LIRNEasia, Sarvodaya and the partners of the HazInfo project have been saying this and more importantly implementing this. Hope the message will be heard. Reuters AlertNet – News – Prevention spending must be doubled Governments, aid agencies and humanitarian actors must spend twice as much on disaster preparedness activities that could save millions of lives, the British Red Cross has urged.Almost two years on from the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami, risk reduction remains low on the international agenda despite encouraging progress in tsunami-affected regions themselves. “The tsunami highlights the importance of proactively preparing for disasters and this lesson must be learnt and risk reduction must become a high priority in all disaster-prone areas,” said David Peppiatt, British Red Cross head of policy.
18 November, 2006 In an auction, which lasted four hours with the bid climbing 168 times, the Tashi Group clinched the deal to operate the first private mobile service in the country with a Nu. 777 million (USD 17.32 million) offer. The Tashi Group outbid three other joint venture companies in the auction that was held in Thimphu on October 16 to operate the license for a period of 15 years. The three other local companies vying for the license were the Singye Group, which had tied up with Reliance mobile in India, Druktel Private Limited, a consortium of Bhutanese companies, which had joined Airtel also in India and Bhutan Steel, which had tied up Thai company, Shin Satellite Public Corporation Limited.
Cost is USD 50 a month; is this higher or lower than what is paid by the Nanasalas in Sri Lanka? With a Dish, Broadband Goes Rural – New York Times Craig Clark, who works from home in Rindge, made do with a sluggish dial-up line until he signed up for broadband service from the satellite provider WildBlue Communications last autumn. With a 26-inch dish outside his home and a modem inside, Mr. Clark now connects to the Internet at speeds similar to those offered by the phone company. “It’s not a perfect technology, but it is one of the best options for those of us in rural areas,” he said.
Dhaka, Nov 13 (bdnews24.com) — Telecom Development Company Afghanistan reached the mark of one million mobile subscribers on October 30. With the brand name “Roshan” or light, the second mobile operator rolled out services in June 2003. “We are very excited and proud of reaching the million subscribers milestone,” said Karim Khoja, chief executive of Roshan. In more than three years, Roshan reached the mark, beating first mobile company in Afghanistan, the Afghan Wireless Communication Company (AWCC)— 20 percent owned by the government.
Looks like we have a virtuous cycle of investment going on. Not only the mobiles, but the fixed operators too are engaging in significant investment. Possibly the unusual predilection of the Sri Lankan consumer for fixed phones, over mobile, keeps Suntel going. For those not from Sri Lanka, 1 USD = 106 LKR, just lopping off two zeros will you a good sense of what is being discussed. LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE – LBO Telecom operator Suntel, a unit of Sweden’s Overseas Telecom AB, plans to spend 3.
Dhaka, Nov 9 (www.bdnews24.com) – The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report for 2006, launched globally Thursday, revealed that Bangladesh had shown impressive gains in water and sanitation sector although Asia’s emerging giants were lagging. “Income matters, but public policy shapes the conversion of income into human development,” said the report, entitled “Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis.” “India may outperform Bangladesh as a high growth globalisation success story, but the tables are turned when the benchmark for success shifts to sanitation: despite an average income some 60% higher, India has a lower rate of sanitation coverage.
Maldives is a country with a population of around 300,000, around 32,000 fixed phones and around 232,000 mobiles [this has to level off, because pretty much the entire population is now using mobiles]. It has a lot of high-end hotel rooms, but the USP of the tourist industry there is not business travel, it is utter and complete relaxation. And relaxed people are not known to generate lots of data and voice traffic. All this is relevant to the question of what will go through the two cables landing in Maldives by 2007. Reliance/FLAG is already live, I believe.
Sri Lanka‘s first outdoor wireless computer network is now up and running. Surprisingly, it is not in Colombo. It is not even in any of the other key places. It was installed in Mahavilachchiya, a little known village, 40 km from the nearest town Anuradhapura, and surrounded three sides by the Vilpattu jungle. Most of the villagers are either farmers or labourers with a monthly income of about Rs.
Zee News – South Asian countries lose 2-16 % GDP in natural disasters “Studies show two to 16 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP) of South Asian countries is lost every year due to natural disasters. They also show a dollar spent on mitigating disasters saves five dollars to be spent subsequently on relief and rehabilitation.”The point of course being that there’s nothing natural about this horrendous loss of lives and growth. It is because we do not take the necessary human actions and engage in the required institutional reforms, that these losses are as high. The micro-level approach that is being proposed in India has significant similarities to the objectives of the HazInfo project and Sarvodaya’s overall approach to disaster preparedness.
Assume a scenario where among the chief complaint strings of two unrelated patients in the same District on the same date there was a mention of bloody stools in pediatric cases. The multiple mentions of “bloody stools” or “pediatric” might not be surprising, but the tying together of these two factors, given matching geographic locations and timings of reporting, is sufficiently rare that seeing only two such cases is of interest. This was precisely the evidence that was the first noticeable signal of the tragic Walkerton, Canada, waterborne bacterial gastroenteritis outbreak caused by contamination of tap water in May 2000. That weak signal was spotted by an astute physician, not by a surveillance system. Reliable automated detection of such signals in multivariate data requires new analytic approaches.
Internet Providers Criticize Leased Line Tariffs Bisnis Indonesia, Sept. 26, 2006, T2 JAKARTA: The Association of Indonesian Internet Service Providers urge network operators to lower leased line tariffs to allow a healthy competition in providing Internet services for retail customers. Chairman of the Association Sylvia W. Sumarlin said that network operators, which also provide direct internet services to customers, have disturbed ISP businesses. “Every day, a lot of ISP customers switch to network operators because they provide cheaper tariffs to access Internet,” she said to Bisnis yesterday.
Hindu Business Line New Delhi , Sept. 21 The Government is planning a major digital expansion by setting up one lakh rural Common Service Centres (CSCs), which will basically be computer kiosks, at a total cost of Rs 5,742 crore [USD$1.2 billion] , through a public-private partnership (PPP) mechanism. These centres are expected to bridge the digital divide existing today between the urban and rural areas. According to a Government spokesperson, a proposal for setting up CSCs was approved by the Union Cabinet on Thursday.
According to this article that appeared today in India’s Business Standard, TRAI seems to be considering using a base price + beauty pagent mechanism to award 5 licenses (of 5MHz each) for companies to introduce 3G services. The prduence of using beauty pagents needs to be questioned. The failures of 3G auctions in Europe in 2000 has been mentioned as one of the reasons for opting for a beauty pagent. However the failures of those auctions stemmed from operators’ over-estimating the potential of a new and untested service. It is unlikely that operators would make the same mistake again – my argument being once-bitten, twice shy.
A consortium of technology companies, including I.B.M. and Cisco Systems, announced plans Tuesday for a vast wireless network that would provide free Internet access to big portions of Silicon Valley and the surrounding region as early as next year. The project is the largest of a new breed of wireless networks being built across the country.
Inadequate backbone infrastructure in Indonesia has been widely regarded as crippling its telecom sector. Uneven development of the backbone has meant that much of the East of the country has no fiber-optic based backbone network and those islands have to rely on more expensive satellite links. Poor long-haul domestic infrastructure has meant that many parts of the country do not have access to basic communication and those that are connected have some of the world’s highest leased line and Internet prices as my earlier study shows. The Indonesian government’s ambitious Palapa Ring project to create a fiber ring connecting the major islands had been shelved post the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Recently, however, efforts have been made to revive a modified version of the earlier vision.
The current potential global Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) market of USD 11.5 billion is expected to grow ten-fold to around USD 120-150 billion in the near future. However, Sri Lanka only recently started emerging as a potential destination for outsourced work. Given that the BPO industry is in its infant stages in Sri Lanka, there is a dearth of quantitative and qualitative information regarding the sector. LIRNEasia was commissioned by the Information and Communication Technology Association (ICTA) of Sri Lanka to conduct a baseline sector analysis of the BPO industry in Sri Lanka.