Earlier we discussed the snapping of four submarine cables in Egypt and its impact. Now we have come to know it was an act of sabotage. Telecom Egypt’s CEO Mohamed al-Nawawi has confirmed that his country’s Armed Forces have arrested three saboteurs. Among the global news outlets, Associated Press and BBC have covered it by far. There is, however, nothing to celebrate.
Pakistan’s 50% internet traffic has been impacted as the Sea-Me-We-4 submarine cable went down in Egypt, said local press. The blogpost of Sunil Tagare brings more bad news: altogether four major submarine cables — I-Me-We, Sea-Me-We-4, EIG and TE North – have been severed in northern Egypt impacting a huge portion of Eurasian telecoms traffic transiting the Middle East. Last week I highlighted the risks of Egypt being the only gateway of Eurasian cables networks. Collapsing of the aforementioned four cables is just an example of the fragile transcontinental submarine telecoms backbone.
Exploding growth of smart devices has divided the industry into two camps debating on the availability of spectrum in future. One says the world is running out of spectrum. The other says there is nothing to get panicked. One year ago the mobile phone’s inventor Martin Cooper has suggested using innovative technologies rather than giving the carriers more spectrum. He said that currently the technology with the most potential for carriers to use their networks more efficiently is the smart antenna.
The Saudi regulator is pressuring operators to crack down on Skype and similar OTT applications. It affects both Saudis and the many expatriate workers who live there. This will require deep packet inspection and some serious interventions in the data streams. Saudi students on scholarships who use the Skype video application to contact their parents are also disappointed. “I really don’t understand what they mean by monitoring.
At every Board meeting of CPRsouth we provide evidence on the efficacy of our actions. Every time we seek funds for our work, we do the same. So we thought the question would be of equal interest to our colleagues engaged in similar enterprises, at TPRC and EuroCPR. We prepared two papers building on one another, one for each. The TPRC paper was presented last September, the Samarajiva_EuroCPR_Mar13_final a few days back.
Returning to the privacy field after a break of more than 10 years, I was struck by how inappropriate the old notice and consent approaches would be for what was actually happening on the ground. Here is an attempt to evolve new principles. Not had time to fully digest yet. Traditional approaches are no longer fit for the purposes for which they were designed, for several reasons: • They fail to account for the possibility that new and beneficial uses for the data will be discovered, long after the time of collection. • They do not account for networked data architectures that lower the cost of data collection, transfer and processing to nearly zero, and enable multiuser access to a single piece of data.
It appears they want to play: Google chairman Eric Schmidt speaks on March 22 in Yangon. The company has big plans for Myanmar, and they’re closely linked to the country’s plans for mobile. Myanmar’s President, Thein Sein, has set a goal of 80% mobile-phone penetration by 2015, from current rates of 9%. With internet penetration as low as 1%, and fixed-line telephony penetration in the single figures even in big cities, mobile networks will be the only way the vast majority of Myanmar’s 50 million people can get online, and will serve as the main communications infrastructure for a modern information economy, including banking, media and civic services. A speculative piece.
Mexico is not really within our sphere of activity, but the irony of having Carlos Slim as the co-chair of the Broadband Commission has caused me to write a few blogs about telecom sector developments there. Most recently, there was this stunning news that a political consensus had been achieved to attack “the great problem of concentration in telephony, internet and television.” One year ago, the OECD conducted a review of the telecom sector in Mexico. The conclusions came under fire from the entities that benefited from the status quo. Is there a causal relation here?
There were no training programs on how to use mobile phones, even for the villagephone ladies in Bangladesh. But they think training programs are needed in the US. What does this mean for our part of the world? According to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, one in five American adults — about 62 million people — do not use the Internet. The 2012 Pew Internet and American Life Project said the main reason these people “don’t go online is because they don’t think the Internet is relevant to them.
This argument is prevalent in the US – A senator passing a bill to regulate data caps, the former chairman of the FCC claiming data caps are for operators to increase ARPUs and not for network congestion issues etc. But can we relate in this part of the world? Are data caps doing more harm than good (limiting potential innovation)? If network congestion issues rise because of constant concurrent use as opposed to how much each user consumer per month, why are operators and regulators telling us otherwise? The report by the New America Foundation raises a valid point: “The fastest car in the world won’t get you very far if you only have 20 feet of road, and a blazing-fast 4G LTE network is not worth much if you are limited to 2 GB of data per month.
In its recent report, Measuring the Information Society, the ITU provide a brief summary of key ICT services and their developments over the past year. One of the key highlights is the price of broadband that was calculated using the ITU basket methodology. The range is from USD 5 to an astounding USD 1700, with Sri Lanka being among the cheapest. The report also refers the comparatively low mobile prices. Home to a highly proactive regulatory authority and a competitive mobile market with five operators competing for some 21 million potential customers, the country ranks 14th globally.
YouTube has hit a billion regular monthly visitors. Such milestone, also reached by Facebook last October, further solidifies Cisco’s projected dominance of video in the cyberspace. “If YouTube were a country, we’d be the third largest in the world after China and India,” the company said in a blogpost announcing it now has a billion unique visitors every month. “Nearly one out of every two people on the internet visits YouTube.” Launched in February 2005, a year after Facebook, YouTube operated from a small office above a fast-food restaurant in San Mateo, California.
I just listening to Eli Noam giving a talk that claimed that Google was the world’s largest media company. The big PDF appears to be the base presentation he was working off. The slide that he used showing Google to be the largest media company, had Time Warner and Telecom Italia in it. He made references to HHI, but it is not clear how he claims that Google (a search engine and advertising company), Time Warner (a media and cable company) and Telecom Italia (a telecom company) can be in the same market and how their market shares can be calculated. When I questioned this, I was advised that the methodology is in two books, one for the US and one for the rest of the world.
Asia’s median wholesale price of Internet bandwidth is now more than four-times expensive than Europe’s. In LIRNEasia I have been working with ESCAP to formulate a Eurasian terrestrial cable initiative. The objective is making Asia’s submarine cables highly resilient by adding a meshed transcontinental overland optical fiber network. It will make Asia’s wholesale IP-transit bandwidth cost either at par or lesser than Europe’s. Broadband in Asia, regardless fixed or mobile, will grow like mobile voice.
Telenor Pakistan acquired stake in Tameer Micro Finance Bank to introduce the country’s first branchless banking in 2009. Analysts raised eyebrow when China Mobile threw US$5.8 billion for 20% of Shanghai Pudong Development Bank in 2010. SPDP now offers Corporate Mobile Banking Services. It will be, however, grossly inappropriate if the Philippines and Kenya are not credited as the global pioneers of mobile banking.
It appears from news reports that the Myanmar government has commenced work on a domestic fiber backhaul network. This was among the recommendations of the oped that I published in a Myanmar newspaper last year. But as experience has shown in country after country that it is easier to build backhaul than to ensure that it is efficiently used (see downloadable book, chapter 7). For this, an open-access regime based on cost-oriented pricing and non-discriminatory access is essential. The farmlands were dug twice, while burying cables along the roads in Thapyay San village, Magway township, one of the locals said.