We’ve had some discussion about the effects of killswitch on this blog. Here is a discussion about full and partial killswitch effects with some nice graphics. When you deliver nearly a third of global Web traffic, you get to see a lot of crazy stuff happen. Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM), the global Internet traffic provider, is giving us a glimpse at some of those wild scenarios today in its latest “State of the Internet” report. The company, based in Cambridge, MA, tracks a wide variety of statistics in its quarterly reports, including domestic and global Internet speeds, mobile connectivity, unique IP addresses, and attacks by hackers.
In the midst of writing a unifying introduction to a special issue of a journal on how the poor use the mobile phone, I came across this sentence on the web. “Ki raflé du ki amul yeeré wayé moy ki amul nit”, as a Senegalese proverb has it, “the poor person is not the one without clothes but the one without anyone.” Seems to capture the essence of the power of social networks (I do not mean FaceBook).
Despite having no license and enjoying 50% subsidized airtime, Grameen Telecom’s Village Phone project is no longer viable in Bangladesh due to fierce competition. Senegal’s telecenters are disappearing for the same reason. In the backdrop this trend, Qualcomm has worked with local authorities to launch a wireless connectivity for rural medical and educational services in southern Thailand. Qualcomm will donate telemedicine equipment for two public health stations on the two islands of Koh Panyee and Ban Pakkoh. Desktop computers and wireless connectivity equipment also will be provided to the nearest main hospital in Phang Nga, connecting the public health stations with the hospital, enabling them to transmit data to the hospital and benefit from real-time access to doctors.
For World Telecom and Information Society Day, I wrote a column on the wrong-headed telecenter policy being implemented by the ICT Agency of Sri Lanka with World Bank funds, where I referred to lessons from South Africa that were taken into account in the design, but ignored in the implementation. Here are some more lessons from Africa: Creative destruction: izi killed the public phones « abaporu project on technology appropriation All of a sudden, users don’t need the ‘public phones’ any more. In Senegal most of these télécentres have gone out of business. Bassirou Cissé, the general secretary of Unetts(*) says that “In 2000, there were 18,000 télécentres in Sénégal, accounting for 33% of the Senegalese operators’ revenues and 30,000 jobs. Today, most of them have closed down.
Rohan Samarajiva represented LIRNEasia at the Research ICT Africa (RIA!), Annual Meeting held recently in Dakar, Senegal with a view to contribute to the discussion on Telecom Regulatory Environment (TRE) assessment that RIA! is planning to undertake. The five-day workshop held from May 26-June 2, 2006, focused on three areas: the 2006 RIA! research agenda, outcomes mapping and RIA!