Our quest for laying optical fiber along the 143,000 kilometers of Asian Highway dates back to 2011. The objective is to liberate Asia’s increasingly digitized cross-border economy from exclusive dependency of submarine cables. Blending the overland and undersea telecoms infrastructure to solidify the continent’s competitive edge has been central to our mission. Thankfully the ESCAP, which fosters Asian Highway, has listened to us. Now it leads the Asia Pacific Information Superhighway (AP-IS) initiative.
CHAKULA is a newsletter produced by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC). Named after the Swahili word for ‘food’, it aims to mobilise African civil society around ICT policy for sustainable development and social justice issues. The latest issue features an e-interview with LIRNEasia’s CEO Rohan Samarajiva, but it is not the only reason why we thought of highlighting the issue. The content is interesting and very readable. We publish two e-interviews from July 2010 issue here fully, as they are not available on public domain.
Pakistan is ranked fourth in terms of broadband Internet growth in the world, as the subscriber base of broadband Internet has been increasing rapidly with the total base crossing 170,000 in the country. The rankings are released by Point Topic Global broadband analysis, a global research centre. According to the statistics, there are around 382. 4 million broadband subscribers worldwide by the end of August 2008 as compared with 317 million in August 2007, showing 17 percent growth. Regional Broadband trend revealed that Western Europe has the largest share of broadband users with 26 percent followed by North America at 22 percent.
The break up of AT&T in 1984 led to a seismic shift in telecom policy and regulatory thinking worldwide and also created the conditions for the Internet boom. New Zealand is a small country quite unlike the US, but it has taken an unprecedented step that has the potential of changing policy and regulatory thinking again. As the excerpt below says, the split is on the lines of the BT reorganization in the UK. That is true. But the key difference is that BT reorganized voluntarily and NZ Telecom, not.
According to a Maldives online news publication, always on Internet is now available in 27 more islands. News In Brief 5 August 2007 Dhiraagu has extended its internet service to twenty seven additional islands, meaning 70% of Maldivians can now access broadband internet. Dhiraagu, which was given permission to extend internet coverage to the atolls in August 2006, now provides a service to forty two islands. The company plans to extend its network to cover all islands with more than nine hundred residents. Is it possible for a knowledgeable person to tell us what “broadband internet” means in the Maldives?
Former Chair of the FCC, Bill Kennard, calls for a broad national debate on how get more broadband connections, especially in rural America. One of his two recommendations is for the adoption of “reverse auctions” or least-cost subsidy auctions for the disbursement of US universal service funds. Another case of policy innovations in the developing world seeping back into the developed. See LIRNEasia’s extensive work on this subject, based on the Indian universal service fund and the least-cost subsidy auction in Nepal. Spreading the Broadband Revolution – New York Times “Any serious discussion of the future of the Internet should start with a basic fact: broadband is transforming every facet of communications, from entertainment and telephone services to delivery of vital services like health care.