When I was in government, I heard complaints of shortages of scarce resources and ability to earn adequate revenue all the time. I paid attention, but always verified. Specifically, with regard to claims of spectrum “shortage,” there is a problem. It is true that without a minimum allotment (say 2.5 MHz for CDMA and 5 MHz coupled on GSM), it’s next to impossible to properly design a network.
AT&T announced its plans to take over T Mobile in March 2011. More than five months later, the US Department of Justice filed suit to block it. Now the FCC joins the fray. While all this is going on, T Mobile must be hemorrhaging to death. In Sri Lanka, we do not have these kinds of complications.
Done for Florida’s electricity utilities, but applicable to other infrastructure as well. A short summary by Mark Jamison, but I assume a longer report exists. In the aftermath of the 2004-2005 hurricane season, when eight named storms caused a total of $15.5 million in customer losses from power outages, Florida embarked on a comprehensive reform preparing electric utilities for hurricanes. This effort included coordinated research through PURC on electric infrastructure and storm damage.
The program we talked about few weeks back has been announced. It will spend USD 4.5 billion a year to connect 20 million Americans to broadband. In an effort to expand broadband Internet service, the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday approved an overhaul of its fund that subsidizes rural telephone service, turning it into one meant to offer broadband service to the millions of Americans who lack high-speed connections. The plan could lead to higher fees for consumers on their telephone landlines because the commission also approved changes in the complex compensation system by which telecommunications companies pay one another for completing or carrying calls on one another’s systems.
In 1998, I was trying to improve the atrocious quality of service offered by Sri Lanka Telecom. My efforts included persuasion: I brought in a quality advocate from BC Tel, a Canadian telecom operator, and organized a public lecture. There, I recall responding to the main criticism made of my efforts by SLT engineers that I was imposing unrealistic American standards of quality on Sri Lanka. I said that no one obtains a phone to keep in the house as an ornamental object; that they went to all the trouble of obtaining a phone in order to talk to people and for that, they needed dialtone. You can imagine my surprise when I see a New York Times writer saying that fixed phones in America are becoming ornamental objects.
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.
I’ve been fascinated by the Sri Lanka Household Income and Expenditure Survey 2009-10, that is just out. The equivalent in the US is based on their census (ours is based on a 22,000 sample). The mobile-only number is stunning. Would be interesting to compare with Finland, and even with Sri Lanka. Twice as many Americans play computer games as do crossword puzzles.
I found it interesting how much space Helani Galpaya had given to the demand side in her study of Broadband in Sri Lanka. Looks like the problem is common to us and to the US, according to this NYT report. Only 68 percent of Americans with access to high-speed broadband Internet are using it, while in places like South Korea the rate is 90 percent. More than 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies — including Wal-Mart and Target — require job applicants to apply online. Various studies have shown that the major reasons people do not have broadband are: the cost of Internet services and the cost of computers; not knowing how to use a computer; and not understanding why the Internet is relevant.
We’ve been saying the new, new thing is big data. According to the NYT, the US government is getting behind big data in a big way. The question we have is how to mobilize this momentum for the BOP in our countries. So far there have been only scattered examples of the potential of mining social media. Last year HP Labs researchers used Twitter data to accurately predict box office revenues of Hollywood movies.
Two years after our research was cited in a presentation by Scott Wallsten to Congress to support his argument that the US should adopt least-cost-subsidy auctions and I condemned the inefficient ways of US universal service fund disbursements at an event attended by senior FCC staff, the change is done: The US will use auctions. Can we claim direct causal responsibility? No. But did we do what catalysts do? Yes.
It’s not only in developing countries that getting organizations and people to change behaviors to accommodate e gov and e commerce is a problem. Consumers who still pay bills via snail mail. Hospitals leery of making treatment records available online to their patients. Some state motor vehicle registries that require car owners to appear in person — or to mail back license plates — in order to transfer vehicle ownership. But the White House is out to fight cyberphobia with an initiative intended to bolster confidence in e-commerce.
We’ve never been fans of all you can eat pricing, because that does not fit the Budget Telecom Network business model. Here‘s the story on the only remaining all you can eat plan for mobiles (not for tablets) in the US ALL the data you need on a smartphone, at full speed, for a single price — Sprint Nextel is the only major wireless carrier in the United States that still offers this with new cellphones. And by the way, Sprint has not made a profit in a long time.
A company has done real download speed tests in multiple US cities and Idaho has come last at 318 kbps. This is in the same range as much of South Asia. The slowest city, by the way, was also in Idaho: In Pocatello, it would take nearly 12 seconds to download that music file, according to the study by Pando Networks, a company that helps consumers accelerate downloads. In the nation’s fastest city, Andover, Mass., a Boston suburb, it would take just over one second.
The political thriller The Ghost Writer hinged on the memory chip of a GPS device in a borrowed car. The whole panoply of issues around information generated by US citizens as they go about our daily business (and access to that information by the state) is to be decided by the US Supreme Court. It’ll take a while for the rights of those in other jurisdictions to be defined. The Jones case will address not only whether the placement of a space-age tracking device on the outside of a vehicle without a warrant qualifies as a search, but also whether the intensive monitoring it allows is different in kind from conventional surveillance by police officers who stake out suspects and tail their cars. “The Jones case requires the Supreme Court to decide whether modern technology has turned law enforcement into Big Brother, able to monitor and record every move we make outside our homes,” said Susan Freiwald, a law professor at the University of San Francisco.
On several occasions, I had stated that the mobile industry HHI in India was lower than the US Department of Justice threshold for all industries. The Obama people had revised it to 2500 in 2010. That means that most S Asian telecom industries are below the threshold. The Justice Department has officially used HHI since 1982, and the guidelines were revised by the Obama administration in 2010. Mr.
We have worse postal services in our region. They do not have hard budget constraints, so they keep going. But the future looks bleak for those that do have hard budget constraints: Mail volume has plummeted with the rise of e-mail, electronic bill-paying and a Web that makes everything from fashion catalogs to news instantly available. The system will handle an estimated 167 billion pieces of mail this fiscal year, down 22 percent from five years ago. It’s difficult to imagine that trend reversing, and pessimistic projections suggest that volume could plunge to 118 billion pieces by 2020.