The rise of social media hammered the readership of our blog. So there have been times when I have wondered whether it’s worth the time and effort. Today is not one such day. I was reading the Reforms Chapter of the recently released Annual Report 2013 of the Sri Lanka Ministry of Finance and Planning, when my eyes were snagged by somewhat familiar language: Although Sri Lanka and India have dropped in their rankings: Sri Lanka from 69th place to 76th, a fall of seven places, being overtaken by countries such as South Africa, Indonesia and Thailand: India has dropped from 68th to 83rd place. Philippines, which is a BPO powerhouse has advanced from 86th place to 78th, ahead of India, but behind Sri Lanka.
As far we knew, this number is collected on the basis of demand-side surveys. When such surveys were not available, “administrations” (Ministries or Regulatory Agencies tasked with the job) would submit estimates, based the number of subscriber and a multiplier. We’ve spent untold hours on the phone, trying to wheedle these numbers out. We even published a peer-reviewed article proposing an alternative (and, in our opinion, superior) method. But little did we (and the peer reviewers, and those collating the data at the ITU) know.
From late April to today, we were engaged in a major push on getting the findings of how ICTs could help improve electricity customer relations out to regulators and other stakeholders in Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka. This is not as simple as telecom which is a central subject in all countries. In India, we (and our partners) succeeded in attracting regulators from three important states (Bihar, Gujarat and Maharashtra) to the half-day dissemination event. In Bangladesh, the Chair of the Bangladesh Electricity Regulatory Commission chaired the event and was present throughout. Today, we had a three hour exchange of ideas with the Director General and senior staff of the Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka.
How can the ubiquitous mobile phone improve the lives of the poor? How can the phone become more like the “Aladdin’s Lamp” that Muhammed Yunus talks about, something that can offer any service its owner wants? If the phone is to be about more than just talk, we have to put some effort into adding to the services offered over it. The 2012-14 LIRNEasia research program funded by IDRC focuses on these questions. One thing we discovered in our research was that people need to manage the inevitable power outages.
As long as I can remember, India has been ahead of Sri Lanka in the WEF Network Readiness Index. But no more. Sri Lanka is now ranked 76th while India is ranked 83rd. The bad part of the story is that both countries have dropped in the rankings: Sri Lanka from 69th place to 76th, a fall of seven places, being overtaken by countries such as South Africa, Indonesia and Thailand. India’s fall has been more dramatic: a 15-place retreat from 68th to 83rd.
The 2013 Central Bank of Sri Lanka report is being sourced for the claim that one in ten Sri Lankans is on the Internet. But this number comes from adding apples and oranges: most individually used mobile broadband connections and mostly collectively used fixed connections. Now with 4G and 3G dongles around in large numbers, one has difficulty making this distinction with mobile: quite a number of 4G boxes and 3G dongles are directly substituting for fixed connections. So what we should ask is what we know about Internet users, rather than Internet subscribers. Here, there is another problem: we have data from household surveys (2012 Census), but one cannot easily derive individual user numbers from household numbers.
Following on from the previous post re Bangladesh making do with an obsolete national telecom policy from 1998, I’ve been asked why we need policies, when in my time in government in Sri Lanka first as a regulator and then handling policy, I had not done much about Sri Lanka’s own obsolete policy (a couple of sheets of paper from 1994). A national policy provides a framework for decision making. A national telecommunications policy lays down basic principles to guide decisions of all relevant government agencies (not limited to the Ministry in charge of the subject) and other stakeholders, including service providers, investors, and even consumer organizations, which makes stakeholder input vital for its formulation. Not just the end result, but the process is also important. One needs stakeholder input; one also needs stakeholders to own the policy.
Yesterday I listened sporadically to a live streamed conference on Big Data. Sporadic was not intentional. I am in Dili, Timor Leste, where most connectivity is via satellite with latencies in the 700ms range. Anyway, the focus was not on big data per se. They talked about all sorts of things, mostly open data (in the parts I heard) and crowd-sourced data.
A presentation and discussion of LIRNEasia research from Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh
As part of our big data work, I have been looking at the 2012 Sri Lanka census preliminary results based on five percent of the responses. The picture that emerges is a far cry from the slums described in this Economist summary of research on slums: Yet the MIT paper, which offers simple statistics about 138,000 slum households from around the world, suggests that slums are often an impediment to advancement. Poor hygiene, and the debilitating illnesses it propagates, is one curse. The majority of slum-dwellers in the MIT sample have no private latrine; in one Mumbai slum, taps are shared by more than 100 people. According to the African Population and Health Research Centre hygiene is regularly worse in slums than in rural areas.
The deployment of 4G wireless as a complement to ADSL last mile by Sri Lanka Telecom suggests that the convergence process that was marked by having a single CEO for the fixed and mobile arms may be reaching its logical conclusion. Sri Lanka Telecom said it had expanded broadband service coverage by deploying fourth generation wireless technology to areas that are not served by its wired network. From January data volumes on all broadband packages had been increased. SLT provides broadband services through ADSL (assymetrical-digital-subscriber-lines), fibre to home and now through 4G LTE (fourth generation long term evolution) wireless technology. At Ruwanwella, in Sri Lanka’s Kegalle district the firm said it had given a gratis broadband connections to the public library and school which had demonstrated downlink speeds of 50 Megabits per second.