The colloquium was conducted by Harsha de Silva, PhD. Harsha began by explaining that the paper focus both on trains and buses, but in this colloquium will focus on the Bus transport. 75% of passenger transport is via public transport and of that 93% by bus and 7% by train. Roughly 5500 SLCTB and 18000 private buses. The fare is regulated by National Transport Commission (NTC).
LIRNEasia plans to conduct its next round of Mobile Broadband Quality testing (in Colombo) on April 6-8, 2009. As a rule such tests are conducted unannounced, for obvious reasons, but this time we decided to make an exception by making the process open. We invite anybody who is interested to participate. If you can bring your own laptops/handsets you are free to test using any tool you wish and check the results differ from the outcome of AT-Tester. Four widely used packages – two from Dialog GSM and two from Mobitel will be tested.
Is broadband quality a subject of interest only to urban top-of-the ladder users? Not necessarily. With the latest developments in telecom services broadband access is increasingly becoming a reality to rural populations as well, even in developing countries. The penetration levels might not be the same but should that mean quality should be compromised for rural users? Broadband quality is critical for telecenters where a link is usually shared.
Your operator promises you x Mbps. Are you sure he keeps promise? If not, what you miss? LIRNEasia, has been researching on Broadband performance quality issues in Asia. One objective of our work is to create ‘EMPOWERED USERS’ armed with broadband performance information.
LIRNEasia’s past researcher Chanuka Wattegama will be making a keynote address at an Internet Governance and Telecom Regulation session at the International Workshop on Building an Information Society: Road to Tunis that will take place on October 23-25 in Dhaka, Bangladesh.Some of the material in his talk will be based on some of the findings of LIRNEasia’s current research that Chanuka was involved in while he worked with us. Chanuka was the lead researcher on a LIRNEasia project to Benchmark National Telecom Regulatory Authority websites of the Asia-Pacific Region, and recently took up a post at Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme in Colombo.
Rohan: Vanguard Foundation was recently created which has a center for disaster management. The work I have done at TRC on disaster management will be leveraged in the current context, and we will prepare a document. Pete Anderson is disaster communication expert who will be brought in to design a concept paper to set up parameters of a disaster management system. We are moving very fast on this. Sequence: Disaster happens, analysed, and transmitted in a secure communication mechanism to the media.
Sujata: summary too lenghty Luxman: Since audience is EU needs to have language on ICT uplifting “masses” and “rural” access. Malathy: Process element of regulation is not there? Rohan: Study was originally for investor study and language taken from WTO language leaving out the independence of regulator. Process question will be in another study comparing different sectors. Malathy: why cant process be built into current study?
Hi Lirneasia folks, below is a table that tabulates all the comments we have received so far on LIRNEasia’s provisional mission statement. You have another opportunity to review the statement and see if you would like to propose any further changes. Shortly, the mission statement will be finalised and sent to the board of directors to be approved and framed on the wall. So the window of opportunity for intervention is limited. ACT SOON Mission Statement Comments .