On March 22nd, LIRNEasia was invited to present the Teleuse@BOP findings to the staff of the Indian USO Fund and interested members of the Telecom Commission. It was a great honor to share our findings with this knowledgeable audience, knowing that they make the decisions regarding disbursement of the world’s second largest universal service fund. While the slides that were used are by no means the sum total of the findings from the survey, they are the broadest slice of data presented so far. The discussion ranged from interpretation of the survey findings to whether or not broadband access should be subsidized, a question triggered by the rather shocking findings about the use and knowledge of the Internet at the BOP in India. The presentation slides can be downloaded here.
Seems like a good business idea for entrepreneurs in countries like Bngladesh, India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, with large migrant populations. Even at double the US set up costs, it won’t take long to start earning returns. Of course, good broadband is a necessary condition. Abroad at Home – New York Times Because of stricter border enforcement since 9/11, increased broadband access and reduced cost of video equipment, more businesses are offering videoconferencing services to reunite immigrants with their families back home. Typically found in or near places immigrants frequent like money-transfer operations or consular offices, these kinds of services are often reserved for weeks in advance.
Rohan Samarajiva and Divakar Goswami from LIRNEasia chaired back-to-back Forum sessions at the ITU World 2006 in Hong Kong on December 7. The Building Digital Communities session, chaired by Divakar, covered a wide-swathe of topics. In his opening remarks [PDF], he outlined on some of the issues that would be covered in the presentations and discussion to follow. In his Keynote address, the Indonesian Minister of Communication & IT, Sofyan Djalil proposed that global equipment manufacturers should adopt a new business model where they share some of the investment risk with operators while deploying infrastructure in financially unviable areas in developing countries. He suggested that the current model where developing countries are only purchasers of high cost equipment and services, breeds dependency and is unsustainable in the long run.
Here is an issue that will feature large in India and even Bhutan, but not Sri Lanka. The reason is that the former countries have a sizable number of cable connections, which will in the future be used to provide broadband access in competition to phone companies. Because of the profligacy of frequency-based broadcast licensing in Sri Lanka, there is no cable industry to speak of. What there is uses frequencies. That means it cannot easily be turned into a conduit for broadband.
by Martyn Warwick – 28/4/2006 11:57:47 http://www.telecomtv.com/news.asp?cd_id=6652&url=news.
The Economist Dec 2, 2004 http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3446429 …today almost all broadband connections in the world are fixed links provided either by telcos or cable companies.