mostly to himself,” remarked the Financial Times. Erdogan is now counting the losses of not consulting his fellow citizens on building a shopping mall at an old park in Istanbul. The young Turks have hit the streets, keyboards and touchscreens simultaneously amid battling with tear gas and water cannons.
Yury Sokolov is the vice-president of Rusatom Overseas, a state-owned Russian nuclear energy outfit. Bangladesh has planned for a nuclear reactor to produce commercial power with Rusatom’s help. Mr. Sokolov underscores the development of skilled manpower, management system and relevant laws prior to building the reactor. His emphasize on building proper infrastructure is striking.
Vodafone and China Mobile were an odd couple. Now the story has become curiouser. Lack of regulatory certainty has caused them to withdraw from Myanmar. Vodafone said it had withdrawn after seeing the final licence conditions, which were published on 20 May, because “the opportunity does not meet the strict internal investment criteria to which both Vodafone and China Mobile adhere”. A spokeswoman for Vodafone added that among the British company’s concerns were that a promised telecommunications bill overhauling regulation of the sector is now not due to be enacted before Burma finalises its choice of foreign mobile operator on 27 June.
In my recent visit to Colombia to assess the ICT sector for the OECD, I found that the Office of the Controlaria (Auditor General) was playing an increasingly central role in telecom policy, second-guessing decisions by policy makers and regulators years after the fact, for example requiring a Mayor responsible for the decision by a municipally owned telco to introduce ISDN many years back to compensate the municipality out of his personal funds for the resulting losses. The broader issues of government ownership raised by this story are discussed in detail in my LBO.LK Choices column. The Indian Comptroller and Auditor General was involved in telecom regulation from the 1990s, for example claiming that TRAI under the leadership of Justice Sodhi was negligent in not optimizing government revenues through BSNL. It played a decisive role in the 2G scandal that has been dragging down the Indian telecom industry for the past 2-3 years by making an inflated assessment of the losses caused.
Last year, I wrote about how the ubiquity of mobiles had helped a Bangladeshi doctor improve vaccination rates and win a Gates Foundation Prize. Here is another story about how the ubiquity of mobiles is helping improve government service delivery in Lahore, Pakistan. Even among the poorest fifth of households, 80% now use phones, so the technology can reach almost everyone. Illiteracy is a problem, but the chief minister’s call alerts a recipient to get help, if needed, with reading the text message when it arrives. It contains a specific question: did the police respond, as required, within 15 minutes of your emergency call?
Several Sinhala newspapers and webpapers have reported that the government will henceforth give priority to delivering e gov services over mobile interfaces. I assume the English media will pick up this story in due course. This is good news for a country where mobiles are ubiquitous, but conventional desktop computer use is not. We at LIRNEasia have been hammering home the message that mobile must be given priority based on our Teleuse@BOP survey research since 2005. Specifically, this was a key message in the 2011 and 2012 Future Gov conferences in Colombo.
Data centers are simultaneously the factories and warehouses of Internet. A study of Cushman & Wakefield, Hurleypalmerflatt and Source8 has ranked Indonesia, India and Brazil as the riskiest countries to open a data center. That strikes out two out of the four BRIC countries from being the home of Internet. Their risks are mostly related to physical, economic and social issues. Other factors however such as high energy costs, poor international internet bandwidth and protectionist legislation are also risks that need to be taken into account.
It seems to be the high time to compare the state of telecoms between North Korea and Cuba. Cuba’s average salary is US$20 a month and it costs $4.5 per hour to surf the net, which is also heavily filtered – said a report of BBC. It means, the Cuban net users burn 25% of their average national wage in an hour. Cuba has activated her first submarine cable early this year, according to Renesys.