Pyramid Research (December 2004) The push for broadband in India has once again taken center stage with the country’s government formally announcing its broadband policy, and deciding, as many had predicted, not to accept the regulator’s proposal for local loop unbundling. Instead, the Department of Telecoms (DoT) has deemed that the last mile copper loop isn’t a bottleneck for the adoption of broadband services, and thus leaves it up to the state owned incumbents (BSNL & MTNL) to enter mutually agreeable arrangements with private parties for access to the last mile if needed. Together, both incumbents have 45 million copper loops, of which only 25% is adaptable for broadband application given the poor state of the copper plant in a majority of areas in India…. (go to full article)
Rediff.com Dec 9, 2004 http://in.rediff.com/money/2004/dec/09telecom.htm Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said on Thursday that the current access deficit charge of 11 per cent must be brought down to lower the tariffs and enable the sector achieve higher mobile growth like China.
This is an article from www.lirne.net: LIRNE.NETÂ’s Asian affiliate, LIRNEasia is quickly making its way into the South Asian policy making process. As a part of its nascent Rapid Response Program, LIRNEasia has submitted comments on a public consultation paper issued by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), on rural telecommunications growth in India.
I was looking at maps on the TeleGeography site and I ended up on their mailing list. This is something they sent me about International voice-over-IP traffic. I was surprised that it now accounts for 11% of international calls – and more in India/Pakistan/Bangladesh. I know of services like www.skype.
Yesterday, I spoke to a large and restive crowd (made so by lack of air conditioning and a delayed start) in Matara (main city in the South of Sri Lanka) at the launch of the Pathfinder Foundation’s first book, a Sinhala translation of Janos Kornai’s Toward a free economy. I was asked to talk about globalization and the relevance of Kornai’s ideas for facing the challenges posed by globalization. In this talk that I pieced together thanks to time zone differences that caused me to wake up at 3 in the morning while in the US, I illustrated the issues referring to Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), a broad area of service exports for which efficient, flexible and low-cost telecom is a pre-condition. I think the talk provides the "big picture" of the necessity of telecom reforms of the type that we at LIRNEasia are involved in. If we are to go beyond simply giving people phones, to giving them "money in the pocket and hope in the heart" this big picture is essential.
Friday October 15 2004, 5.30pm, SLIDA premises, Colombo 7 1. WDR Expert Forum 2004 September’s WDR Expert Forum at Mount Lavinia was a success Next expert forum in Sri Lanka: Sept. 30 , Oct 1 and 2 [half day], 2005 Sector and Regulatory Performance Indicators: may be WDR theme for 2005/6; proposed workshop for this in early 2005 ? Pondicherry.
These are live notes, so they’re borderline incomprehensible. The value was more in that Rohan wanted to make a live text record of conference proceedings on the Net. Payal Mallik, Group 1: Case Studies, success stories of application. From India- Karnatika, first action was to formalize the land records which translates to land reforms through ICTs. Governments get to see the productivity gains from ICTs.
a speech by Executive Director Rohan Samarajiva In one of my intemperate moments I’ve said that Asia is a category that is of use only to international bureaucrats. There is little that the entire region holds in common. This is the area that has the largest concentration of poor people in the world. Asia is seen, however, as driving the world economy. The Asian Tigers, and the Juggernauts of China and India.
Word Document Powerpoint Teledensity: 2% in 1999 to 7% in 2003. Telecom revenues are expected to triple to $24 billion by 2005-2007, driven primarily by wireless. Wireless accounts for 40%, up from 7% in 2000. Payal Mallik discussed the transformation of the Indian industry from a static monopoly to a dynamic multiple provider system. “Regulatory effectiveness depends on the monopoly wielding power of the incumbent.
Today is the official start of the LIRNEasia Expert Forum on Regulation and Investment. Rohan Samarajiva is enamoured of ‘real-time updating’, hence you will be getting a plethora of information. Dr. William Melody delivered the commencement address, beginning with a simple question: “What are the characteristics of 21st Century Network Economies and Information Societies?” He also answered the question ‘What does LIRNE do?