Chairman Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) Dr. Muhammad Yaseen has said that data usage is increasing in Pakistan and proliferation of broadband services will help establish Information Society. He was talking in a seminar on The Future of Mobile Communications in Pakistan. Chairman PTA said that for mobile phone industry future direction could be value addition and innovation in services including mobile commerce, video streaming, and high speed mobile internet. He said presently broadband costs are high in the country but broadband usage was showing growth in the recent quarter.
LIRNEasia researchers participated at the International Telecommunications Society (ITS) 17th Biennial Conference in Montreal, Canada, from June 24-27 2008. The theme of the conference was on, ‘The Changing Structure of the Telecommunications Industry and the New Role of Regulation’. The picture above shows Professor Sudharma Yoonaidharma, Commissioner, National Telecommunciations Commission of Thailand commenting on the presentations made at the second of the two LIRNE.NET sessions, watched by (from left) Rohan Samarajiva and Payal Malik from LIRNEasia, Roxana Barrentes from DIRSI and Anders Henten from LIRNE Europe. The session was chaired by Hank Intven, Partner at the leading Canadian firm of McCarthy Tetrault (not in the picture).
Helani Galpaya is attending the 2008 Global Event on Measuring the Information Society in Geneva, Switzerland on 27 – 29 May. She is acting as a Facilitator in a session on Advancing the ICT Agenda . The Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development is an international, multi-stakeholder initiative to improve the availability and quality of ICT data and indicators, particularly in developing countries. It provides an open framework for coordinating ongoing and future activities, and for developing a coherent and structured approach to advancing the development of ICT indicators globally. George Sciadas of StatsCanada also made a presentation at this event.
LIRNEasia’s Executive Director will speak at the International Conference on Information, Communication and New Media & the First Annual Convention of the Information and Communication Association of Taiwan, being held in Taipei on 17 May 2008. His presentaiton, Asia at the leading edge of communication and new media developments? can be downloaded by clicking on the link.
DIRSI – Regional Dialogue on the Information Society – Telecom Regulatory Environment (TRE) Assessment Series Using interviews and a questionnaire administered to a statistically significant cross-section of industry stakeholders and experts, the TRE assessment traverses six dimensions of regulatory risk (market entry, access to scarce resources, interconnection, tariff regulation, regulation of anti-competitive practice and universal service) for both the fixed and mobile sectors. The TRE methodology focuses on the environment as a whole, rather than only on the regulatory agency. This broadens the scope and usefulness of the study to different actors. DIRSI and LIRNE.NET are currently undertaking TRE studies in Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador.
Payal Malik, Senior Researcher, LIRNEasia was invited to the eleventh meeting of the Working Party on Indicators for the Information Society (WPIIS) of the OECD countries, held on Monday 21 May 2007, at the Department of Trade and Industry Conference Centre, London. She presented her report on “Documenting the Capabilities of Measuring ICT Statistics in India”. Her report raised great interest among the participants. In an extension to the LIRNEasia work on indicators this report profiled the institutions that collect ICT data in India , with some observations about the methodology and the limitations. The reference point for the exercise is the ‘metadata survey’, a global exercise to collect information from all countries regarding the statistical measurement of ICT (reported in “The global status of ICT indicators”) conducted by global Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development.
Rohan Samarajiva and Sujata Gamage |The Information Society – An International Journal, Volume 23 Issue 2, 109 Download article Author Posting. (c) Taylor & Francis, 2007. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Taylor & Francis for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in The Information Society, Volume 23 Issue 2, March 2007.
The ITU has just released Measuring the Information Society 2007: ICT Opportunity Index and World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators. This report includes the annual data on basic telecom indicators, which many rely on for research, writing and policy formulation. Contrary to the title, the data are from 2005, but still, this is one of the few sources of comprehensive data where all countries are represented. This particular report also ranks countries by something called the ICT Opportunity Index. According to this ranking, Zimbabwe (Rank = 127) has greater ICT opportunities than Pakistan (139), India (133) and Sri Lanka (128).
The Philippine ICT Researchers Network through the National College of Public Administration and Governance (NCPAG) of the University of the Philippines will be hosting the first international conference on “Living the Information Society: The Impact of Information and Communication Technologies on People, Work and Communities in Asia” which will be held on April 23-24, 2007 at the Renaissance Hotel, Makati City, Philippines (program attached). Early registration (download form) for the Conference is now open and entitles the participant to a 20% discount. This conference funded by the International Development Research Centre – Canada, is being organized in support of the growing community of researchers and practitioners conducting research on the social, cultural, psychological, economic, political, and other transformations brought about by information and communications technologies (ICT) in the Asia-Pacific region. The conference provides a forum for discussing life in the information society. Over 75 papers will be presented by researchers from different countries and disciplines on the usage and effects of ICTs on culture and society.
Living the Information Society: The Impact of Information and Communication Technologies on People, Work and Communities in Asia Renaissance Hotel, Makati City, Philippines April 23-24, 2007 Download Call for Papers The Philippine ICT Researchers Network through the National College of Public Administration and Governance of the University of the Philippines is hosting an international conference on “Living the Information Society: The Impact of Information and Communication Technologies on People, Work and Communities in Asia.” This conference will be held at the Renaissance Hotel, Makati City on April 23-24, 2007. The event is also co-sponsored by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).
Dec 23, 2005, By: Robert Clark, Wireless Asia http://www.telecomasia.net/telecomasia/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=274336 The UN summit in Tunis last month did not turn out to be the showdown expected between the and the rest of the world.
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.
Voices from Asia-Pacific: Internet Governance Priorities and Recommendations: After almost ten months of research and activities, UNDP-APDIP’s Open Regional Dialogue on Internet Governance (ORDIG*) has produced a two-part report entitled, “Voices from Asia-Pacific: Internet Governance Priorities and Recommendations” – consisting of 1) the ORDIG Policy Brief and Executive Summary, and 2) the ORDIG Input Paper for the UN Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) and the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). These documents stem from months of consultations involving stakeholder groups from the public and private sectors, as well as civil society. ORDIG consulted over 3,000 stakeholders through sub-regional meetings, jointly organized with UNESCAP and others; a region-wide online forum that allowed for open and candid discussions on the issues; and a region-wide, multi-lingual, issues-based online survey that looked at the Internet governance priorities of the region. The resulting two reports are the synthesis, consolidation, and reading of the voices from the Asia-Pacific region. They outline the principles and dimensions that make up the framework for building recommendations, which are provided in the documents at two levels – general and specific recommendations.