Helani Galpaya’s work and LIRNEasia’s research has been drawn upon for a newspaper column. The novel element we had never thought of is using Facebook as a data source: One other metric is available to anyone, just go to facebook.com/ads and create an ad. It will tell you how many people your ad can reach. For people of all ages, that number is 1,126,020.
A good value-added blogpost drawing from LIRNEasia research Helani Galpaya’s work: These are only a few graphs and download speeds are only one measure. What’s nice is that we can now quite confidently say Sri Lanka’s Internet and not be talking about a niche product. There are at least 280,000 fixed subscribers (including dial-up, ADSL and WiMax) and around 300,000 mobile broadband subscribers. There are also over 1 million HSPA/3G mobile users with active data use. This is all via Helani’s report btw.
I recall a meeting within weeks of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, convened by the current President (then Prime Minister), to seek the views of intellectuals about rebuilding. The most memorable suggestion came from the late Arisen Ahubudu, who began with a reference to Madagascar once being part of Lanka and ended with a proposal to build a wall around the island, adhering to ancient Sri Lankan engineering norms. Luckily, it was not acted upon. In contrast, some bureaucrat in Japan accepted a harebrained proposal to build a wall to stop tsunamis. That collapsed in the tsunami that came with the Great Tohoku Earthquake.
In Sri Lanka, the window for saving the post has probably closed. According to the latest Household Survey, a Sri Lankan household spends LKR 4/month on postal services and LKR 750/month on telecom services. You cannot build a viable business on that kind of money. There will always be a need to deliver packages (until teleporting is perfected), but this can be done by agile courier services, not the bloated government post office. Now that the US postal service is almost bankrupt, everyone is looking at Europe.
The October 13th dissemination event has generated more coverage, this time in the Sunday Times, the leading English weekly. LIRNEasia, a think tank headquartered in Sri Lanka and representing South Asian, has teamed up with the Lanka Fruits, Vegetable Producers and Exporters Association (LFVPEA) and are jointly involved in a project to find out ways and means of obtaining more money from agriculture – and to improve the agriculture value chain to make it a win-win solution. They held an open discussion programme with expert research findings last week at the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce Auditorium and the focus at this open forum was on pineapple growing and how to assist the pineapple smallholders to overcome the hassles in producing quality consistent fruit, and to ascertain on adequate supplies to the export market.
The 2009-10 Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) is a representative sample survey based on responses from 22,000 households from all across Sri Lanka, except Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu and Mannar districts that were considered too dangerous because of uncleared mines. It is a veritable treasure trove of data on how Sri Lankans live, what the differences among the provinces are, and, when combined with data from past HIES, a source of trend data. It reports communication and recreation expenditures separately, but I decided to combine them since communication is recreation. When the different telecom related expenditures are combined, they amount to LKR 750 per month (around USD 7) and dwarf everything else. Households spend 17 times more money on telecom and Internet services than on books, newspapers and magazines.
Until the 1970s, it was customary to ensure seats for specific under-represented castes in the Sri Lankan Cabinet. It was only in 1989 that a non-leading caste politician got elected President. Caste-bloc voting has ceased to be a major factor in elections in at least the Western Province. These progressive changes are catching on in North India, it appears. South India is more progressive in economic and cultural terms, but caste is deeply embedded in the political practices in the South.
This really should not be a mystery. In most countries in the region, the information is available for all to see on either the regulator’s website or on operators’ websites. Domestic leased lines are a key input, important both in terms of interconnection and in terms of providing Internet. There is no reason to keep the prices secret. But they are not publicly available in Sri Lanka.
A major step in consumer protection has occurred in the US, with customers now being warned when their data usage and bills go above a threshold. Is this a problem for us in South Asia. Yes, for the TOP (top of the pyramid) customers who actually receive bills. But for our clients, the bottom of the pyramid teleusers, there will be no shock; just disconnect. Because 99.
infoDev has released the Sri Lanka broadband study authored by Helani Galpaya. The introduction: Sri Lanka, an island nation located in the Indian Ocean just south of India, has lately experienced an explosion in the use of broadband services. This report, part of the Broadband Strategies Toolkit, explores the various factors that have contributed to Sri Lanka’s broadband success, ranging from innovative business models to government investment in e-development services.
We immersed ourselves in agriculture for 3-4 hours yesterday in conversation with visiting colleagues from the University of Alberta, working up a proposal on food security. When asked for a definition of food security, they responded in terms of shorter distances food was transported. I was reminded of the archetypal “bad” food value chain that got much play when there was fire in one of the Swiss road tunnels: potatoes grown in Poland, transported by truck (despite Europe’s vaunted and subsidized railways) to Italy for processing, and then hauled back as French Fries across those same tunnels back to Germany and Poland. It seems common sensical that food that puts on less miles would be better. So what are such value chains in Sri Lanka?
Most people are electronically connected to each other and to their governments. This happened in our countries in the past decade. How does this translate into being treated with more respect as a citizen? Almost everyone has experienced the frustration of going to the wrong office; of going to the right office but being told the right official is absent; of finding the right official and being told the documentation is not complete; of having the required documents but not having the payment in the right form, and so on. For those whose language is not Sinhala, there is the added frustration of not being able to communicate, not being able to read the forms.
The ICT Development Index (IDI) rankings by the ITU are out. Vietnam, a high performer on all composite ICT rankings, has leaped forward from 91st place to 81st place, in a rare 10-place advance. In South Asia, Bhutan advanced four places to 119th; Nepal by three places to 134th; and India and Sri Lanka advance by one place to 116th and 105th respectively. Pakistan and Bangladesh drop two places each to 123rd and 137th, respectively. Maldives, the leader among the South Asian countries, drops one place to settle at 67th place.
The m payments in buses research conducted as part of the Mobile 2.0 component of the 2008-10 research cycle is about to be piloted by the private bus owners association: “The private bus industry in Sri Lanka incurs an immense loss of more than Rs.13 billion annually due to the current system of collecting bus change from passengers. The government incurs an annual loss of about Rs.500 million owning to the production of coins each year.
Our good friend Nalaka Gunawardene has blogged about the difficulties of figuring out how many people are actually using the Internet in Sri Lanka. He shares our frustration with the archaic data reporting by the TRCSL. This produced a total of 2,184,018 — which takes the percentage of population to almost 11%. And if we apply the same average number of 3 users, it could give us 30% of population accessing and using the Internet. But is that assumption of 3 users per subscription equally applicable to mobile devices?
Reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a rite of passage for college students (should still be). The key point I took away from it was the need to focus on quality. My most favorite economics book is Exit, Voice and Loyalty, by Albert Hirschman. Also a discourse on quality. Perhaps because I read Zen at an impressionable age .