Telektronikk 2.2008

This article is based on a study of Grameenphone and Telenor’s activities in Bangladesh and the effects they have on local social and cultural development. The research was undertaken by MICRO, Centre for Development Studies and Microfinance of the Norwegian School of Management BI, as part of a broader research vision on the role and outcomes of business-oriented aid. The article familiarizes the reader to the context and research design of the initial study. The motivation, research question and conceptual framework are briefly introduced. The effects of business-oriented aid are indicated by discussing the findings of the study from the technical, political and financial perspectives, and emphasizing the social aspects associated to Grameenphone’s activities in Bangladesh. The combination of foreign ownership, local knowledge and competent management is found to have played an important role in the situation analyzed. Furthermore, competence alongside cultural awareness are critical success factors. Future research ought to focus on the area of private investment abroad and its impact on development.

Information and communications technology is increasingly being used to enable social and economic development of underdeveloped economies. In this paper we draw on the literature on ICT for development to propose four conditions necessary for the sustainability of such initiatives: appropriate positioning of the project for finance flow, appropriate content, the need for a local catalyst, and an appropriate view of ICT within the project. We then present an evaluation of the Grameenphone CIC initiative against these four conditions. We argue that while it may not always be possible to discover linear cause-effect relationships vis-à-vis sustainability, ICT for development initiatives such as Grameenphone CIC can build in mutually reinforcing elements of sustainability based on the four conditions proposed here.

This paper looks at the question of universal access to telecommunications in emerging Asia. It looks at how universal access is defined, and compares this to access levels as found in a recent five-country study of the use of telecommunication services at the ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’ in India, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Very high levels of access, but low levels of ownership are found. The paper then looks at the potential benefits that these non-owner users are missing out on, and then goes on to look at the key barriers to ownership that are faced by them. The paper estimates that there could be close to 150 million new subscribers at the BOP in these five countries by mid-2008. However, a distinct affordability gap is found. Possible ways to deal with this affordability gap are proposed in the final section with emphasis on multiple stakeholder efforts.

The article seeks to identify issues and challenges concerning micro-enterprises in a developing country, specifically Bangladesh. It suggests that ICT can help address the concerns of small businesses such as access to information about production techniques and potential buyers, communication requirements for negotiating price, terms of payment, and delivery logistics, among others. The article hopes to shed light on how the mobile phone and the telecenter or Community Information Center (CIC) can be used as tools for enhancing capability and sustainability of these micro-enterprises.

The telco industry is seeing a rapid growth in users in developing countries due to price erosions on equipment and end-user prices expanding their footprint into low-income groups. The global optical backbone boom in the 1990s was mainly fueled by exuberant investors ploughing in capital, but is this the case for the mobile last-mile / access network for the bottom of the pyramid? Or are we seeing signs that the operators fund the expansion using earnings from high-end subscribers to cross-subsidize these new consumers? In this article we have tried to answer this question by applying a method for allocating both costs and revenues on each and every subscription. We used first hand data for Grameenphone while deploying several allocations methods to estimate the same figures for the other operators in the Bangladeshi mobile industry based on secondary financial and market information sources. The results show that there is a significant cross-subsidy from older and high-end users to new and low-end subscribers, but the industrial investors also contribute to the growth into these BoP customers (reflected in the low-return, long term yields). Hence the subscription-wise income statements were able to prove that the current expansion in the emerging markets is not entirely like the IT-bubble in late 1990s – in this new boom the operators enable high-end customers / early adopters to effectively help in closing the digital divide.

It is widely recognized that the majority of the next billion telephony subscribers will come from rural emerging markets. We, at Ruralfone Inc. argue that the dominant methodology for servicing this BOP (Bottom of the Economic Pyramid) market by telecoms operators – which is, to adapt existing telephony models – is an inferior alternative for both the population serviced and the operators’ bottom line. Rather, we are convinced that the challenges presented by this market niche demands exclusive concentration on that particular segment. In May 2005, we launched our service through our subsidiary “Local Serviços de Telecomunicações” (LOCAL) in one of the poorest cities in the world: Quixadá, in the northeastern state of Ceará in Brazil. LOCAL now has four cities in operation in that state. We approached our market with a Business Model completely different from a traditional operator emphasizing: • Maximization of local resources (decentralization) • A completely different distribution system • High personalized customer services After almost three years of operation, we have proved that: • Even in the low-income market segment (GDP being around 1/15 of the USA GDP), it is possible to be profitable. • The social impact created by our “new approach” in telephony on the local population ensures the Business Model is highly sustainable. • The solution to address the low-income markets resides more in a completely non-traditional approach as opposed to a new “technical solution”.

The adoption and diffusion of the mobile phone has been exceptionally rapid in Mainland China, especially in its capital Beijing and the coastal industrialized towns. With almost half a billion mobile phones, China has rapidly become the biggest market for this technology and one of the world’s leading nations in the production of information and communication technologies. In the last years also the amount of qualitative research devoted to ICTs in China is increased, while that of quantitative studies is still limited. This paper describes a quantitative research study, specifically focused on the appropriation and domestication of the mobile phone in China. On the basis of questionnaires that were personally administered to a convenient sample of 487 respondents, the design of this research attempts to answer the following research question: How the relational sphere in China is reshaped by the massive use of the mobile phone? And then are there striking differences between the attitudes, behaviours and practices associated with mobile phone use in China and in the West? This is a very broad research topic, but in this paper we confine our examination to the social implications of the mobile phone use on some aspects of the relational sphere. A convenience sample of 487 respondents can hardly provide a basis for generalizations about the Chinese population as a whole. However, the results of this study will serve to indicate the most important patterns of mobile phone use, which would be a fruitful subject for future research. Thus the data presented here will provide the direction for further inquiries into various aspects of mobile phone use in China.

Recently a Philippine tourism official claimed that a mobile saved his life. A bystander took pictures on a mobile while the official was being menaced by kidnappers – seeing this, the kidnappers fled. Another triumph for the mobile. To some, the microchip was a wondrous invention – a high-tech helper that could increase security at nuclear plants and military bases, help authorities identify wandering Alzheimer’s patients, allow consumers to buy their groceries, literally, with the wave of a chipped hand. To others, the notion of tagging people was Orwellian, a departure from centuries of history and tradition in which people had the right to go and do as they pleased, without being tracked, unless they were harming someone else. Chipping, these critics said, might start with Alzheimer’s patients or Army Rangers, but would eventually be suggested for convicts, then parolees, then sex offenders, then illegal aliens – until one day, a majority of Americans, falling into one category or another, would find themselves electronically tagged. Li Yijiang, 25, killed and mutilated six Beijing men between late 2002 and early last year, the Beijing Today newspaper reported. Police linked the murders by discovering all six victims had regularly used a pornographic website called Purple Boy. They then followed the trail to Li, who was arrested in August last year. Li confessed to the killings, saying he had logged on to the website after moving to Beijing from remote Xinjiang region to attend university. Li told police he was gang-raped after meeting the six men at a disco used by Purple Boy regulars. He later lured each man separately to his death. With the development of the Internet, and with the increasing pervasiveness of communications between networked computers, we are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire. I used to think that it was just the biggest thing since Gutenberg, but now I think you have to go back further. (Barlow, 1995:36) We’re going to be Gods, we might as well get good at it. In another thousand years, we’ll be machines or gods (Gray, 2002:9).

The practice of sending intentional “missed calls” (calls that are terminated by the caller before the receiving party answers) is a familiar phenomenon in emerging mobile markets across Africa and Asia. Although generally considered to be a free-of-charge messaging service used primarily by the financially constrained, the authors document its use by a far wider range of mobile users and for a variety of other purposes, ranging from social control and relationship maintenance to entertainment. Mobile operators have long sought effective measures to eliminate or reduce the volume of missed calls since they are a major cause of network congestion and do not generate revenue. The authors argue, however, that in-depth studies of missed calls may provide the telecom industry with a much needed window into the sociocultural life space of customers, and suggest new service offerings that better match their needs and circumstances.

The ICT business is now busy adapting to the message from the The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Hence, consultancy companies are now re-launching energy saving applications invented in the ICT research labs and taken to market a decade or two ago: distance work, distance education, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), video conferencing, software for logistics support, virtual project rooms, smart homes, etc. (e.g. Mellon et al. 2008 for Telstra; McKinsey 2008 for The Climate Group on behalf of the Global eSustainability Initiative (GeSI)1)). Also, the ICT business and politicians alike have for a decade or two argued for ICT to be an essential tool in lifting the world’s poor out of poverty by cutting costs, freeing capacity, and creating work. Its effect as to spurring economic growth has even created revival-like enthusiasm, and forms a platform in its own right for forwarding the ICT business as being socially responsible, important, and wishable (e.g. Vodafone 2005; Entner & Lewin 2005; Deloitte & Touche LLP 2008). There is no doubt that ICT applications can help us save on resources and (fossil2)) energy, and make us much more efficient in our tasks. It is also next to self-evident that rolling out such large and new infrastructures as mobile telephony spur economic growth. It even seems clear that we are nowhere near harvesting the full potential from applications like the ones now re-launched as being particularly “green”. So far, so good. But worse, it seems that those same ICT efficiency gains make energy and resource consumption increase substantially. If so, there are some problems here that should be brought to the table and discussed to help shape the initiatives needed so that there will actually be gains harvested, not just an increase in non-sustainable consumption. The purpose of this article is not to suggest simple, realistic and ready made solutions, but to expose the problems and to shed some light on what needs to be done to harvest the gains in ways that can contribute to environmental sustainability and to sustainable social development. To this author, such alternative strategies will need to take less conventional directions that will have substantial implications for business models and business strategies. It seems a good start simply to draw the picture as it emerges when listening to those who have been studying the topics of environment and development for some decades. Unrealistic and impractical? Yes, but no. Realism is a next step.

Terms and Acronyms used in Emerging Markets in Telecommunications.

The architecture includes a secure Application Programming Interface (API), a backbone and separate device networks with standard interface to the backbone. The API decouples innovation of services and service logic from protocols and network elements. It also enables service portability between systems, i.e. a service may be allocated to end-systems or servers, with possible relocation and replication throughout its lifecycle. Machine-to-machine services for Connected Objects (CO) could benefit the society in many areas, including environmental, health care, trade, transportation, alarms and surveillance. However, such development depends on powerful communications features with global interoperability for service ubiquity. Interoperability is required not only for a standard Quality of Service (QoS) controlled Internet Protocol (IP) bearer, but also for cross domain security, mobility, multicast, location, routing and management, including fair compensation for utility provisioning. The proposed architecture with its API not only includes these critical elements but also caters for multi-homing, mobile networks with dynamic membership and third party persistent storage based on indirection. The API supports end-to-end service control and offers capability features as a vehicle for service development and ubiquitous deployment. The architecture is more generic than traditional hierarchical sensor and actuator networks as it supports grids and autonomous neural type of networks.

Introduction to the paper by the winners of the Telenor Research Prize 2007; Øystein Foros and Bjørn Hansen.

Competing network providers typically have to co-operate in different types of interconnection and infrastructure sharing arrangements (e.g. roaming) in order to provide seamless communication to customers. Thus, firms being active in the same market have to compete in some dimensions and co-operate in other dimensions. We discuss the interplay between competition and co-operation, and show some potential trade-offs between co-operation and competition. The trade-offs have implications for both business strategy and regulation policy. In some cases (but not all) firms can arrange their co-operation such that they are able to soften competition and increase prices. Whether such effects are present or not depends on technology and market characteristics. It is accordingly necessary to carry out case by case analyses in order to assess these issues.