A new report from the North American research house, Instat, reveals that the US is way behind its European cousins in consumer Voice over IP (VoIP) adoption – and this despite the fact that 2006 was a particularly good year for the technology globally with the wordwide total of VoIP subscribers increasing by 34 million. The leading European VoIP adopters over the course of 2006 were France, Germany, and the Netherlands. According to Instat analyst, Keith Nissen, “The EU market increased by over 14 million subscribers last year largely due to local loop unbundling, the introduction of cable telephony and triple-play service bundles as well as operator consolidation.” By contrast the US added a mere four million new VoIP subscribers over the same period. Keith Nissen says US carriers “don’t seem interested in selling anything other than plain-old-telephone-service.
In the old days, telecom operators gouged each other’s customers through excessive termination charges (settlements) for international calls. That went the way of the dodo with bypass and calling cards. Then they came up with the idea of gouging the customers of other operators foolish enough to use roaming facilities. Now the EU is trying to tamp it down, at least for its own citizens: “The price of using a mobile phone in another EU country could be capped at 50 cents ($0.66; 34p) a minute.
India’s Department of Telecom (DoT) has mandated non-discriminatory access to international cable landing stations which are an essential facility for a host of international data and voice services. VSNL has agreed to open three landing stations to all operators on a non-discriminatory manner. LIRNEasia has been pushing for having access regimes in place for telecom infrastructure bottlenecks like cable landing stations and backbone in a number of countries we work in. Hopefully, this will be emulated in other countries in the region. DoT will also introduce resellers for international bandwidth in order to further bring down international bandwidth prices since the liberalization of the international gateway (IGW) in 2002.
BBC NEWS | Business | EU plans crackdown on mobile fees “A plan to regulate mobile phone charges for calls made abroad will shortly be published by the European Commission, despite intense opposition. The industry is concerned that the proposals go too far, and even within the commission itself there are doubts. At present, most users pay far more to make mobile calls when they are abroad than they do in their home country. This is because service providers have to pay large fees for access to one another’s networks.” Not the highest priority for regulators in emerging Asia.
by Patrick Neighly Weblink to article EU Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding has accused continental governments of lagging on telecom advancements that could be used to fuel European economies. “It is worrying that in ICT research, Europe continues to lag behind its competitors, investing about half as much as the US,” she said in a presentation, urging governments “not to shy away from cross-border competition in the telecom sector.” Reding said that the impact of ICT on European productivity growth has fallen over the past decade and lashed out at economic reform programs that “fail to give a new impetus to information society policies or to cover drivers of growth such as the convergence of digital networks, content and devices.” Said Reding, “Only through stronger investment in ICT research and effective cross-border competition will we ensure that the great potential of ICT is used to lift our competitive performance across the economy.”
Findings from Indonesian study WiFi Access Innovations by LIRNEasia researchers, Divakar Goswami & Onno Purbo were presented at a press conference at the Jakarta Hilton, Indonesia on October 1. The results from the study have been covered by Indonesian newspapers. The news story by Rakyatmerdeka is online and can be found here. The study findings can be found here. Divakar and Onno identified high leased prices as the main factor forcing ISPs to deploy their own WiFi-based networks to connect customers to the last mile.
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?