It is estimated that the world’s population went past the seven billion mark in 2011. Why do I use this cautious language? Sri Lanka just conducted a census and is looking for some half a million people that are short of the previous projections. So estimate we must. GSMA’s Mobile and Development Intelligence website estimates that the number of mobile SIMs went past the five billion mark, at end of 2011.
O3B is a new satellite company that is offering low latency (120-150 ms) satellite connectivity that should be of great interest to small countries without access to submarine cables; for those wanting redundancy for the existing cables, and even cruise lines. Simple physics does not allow geostationary satellites to give low latency. O3B is using medium orbit satellites. Worth a look.
PiRRC Research Assistant Shivanjini Anamika made an excellent presentation on intra-Pacific international call prices and roaming prices at the 5th Policy and Regulation Forum for the Pacific in Nadi, Fiji. The prices were high in general, but relatively lower prices were offered in the countries that had introduced competition. The presentation is here. This makes a direct contribution to the APT’s interest in lowering roaming rates, as signified in its Bali Action Plan of 2009 and several workshops held since.
LIRNEasia‘s predecessor PIPU [the Public Interest Program Unit] was headed by Rohan Samarajiva (LIRNEasia’s Chair and CEO) and Luxman Siriwardena (one of our Board members), and consisted of many of LIRNEasia‘s current family and friends, including Harsha de Silva (MP, and our Consultant Lead Economist). Here are a few annotated memories of PIPU’s finale trip to Trincomalee in June 2004: PIPU trip to Trinco 2004. Captions and comments courtesy of Harsha. PIPU was in charge of executing Sri Lanka’s infrastructure reform program between 2002-04. In Prof’s words, “PIPU gave birth to LIRNEasia.
Reports are coming out about the Myanmar government’s plans for the telecom sector. Sadly, little seems to have been learned from the rich experience of the past two decades. Why otherwise would there be an interest in maintaining 51% ownership of the new operators? More interesting is the line about developing a national backbone. Are the rules for open access being drawn up?
According to this feature in the Line Media, it is not in Silicon Valley. Here’s the pop quiz for today–If you wanted to use your garage for a high-tech startup, one that was going to require a gig of connectivity, where would be the best possible place for that garage to be located? Silicon Valley? Raleigh-Durham’s Research Triangle? The Twin Cities?
Based on LIRNEasia research, Telecom Tiger and Knowledge Partner carried a story on the lack of transparency and consistency in IDD and roaming tariffs within the SAARC. If judged by the criterion of relative ease of electronic connectivity within the region as against outside, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) is a failure. If SAARC is real, prices for intra-SAARC calls must be lower than for calls to points outside SAARC. Roaming within the region should be cheaper and less opaque than outside the region. Both are not so, despite some improvements since 2008 says LIRNEasia, a regional think-tank.
We’ve been talking about mobile devices becoming the primary interfaces with the web. But this is an attack from another direction, the cloud: Much the way Salesforce wasn’t really about ending software (the company writes plenty of software that is up in the cloud, not inside a computer), Pano is not really about the end of chips, or the software needed to run them. Pano counts on chips and software that are in servers elsewhere to do its computing. But that shift of complex chips could presage a deeper shift in the computer industry, as cloud-based businesses change how information is controlled. A company in the traditional personal computer business “is like a saguaro cactus that has been shot,” Mr.
Public access to ICTs: Sculpting the profile of users is a Global Impact Study working paper by George Sciadas, with input from Hil Lyons, Chris Rothschild, and Araba Sey. Based on a survey of public access ICT users in five countries, it outlines some basic characteristics of users – their demographics, history of using ICTs and reasons for using public access ICTs. “Public access” is defined as computer and Internet services that are open to the general public. This preliminary analysis indicates that while a large proportion of public access ICT users are young (50% under 25 years old), students (44%), and have at least secondary education (82%), there is a fair amount of diversity in user characteristics. The significance of public access ICTs is demonstrated in the finding that most users’ first contact with computers (50%) and the internet (62%) was in a public access venue.
An op-ed by Harsha de Silva, PhD, in Daily Star, Bangladesh focuses on the Smallholder Quality Penalty (SQP) in the jute supply chains. The SQP is the financial penalty on the market price imposed on the smallholder by the first-handler (generally a collector) due to uncertainty over produce quality. This allows the first-handler to offset potential losses due to the perception of lower quality when selling to the next handler downstream. The SQP exists in most transactions in the supply chain. LIRNEasia research on the jute supply chain conducted in 2011 revealed that the SQP is imposed upon smallholders in the Bangladeshi jute industry.
We learned to our great sorrow that Haymar Win Tun passed away. Our condolences go to her family and many friends, among who are many from LIRNEasia and CPRsouth. She was at LIRNEasia only for a short time and attended only one CPRsouth conference, but the bonds that were forged were deep and strong. It is a tragedy when a young person dies; it is an even greater tragedy when a person of great potential dies. Haymar was a person of great potential.
An unexpected benefit of our visit to Islamabad was learning that a new academic publication had been launched in December 2011 by the Bangladesh Institute for ICT in Development and the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh. The working papers are listed below: * Bottom of the Pyramid Expenditure Patterns on Mobile Phone Services in Selected Emerging Asian Countries by Aileen Agüero and Harsha de Silva * Mobile banking: Overview of Regulatory Framework in Emerging Markets by Rasheda Sultana * Factors Affecting e-Government Assimilation in Developing Countries by Boni Pudjianto and Zo Hangjung * Inclusive Development through e-Governance: Political Economy of e-Government Projects in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala in India by Rajendra Kumar * New Media, Knowledge Acquisition and Participatory Governance in Rural Bangladesh by Jude William Genilo and Marium Akther * e-Krishok: A Campaign to Promote Agricultural Information and Services through ICT by Shahid Uddin Akbar, Parvez Mohd. Asheque, Shariful Islam Four out of six of the papers came from LIRNEasia/CPRsouth. The first is authored by Aileen Aguero (of DIRSI, worked up during her time at LIRNEasia) and Consultant Lead Economist Harsha de Silva. The second, third and fourth papers are from CPRsouth4.
We were flattered to see the highest authority for telecom in India use an image from our Teleuse@BOP research, unacknowledged, on the front page of its website. The image appears to have been taken from a post from our partner on this project, Nalaka Gunawardene. We have more good images. We’d happy to share them with an entity as prestigious as the DoT. Just ask.
Interesting, but perhaps not fully accurate, first read of the emerging cloud-centric model from the NYT. We are seeing a new business ecosystem with all sorts of mobile and cloud-connected devices. Each is a powerful computer, with connections to a nearly infinite amount of data storage and processing in the cloud. “We’re entering this era where consumer electronics is the hardware, and the software and the cloud,” said Matt Hershenson, Google’s hardware director. His view increasingly holds for business computing, too.
Al Jazeera reports that a lot of server farms got knocked out by bad weather in the US. Instead of making us rethink the cloud, this suggests that we need more redundancy, preferably with server farms on the other side of the world. Sean Ludwig, from VentureBeat, wrote in a blog post, “The outage underscores the vulnerabilities of depending on the public cloud versus using your own data centers.” The outages on Amazon’s cloud server come two weeks after a similar incident when a number of popular websites hosted by Amazon went down. A report into the incident by Amazon found that a configuration error was made during a routine upgrade.
WSJ has a piece on big data. “It’s not unlike a microscope—taking something you can’t see and bringing it into the scale of perception,” Aaron Koblin, 30, told me at lunch in Google’s San Francisco office. He’s head of the company’s Data Arts Team. Mr. Koblin’s work sits right on the line between art and information.