Last Saturday a 6.6 magnitude earthquake has rocked the Baoxing County in China’s Sichuan province. It immediately reminded everyone the 7.9 magnitude earthquake that killed nearly 90,000 people around Chengdu city in the very Sichuan province during May 2008. Five years is too short to forget the devastation as well as the mistakes.
Moscow has claimed Cairo’s partnership in its plan to command and control the Internet. Nashwa Gad, a department manager at Egypt’s Ministry of Communications & Information Technology (MCIT), has, however, flatly denied: Our name was associated to this proposal by mere misunderstanding. Egypt has always been supporting the basic Internet principles that … the Internet should remain free, open, liberal. We do not see that the ITU mandate deals with the Internet. If the veil of diplomacy is removed, Egypt has officially accused Russia of cheating in the global stage.
Vinton Cerf is credited with developing the protocols and structure of the Internet and the first commercial email system. He has been loud against the shifting of Internet’s control to ITU and effectively nationalizing it. He wrote an op-ed in New York Times and passionately testified before the U.S. lawmakers.
Information has been riding on technology. And now the technology is disrupting the business of information. Reuters’ Editor-in-Chief, David Schlesinger, has outlined the following battle-plan: Knowing the story is not enough. Telling the story is only the beginning. The conversation about the story is as important as the story itself.
Qatar Telecommunications Co QTEL said on Saturday it would begin tender offers for shares in Indonesian telecoms firm PT Indosat on Tuesday to lift its stake to 65 percent, the maximum allowed. Indonesia limits foreign ownership in the telecommunication sector to a maximum of 65 percent for mobile phone operators and 49 percent for fixed-line operators. Two tender offers would begin concurrently in Indonesia and the United States at 7,388 rupiahs ($0.661) per share and would expire on Feb. 18, Qtel said.
GSMA, the global trade body representing the mobile industry, called on Bangladesh to issue 3G licences soon to make broadband services more widely available. Licensing the 2100 MHz spectrum band for 3G services would enable Bangladeshi operators to launch mobile broadband services, which their customers can use to gain fast and easy access to the Internet and online services, it said on Wednesday. Bangladesh’s mobile sector has grown rapidly, with user numbers reaching more than 45 million at end-September from 200,000 in 2001, while the country has only 1.32 million fixed-line phones. “Laying new fixed-line connections is expensive and inefficient, so high-speed mobile networks are Bangladesh’s best bet to realise the many social and economic benefits that arise from widespread access to broadband services,” said Ricardo Tavares, senior vice president for public policy at the GSMA.
A wave of economic gloom is expected to hit mobile phone buyers next year, and more and more analysts predict the once-buoyant market will shrink for the first time since the 2001 crash, a Reuters poll shows. On average, analysts expect global growth to be 3 percent in both the fourth quarter and in 2009, compared with well above 10 percent in recent years. Eight out of 22 analysts said they expected the market to contract next year. In a similar poll just a month ago, only one analyst out of 23 expected 2009 market sales volumes to fall, and then only slightly. For the fourth quarter, analysts expect the market to grow 11.
Indian mobile telecoms firms added 9.2 million users in July, taking subscribers in the world’s fastest growing wireless market to nearly 300 million, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said on Monday. Leading mobile firm Bharti Airtel signed up 2.7 million customers, enough for it to overtake state-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd as India’s largest telecom firm by total subscribers, including fixed-line subscribers. Second-ranked mobile firm Reliance Communications added 1.
India on Tuesday allowed telecoms operators to share transmission systems, radio access networks and antennae and simplified the approval process for building mobile towers.But radio spectrum, or air waves used for wireless networks, cannot be shared. Telecoms operators in India were earlier permitted to share only passive infrastructure such as mobile towers, buildings and power backup facilities. Sharing infrastructure reduces the operating costs and capital expenditure of wireless telecoms operators, allowing them to maintain margins in a competitive market that has call rates as low as 1 U.S.
China on Tuesday started a public hearing to discuss lowering domestic mobile roaming charges, state media said, to address complaints from users. Hosted by the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top economic planner, the hearing discussed two proposed plans for roaming charges, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. Both proposals involve cancelling the existing roaming service fee of 0.2 yuan per minute, which users have criticized as being too high, according to local media reports. China’s mobile operators, China Mobile and China Unicom collect domestic roaming fees if the subscriber leaves the local service area.
YANGON (Reuters) – Without warning, Myanmar’s military government has ordered a massive 166-fold rise in the annual satellite television levy in an apparent attempt to stop people watching dissident and international news broadcasts. With no word in state media of any license fee increases, the first satellite dish owners knew of the hike was when they went to pay the 6,000 kyat levy, only to be told it was now 1 million kyat ($780), three times the average citizen’s yearly income. An official at Myanmar Post and Telecom confirmed the increase on Wednesday, but was at a loss to explain it. “It’s not our decision,” the official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters. “We were just ordered by the higher authorities.
Will authorities be able to use this satellite system to ensure that hazard information gets to the vulnerable in a timely and accurate manner? Detection technology is available but it is up to governments to not only use it but find the means to convey the message to vulnerable communities. “A global satellite system should come on line next decade, potentially saving billions of dollars and thousands of lives by boosting preparedness for natural disasters, a top scientist said on Wednesday. Monitoring changes in climate, the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) should also help health officials prevent epidemics and guard against man-made environmental damage, said Jose Achache, head of the group behind the project. “I’m an optimistic guy.
The victims of cyclone in Bangladesh are poorest among the poor. Their views about effective warning system “lacks credibility” to the concerned bodies.But it is a real bad news when the merchant mariners have slammed Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD) for suddenly raising the cyclone’s severity within an hour. It clearly demonstrates the BMD’s professional incompetence. Reuters provides the chilling details.
Indonesia has learnt lessons from dealing with a string of earthquakes, but still can do more to reduce the impact of such disasters by quake proofing buildings and deploying more tsunami buoys, officials said on Wednesday. An official at Indonesia’s National Coordinating Agency for Disaster Management said there had been progress in educating people since the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that followed a huge quake off Aceh province and killed nearly 170,000 Indonesians. Read more Reuters Alertnet | Indonesia disaster preparedness a work in progress
India’s finance minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said Monday in Washington, “Regulation must stay one step ahead of innovation”. He said the developed countries’ financial authorities are not keeping up with the new and complex financial market instruments that lay behind recent credit market turmoil. “Thanks to the present crisis which originated in the advanced economies … I think developed economies will listen more to the developing economies’ point of view,” Chidambaram remarked. “In the name of innovation, regulators or governments in the advanced economies have fallen behind the curve.” The time has come for the developed world to attend to its own problems, and stop lecturing emerging economies about what is right and what is wrong, he said.
Myanmar restores Internet, but arrests continue | Reuters “The Internet connection was restored on Saturday afternoon, but we still haven’t decided whether or not to reopen our internet cafe yet,” a Yangon Internet cafe owner said. There had been intermittent access to the Internet over the past week, mostly during a curfew first imposed as the junta sent the army in to end protests led by thousands of Buddhist monks. Powered by ScribeFire.