Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) was the talk of the town in Harbin at the ISCRAM-CHINA workshop, which took place August 26-27, 2007. The event was jointly organized by the ISCRAM-Community and the School of Economics and Management – Harbin Engineering University. The workshop was a post-conference meeting to the International Disaster Reduction Conference (IDRC), which took place 21-25 August, 2007. LIRNEasia project manager, Nuwan Waidyanatha, was 1 of 2 Sri Lankan delegates invited to present a research paper and the other was Chamindra De Silva of Lanka Software Foundation – Sahana Project. LIRNEasia presentation titled “Common Alerting Protocol Message Broker for Last-Mile Hazard Warning System in Sri Lanka: An Essential Component” was 1 of 115 papers published in the workshop proceedings.
A comparison of the customer numbers for China and India for the end of July 2007 yields some interesting results. Although in real terms China is still by far the largest mobile market in the world, with 491 million subscribers to India’s 189 million at the end of July, the Indian market continues to outpace the Chinese market in terms of growth. The figures are somewhat skewed by the fact that the AUSPI, one of India’s regulatory bodies, has moved to including all Wireless Local Loop (WLL) customers in its definition of Mobile, as Reliance did some time back. This move has positively impacted numbers by just over 4.7 million, which goes some way towards explaining the astonishing 12.
We could still do better; But more taxes could kill the industry The Nation Economist, Sunday 26 August 2007 | See Print version I have to say that JHU does not know economics. What is the rationale behind taxing the only sector that is growing? The industry is giving government enormous amount of revenue. Twenty percent of every mobile rupee goes to the government. If you squeeze the goose for more eggs the goose will ultimately die.
Sales in Emerging Markets Help Nokia Add to Its Cellphone Lead – New York Times Nokia sold 100 million mobile devices in the period, an increase of 29 percent over 2006, while the overall industry growth was about 14 percent, with 262 million mobile devices sold globally, Nokia said. But the group again warned about the performance of its troubled network operations, describing market conditions as challenging because of heavy competition. “We shall have to increase the amount and speed of cost cutting,” the chief executive, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, said, giving no details. The greatest growth in Nokia’s handset sales, 37 percent, was in the Middle East and Africa, it said. But at 36 percent growth, sales were also strong in the Asia-Pacific region and in China.
Pyramid Research has released a list of the Top Ten Trends that will influence the telecoms sector in the region (and elsewhere) throughout the coming year. It claims that subscriber growth will be the number one ‘critical development’ in the Asia Pacific region through 2008. The new research shows that subscriber growth is expected to be highest in Indonesia, which will see a 45 per cent increase in its broadband market ever year for the next five years. By 2012, 80 per cent of Asia’s mobile subscribers will be from China, India, Indonesia, and Pakistan, with regional subscriptions totaling 2.2 billion.
Nuwan Waidyanatha, project manager of the HazInfo program, has been invited to present a paper at the Second China Workshop on Information System of Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM-CHINA 2007) to be held on August 26-27, 2007 in Harbin, China. The paper entitled “‘Common Alerting Protocol Message Broker’ for Last-Mile Hazard Warning System in Sri Lanka: An Essential Component” will focus on proving the need for a CAP Broker for a Last-Mile Hazard Warning System. The general objective of the research was to evaluate the suitability of 5 ICTs deployed in varied conditions for their suitability in the Last-Mile of a national disaster warning system for Sri Lanka and possibly by extension to other developing countries. The Live Exercises conducted between November 2006 and May 2007 showed that the Hazard Information Hub (HIH) had a reliability of only 78% on average – a poor result, as the reliability of the HIH performing her set of functions was not meant to be any less than 95%. High reliability from the HIH was a necessity in order to provide as much time for the Community First-Responders to activate and complete the Last-Mile Community Emergency Response Plans.
There is no reason why Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and even the microstates of Bhutan and Maldives cannot get BPO business, not in competition with the Indian juggernaut, but in a complementary way. Sri Lanka had no BPO business to speak of prior to 2002, despite similarities with South India where it was booming. It was only after the international liberalization of 2002-03 that BPOs started in a significant way in Sri Lanka, though that promising start has been affected by the unsettled security situation. For the policy makers and implementors in these countries to contemplate: 1 percent of USD 60 billion is USD 600 million. That is not chump change.
In one of the most detailed analyses of WiMax issued for Asia to date, the influential investment house says that it is “particularly optimistic about the prospects for fixed WiMax in developing markets in Asia, where the copper infrastructure is too weak or limited to provide broadband services using DSL.” It adds, “We believe that WiMax and other wireless broadband technologies will be particularly successful in markets with low broadband penetration, such as India, Malaysia, China, the Philippines, and Indonesia.” Read more.
China and India are emerging as powerhouses of innovation and creativity. “In 2005, the number of patent filings in China outnumbered those in the US,” said Partha Iyengar, vice-president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Slightly less than one-tenth of world intellectual property organisation international patents were attributed to emerging markets. If the growth rates remain constant, the emerging market share could reach almost one-fifth in 2012.”
BSNL, the former incumbent fixed line and mobile carrier in India, is finalizing a $4.5-4.7 billion deal with Ericsson and Nokia Siemens to deploy 45.5 million GSM lines. Ericsson’s share of this deal is about $2.
Mobile phone production in China is expected to rise by nearly 17% during 2007 – to reach 560 million units, according to information released by China’s Ministry of Information Industry. In 2006, handsets produced in China totaled 480 million units, accounting for a 47% share of global production. During Q1 of this year, handset production had totaled 134 million units – a rise of 34.5% on the same quarter the previous year. The report states that the primary production areas in China are Tianjin, Beijing and Shenzhen – each capable of producing over 100 million handsets per annum each.
A British climber has set a world record by making a mobile phone call from the top of Mount Everest.In the early hours of 21 May, Rod Baber made two calls from the mountain’s north ridge. In the first call Mr Baber described the view, how cold it was and what he wanted to do when back at base camp; he then rang his wife and children. The calls were made possible when China set up a mobile base station with a line of sight to the north ridge. Mr Baber set off from the UK for the Himalayas on 30 March and since mid-April has been getting used to living at high altitude.
Data and 3G may not be a priority in Asia: discuss. No, we’re not referring to Japan, Korea or Hong Kong. Not even China. This time we’re looking at the area’s so-called emerging markets – markets like Indonesia where the market-leading operator Telkomsel and third-ranked player Excelcom launched 3G services in early September. Or the Philippines, where rival operators Globe and Smartcom have been offering 3G for a slightly longer period.
China has just 530 point-of-sale (POS) terminals and ATMs per million people, far below the 10,000 per million found in the United States. Accordingly, cash is used in 83 percent of all payment transactions in China, compared with just 21 percent in the United States. With most of these terminals and ATMs in China’s cities, practically all rural transactions are cash based. One way to wean rural consumers off their reliance on cash might be to add more ATMs and POS terminals. But it would cost at least $2 billion and add just 130 terminals and ATMs per million people.
More indications that the BOP [Base of the Pyramid] markets in South Asia are beginning to develop a criticial mass of attention:TelecomTV® NewsDesk A survey carried out by an unusual collective of researchers from the Russian School of Economics, the London Business School, various colleges of Cambridge University and the Anglo-Russian telecoms investment group Altimo, comes to the conclusion that those companies, manufacturers, vendors and service providers want to make the most of the world’s telecoms markets should focus on Bangladesh, India and China. The report says southern and south-eastern Asian markets will provide suppliers with the most lucrative opportunities over the course of the next five to seven years thanks to a felicitous combination of “high projected per capita GDP growth and significant current capital expenditure”. Powered by ScribeFire.
Sonal Desai | CXOToday.com Mumbai, Mar 27, 2007: Mobile penetration will penetrate the homes of bottom or pyramid (BOP) families in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, a study instituted by LIRNEasia has found. Titled, “Teleuse on a Shoestring- A Study of the Financially Constrained in Asia,” it interviewed and maintained diaries of respondents from Thailand and Philippines besides the above mentioned countries. A C Nielsen conducted the fieldwork. International Development Research Center (IDRC), Canada funded the research.