Today was the day Myanmar lowered the price of SIMs. Here are the conditions imposed. 350,000 SIM cards will be divided among states and divisions on a monthly basis. In order to prevent the common practice of transferring SIM card ownership, the cards will be disabled if they are not used in the first 15 days after purchase. Certain rules apply to the new SIM cards, which come with 300 kyats (about US$0.
We have worse postal services in our region. They do not have hard budget constraints, so they keep going. But the future looks bleak for those that do have hard budget constraints: Mail volume has plummeted with the rise of e-mail, electronic bill-paying and a Web that makes everything from fashion catalogs to news instantly available. The system will handle an estimated 167 billion pieces of mail this fiscal year, down 22 percent from five years ago. It’s difficult to imagine that trend reversing, and pessimistic projections suggest that volume could plunge to 118 billion pieces by 2020.
Interesting route chosen by Australia: taxpayers will fund most of the costs of building the broadband network and the operators, including the formerly government-owned Telstra, will have to buy capacity on it to provide services. Unlikely to be effective in most countries, but Australia along with the Scandinavian countries was among the most advanced in providing services to most citizens during the period of government ownership. Assuming that the backbone is relatively static technology, this might work as well as having a private entity operate the backbone under regulation. Given it will be an essential facility, there had to be regulation anyway. One does have to ask why none of private bidders met the requirements.
There are still some who talk about the value of government ownership of telecom operators. In their talk of national interest and local control, rarely is mentioned the word corruption. The recent case in which Siemens pleaded guilty to massive “accounting violations” and paid large fines should be of interest to all who care about transparency. More than the fines, the court record is of great significance. Investigators and the law firm for Siemens amassed massive amounts of data, starting from the five terabytes of information seized from Siemens offices at the start.