While teaching a course on policy and regulation at a very nice, generator-equipped hotel in Taungoo, I was struck by how bad the Internet was and how unstable the electricity supply was. We are used to working closely with the office while on the road, but this proved too difficult in Taungoo and one of us had to advance the departure by one day to ensure projects did not get disrupted. The importance of electricity has been picked up by this analyst, as reported. The costs of Internet subscriptions are expected to decline gradually, particularly for equipment and administrative fees. Announcements that a high-speed Internet cable network is being built this year, and more hydropower dams over the next few years, will have excited the market, it said.
Greater value could be added to the newly built cross-border power grid, which brings electricity from India to Bangladesh. Early this year, Bangladesh has diversified its international connectivity through cross-border underground optical fiber links with the Indian carriers. The six Bangladeshi International Terrestrial Cable (ITC) operators are, however, linked with their Indian counterparts through a common optical fiber link. It exposes both the parties to the risk of disconnection, once the link is snapped. The Indo-Bangla power grid is fitted with Optical Ground Wire (OPGW) to measure the volume of electricity being flown (Red line in the map).
It is easy for Filipino researchers to care about 1 GB of IP transit costing eight times more in Manila than in Singapore. But it not so easy to understand why working to establish a mesh network that includes multiple cables across the continental Asian landmass has any relevance to this archipelagic country. This is the discussion we had today during a presentation organized by the Phil ICT Research Network at University of the Philippines Diliman Campus. The slideset is here.
The Packet Clearing House is a great repository of knowledge about the way the Internet is developing. Being a decentralized network there is no central entity that decides on things or even collects data about what is happening. So entities such as PCH play an important role. The recent UN General Assembly speech by President Rouseff was perhaps the strongest response to spying by the NSA. The commentary by Bill Woodcock of PCH provides an excellent framework to understand the issues.
It has been reported that the CEO of Yatanarpon Teleport, until now believed to be 100% government owned, has stated that is company has been privatized, with the government now holding only 5 percent of the equity. However done (auction or negotiation), privatizations are not this secret. The fact that no one seems to know who the owner(s) of the 95 percent of the company are adds to the mystery.
We’ve kept saying this, because that is what we see from our demand-side research. But Manu Joseph, a novelist, says it better in a New York Times op-ed. Too many people presume that what the poor want from the Internet are the crucial necessities of life. In reality, the enchantment of the Internet is that it’s a lot of fun. And fun, even in poor countries, is a profound human need.
LIRNEasia was recently asked to sign a declaration on Internet rights. We do not normally sign declarations unless we have done the research to back up our signature. Another reason for declining at this time was my wariness about right-based approaches. I prefer the Deng Xiao Ping approach of crossing the river by feeling the stones. We need to figure out, for example, what is practical with regard to big data before imposing rights and policy solutions imported from other contexts to something that we are all unfamiliar with.
SLASSCOM is the software and BPO industry body in Sri Lanka. It is organizing a discussion on innovation-friendly policies. SLASSCOM are to host CXO Breakfast Briefing on “Impact of policies concerning the internet on innovation and economic growth” on 05th September from 7.30 to 11 AM at Kings Court, Cinnamon Lakeside Hotel, Colombo. This event will feature a keynote address by Ann Lavin-Director, Policy and Government Affairs, Greater China and Asian Growth Markets, Google.
As everyone assumes that everyone is connected to the Internet (not an assumption we have to deal with in our countries at this moment), the consequences of not using the Internet become quite serious. “As more tasks move online, it hollows out the offline options,” said John B. Horrigan, a senior research fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. “A lot of employers don’t accept offline job applications. It means if you don’t have the Internet, you could be really isolated.
A paper based on work Roshanthi Lucas Gunaratne and I did over the past two years is finally published in a peer-reviewed journal, info. Here is an excerpt of the abstract: Purpose – There are significant shortcomings in the current method of estimating the indicator “Proportion of internet users” by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in countries where demand-side data are unavailable. In the absence of demand-side surveys, governments calculate the proportion of internet users on the basis of the number of subscriptions and a multiplier, which leads to arbitrary values. Errors in such base indicators ripple through the system, causing significant errors in composite indicators, and should be minimised. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new evidence-based methodology, in the absence of demand-side surveys, to estimate the proportion of individuals using the internet.
We posted that TRAI had said that 143 million Indians were connecting to the Internet over mobile networks. Only 15 million used fixed broadband. Facebook says it has 82 million MAUs in India. Even if assume 15 million come from the fixed side that means 67 million over mobile platforms. Buoyed by surging user base in emerging markets of India and Brazil, the social networking platform’s MAUs globally rose by 21% to 1.
I discussed two elements of the Internet eco-system, attractive apps and content and trust, with an audience of interested and informed members of the Nepal Internet Society in Kathmandu on August 1, 2013. Discussion focused on how innovation could be fostered in Nepal, on cyber-security, and what could be done in the short and medium term for the young people of Nepal to grab the opportunities afforded by the new mobile-first Internet eco-system. The presentation.
The South Asian Telecom Regulators’ Council (SATRC) is holding a policy workshop in Nagarkot, a scenic location about 90 minutes from Kathmandu. Sustainable broadband is one of their key focus areas. I was asked to do the lead presentation. My presentation was organized around the metaphor of chains. A chain is as strong as the weakest link.
I was thinking back to when our alternative narrative on mobile becoming the central platform started. I think it was when Divakar Goswami and I were invited chair some sessions at ITU Telecom World in Hong Kong in December 2006. I listened to the various talks on fiber to the cabinet and home and felt like I was on listening to Martians. Our demand-side work was telling a completely different story. Our alternative narrative went into the 2008-10 research proposal that was written shortly after that.
Facebook is about to announce the results of a major initiative to make its services accessible to those at the bottom of the pyramid who do not yet use smartphones. More than 100 million people, or roughly one out of eight of its mobile users worldwide, now regularly access the social network from more than 3,000 different models of feature phones, some costing as little as $20. Many of those users, who rank among the world’s poorest people, pay little or nothing to download their Facebook news feeds and photos, with the data usage subsidized by phone carriers and manufacturers. We saw this phenomenon back in 2011 when our researchers were in the field in Indonesia and heard them say they use Facebook, but not the Internet. I have also discussed the possible rationale for serving low-income users who may not be generating revenue at this time.
The title of an article in The Diplomat is “Has Snowden killed Internet freedom?” Whatever one thinks of Mr. Snowden’s actions or motives, one of his most lasting legacies in ousting these programs is likely to be severely setting back the cause of Internet freedom in the international community. Although the U.S.