Varghese K George, Hindustan Times
Delhi, June 26, 2011
The communists may find it hard to disown the legacy of having opposed computers when the technology made its Indian foray in the early 1980s, but CPI-M leader and Rajya Sabha MP Sitaram Yechury recently became the proud owner of a sleek Apple iPad-2. Yechury is the first MP to hop on to a new scheme - not yet formally launched - that gives House members Rs 50,000 to get a tablet PC.
"We hope to roll out the scheme in the next fortnight. MPs can order it through the Parliament secretariat or get the cost reimbursed," said K Rahman Khan, deputy chairman, Rajya Sabha.
Khan said the aim is to make Parliament paperless. During sessions, members get huge amounts of printed material comprising House business, reports and debates.
"We will discontinue this soon," he said.
"Tablets will replace paper and MPs will make better use of the literature as it can be carried, unlike voluminous paper reports."
"We are waiting for Rajya Sabha to roll out the scheme and will follow suit," said TK Viswanathan, secretary general, Lok Sabha.
The National Informatics Centre has developed applications compatible with Samsung and Apple tablets, "keeping in mind the information requirements of Parliament", Khan said.
"For instance, just by a touch, members will be able to see what the starred questions listed for the day are."
Parliament's central hall and lobby are wi-fi enabled. And all MPs will be trained in the use of the gadgets.
Currently, each MP gets Rs 1.5 lakh to buy computers and peripherals.
"The cost of a tablet will be less than the money spent on paper for each MP over his tenure," said Yechury.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Tablet war heats up as Asia challenges iconic iPad
Agence France-Presse
11:15 am | Thursday, June 23rd, 2011
SINGAPORE—A tablet war is heating up in Asia as companies from China, South Korea and Taiwan challenge the dominance of Apple’s iPad on features and price, analysts said.
Asia is a major battleground because of the presence of alternatives offered by top global brands like South Korea’s Samsung as well as cheaper choices from dozens of smaller firms, many of them from China.
By one estimate, Asia will account for about a third of tablet sales by 2015, triggering a race for market share by big and unknown brands alike.
Chinese technology firm Huawei became the latest company to jump on the bandwagon when it launched the MediaPad, which has a seven-inch (178-millimeter) screen and is powered by Google’s Android 3.2 Honeycomb operating system.
Making its global debut at this week’s CommunicAsia trade fair in Singapore, the MediaPad sports Qualcom’s dual-core 1.2GHz processor.
It is just 10.55 mm (0.4 inches) thick and weighs 390 grams (0.86 pounds), making it much lighter than an iPad2.
“With the Huawei MediaPad, we are demonstrating yet again that design, functionality and performance is within everyone’s reach,” said Victor Xu, chief marketing officer of Huawei Device.
The market is already abuzz with models such as Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, the HTC FlyerTM by Taiwan’s leading smartphone maker HTC and the ZTE Light tablet by Chinese manufacturer ZTE.
Add to these other Western brands such as the BlackBerry Playbook by Canada’s Research in Motion and a growing array of inexpensive gadgets from little-known vendors and the field is widening up for competition.
“We see Apple’s market share declining — in a growing market — as credible alternatives emerge from a variety of manufacturers,” said Tim Renowden, an analyst with technology research firm Ovum.
“The emergence of lower-cost tablets, predominantly running Google’s Android operating system, will be an important opportunity for Asian manufacturers,” he told AFP.
He said Samsung and HTC “are arguably the front runners with their experience producing smartphones”.
However, Chinese technology companies such as Huawei and ZTE “are also actively pursuing market share and can potentially succeed with lower-cost devices”, he said.
In addition, traditionally PC-focused companies like Acer and Asus of Taiwan have also launched some interesting tablet products.
“All of these players are really competing against each other, more than they are competing with Apple,” Renowden said.
Industry research firm Gartner has said the iPad accounted for a hefty 84 percent of the total 17.6 million tablets sold worldwide in 2010, with that share tipped to decline to 69 percent of 70 million to be sold this year.
Bryan Ma, an analyst with technology industry consultancy IDC, said although the iPad is expected to remain a major player in Asia, the region is different from Western markets.
Samsung is strong in South Korea because of nationalist sentiment, while the massive China market is awash in inexpensive tablets known as “white box” devices because of their obscure brands.
“In that sense there’s an interesting activity that’s giving Apple some competition. A lot of these guys are low-priced players,” Ma told AFP.
“They might not necessarily have that cool cachet that Apple has but… these Chinese vendors are selling these products overseas, to other developing markets as well like Indonesia, parts of the Middle East and Africa.”
Apple’s advantage is that it has cultivated an image as a “cool product, and in many cases there is that status symbol element,” Ma said.
“It’s in the local culture. People will aspire to that social status to carry an Apple product.”
Ovum’s Renowden said the Asia-Pacific market was big enough for several players, forecasting tablet sales to reach 50 million units in 2015 out of a global total of 150 million.
“The market is certainly big enough for a number of players to be profitable,” he said.
“But competition is already fierce and standing out from the crowd is important, as is maintaining good relationships with distributors, both retail and through telco partners.”
Ma expects some competitors to fall by the wayside.
“Frankly, the market is over-saturated, there’s way too many vendors trying to participate in this market than there is demand for,” he said.
“We expect that there are going to be vendors that will find that they are not shipping enough volumes and they will eventually back out of the market both this year and probably in the upcoming year,” he added.
“There’s going to be some sifting of the market, the dust still needs to settle a bit because it’s still very, very early stages.”
11:15 am | Thursday, June 23rd, 2011
SINGAPORE—A tablet war is heating up in Asia as companies from China, South Korea and Taiwan challenge the dominance of Apple’s iPad on features and price, analysts said.
Asia is a major battleground because of the presence of alternatives offered by top global brands like South Korea’s Samsung as well as cheaper choices from dozens of smaller firms, many of them from China.
By one estimate, Asia will account for about a third of tablet sales by 2015, triggering a race for market share by big and unknown brands alike.
Chinese technology firm Huawei became the latest company to jump on the bandwagon when it launched the MediaPad, which has a seven-inch (178-millimeter) screen and is powered by Google’s Android 3.2 Honeycomb operating system.
Making its global debut at this week’s CommunicAsia trade fair in Singapore, the MediaPad sports Qualcom’s dual-core 1.2GHz processor.
It is just 10.55 mm (0.4 inches) thick and weighs 390 grams (0.86 pounds), making it much lighter than an iPad2.
“With the Huawei MediaPad, we are demonstrating yet again that design, functionality and performance is within everyone’s reach,” said Victor Xu, chief marketing officer of Huawei Device.
The market is already abuzz with models such as Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, the HTC FlyerTM by Taiwan’s leading smartphone maker HTC and the ZTE Light tablet by Chinese manufacturer ZTE.
Add to these other Western brands such as the BlackBerry Playbook by Canada’s Research in Motion and a growing array of inexpensive gadgets from little-known vendors and the field is widening up for competition.
“We see Apple’s market share declining — in a growing market — as credible alternatives emerge from a variety of manufacturers,” said Tim Renowden, an analyst with technology research firm Ovum.
“The emergence of lower-cost tablets, predominantly running Google’s Android operating system, will be an important opportunity for Asian manufacturers,” he told AFP.
He said Samsung and HTC “are arguably the front runners with their experience producing smartphones”.
However, Chinese technology companies such as Huawei and ZTE “are also actively pursuing market share and can potentially succeed with lower-cost devices”, he said.
In addition, traditionally PC-focused companies like Acer and Asus of Taiwan have also launched some interesting tablet products.
“All of these players are really competing against each other, more than they are competing with Apple,” Renowden said.
Industry research firm Gartner has said the iPad accounted for a hefty 84 percent of the total 17.6 million tablets sold worldwide in 2010, with that share tipped to decline to 69 percent of 70 million to be sold this year.
Bryan Ma, an analyst with technology industry consultancy IDC, said although the iPad is expected to remain a major player in Asia, the region is different from Western markets.
Samsung is strong in South Korea because of nationalist sentiment, while the massive China market is awash in inexpensive tablets known as “white box” devices because of their obscure brands.
“In that sense there’s an interesting activity that’s giving Apple some competition. A lot of these guys are low-priced players,” Ma told AFP.
“They might not necessarily have that cool cachet that Apple has but… these Chinese vendors are selling these products overseas, to other developing markets as well like Indonesia, parts of the Middle East and Africa.”
Apple’s advantage is that it has cultivated an image as a “cool product, and in many cases there is that status symbol element,” Ma said.
“It’s in the local culture. People will aspire to that social status to carry an Apple product.”
Ovum’s Renowden said the Asia-Pacific market was big enough for several players, forecasting tablet sales to reach 50 million units in 2015 out of a global total of 150 million.
“The market is certainly big enough for a number of players to be profitable,” he said.
“But competition is already fierce and standing out from the crowd is important, as is maintaining good relationships with distributors, both retail and through telco partners.”
Ma expects some competitors to fall by the wayside.
“Frankly, the market is over-saturated, there’s way too many vendors trying to participate in this market than there is demand for,” he said.
“We expect that there are going to be vendors that will find that they are not shipping enough volumes and they will eventually back out of the market both this year and probably in the upcoming year,” he added.
“There’s going to be some sifting of the market, the dust still needs to settle a bit because it’s still very, very early stages.”
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
100 years of ‘Think’
Saturday, 18 June 2011 16:26 Jordan Robertson / The Associated Press
Google, Apple and Facebook get all the attention. But the forgettable everyday tasks of technology—saving a file on your laptop, swiping your ATM card to get 40 bucks, scanning a container of milk at the checkout line—that’s all IBM.
In Photo: The IBM PC makes its debut in 1981. (AP Photo/IBM Corporation)
Google, Apple and Facebook get all the attention. But the forgettable everyday tasks of technology—saving a file on your laptop, swiping your ATM card to get 40 bucks, scanning a container of milk at the checkout line—that’s all IBM. International Business Machines turned 100 on Thursday without much fanfare. But its much younger competitors owe a lot to Big Blue.
After all, where would Groupon be without the supermarket bar code? Or Google without the mainframe computer?
“They were kind of like a cornerstone of that whole enterprise that has become the heart of the computer industry in the US,” says Bob Djurdjevic, a former IBM employee and president of Annex Research.
IBM dates to June 16, 1911, when three companies that made scales, punch-clocks for work and other machines merged to form the Computing Tabulating Recording Co. The modern-day name followed in 1924.
With a plant in Endicott, New York, the new business also made cheese slicers and—significantly for its future—machines that read data stored on punch cards. By the 1930s, IBM’s cards were keeping track of 26 million Americans for the newly launched Social Security program.
These old, sprawling machines might seem quaint in the iPod era, but they had design elements similar to modern computers. They had places for data storage, math processing areas and output, says David A. Mindell, professor of the history of technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Punch cards carted from station to station represented what business today might call “data flow.”
“It was very sophisticated,” Mindell says.
The force behind IBM’s early growth was Thomas J. Watson Sr., a demanding boss with exacting standards for everything from office wear (white shirts, ties) to creativity (his slogan: “Think”).
Watson, and later his son, Thomas Watson Jr., guided IBM into the computer age. Its machines were used to calculate everything from banking transactions to space shots. As the company swelled after World War II, IBM threw its considerable resources at research to maintain its dominance in the market for mainframes, the hulking computers that power whole offices.
“When we did semiconductors, we had thousands and thousands of people,” says Donald Seraphim, who worked at IBM from 1957 until 1986 and was named a fellow, the company’s highest honor for technical achievement. “They just know how to put the force behind the entrepreneurial things.”
By the late 1960s, IBM was consistently the only high-tech company in the Fortune 500’s top 10. IBM famously spent $5 billion during the decade to develop a family of computers designed so growing businesses could easily upgrade.
It introduced the magnetic hard drive in 1956 and the floppy disk in 1971. In the 1960s, IBM developed the first bar code, paving the way for automated supermarket checkouts. IBM introduced a high-speed processing system that allowed ATM transactions. It created magnetic strip technology for credit cards.
For much of the 20th century, IBM was the model of a dominant, paternalistic corporation. It was among the first to give workers paid holidays and life insurance.
It ran country clubs for employees generations before Google offered subsidized massages and free meals.
“The model really was you joined IBM and you built your career for life there,” says David Finegold, dean of the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University. Transfers to other cities were still common enough that employees joked IBM really stood for “I’ve Been Moved.”
The origins of the company’s nickname, Big Blue, are something of a mystery. It may simply derive from IBM’s global size and the color of its logo.
IBM’s gold-plated reputation was based in part on ubiquity and reliability, as well as a relentless sales force. But its fortunes began to change as bureaucracy stifled innovation.
Information-technology managers used to joke that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. But by the 1980s, Big Blue found itself adrift in a changing technology environment.
IBM had slipped with the rise of cheap microprocessors and rapid changes in the industry. In an infamous blunder, IBM introduced its influential personal computer in 1981, but it passed on buying the rights to the software that ran it—made by a startup called Microsoft.
IBM helped make the PC a mainstream product, but it quickly found itself outmatched in a market it helped create. It relied on Intel for chips and Microsoft for software, leaving it vulnerable when the PC industry took off and rivals began using the same technology.
The PC’s casing wasn’t as important as the technology inside it, and IBM didn’t own the intellectual property inside its own machines. In addition, the rise of smaller computers that performed some of the same functions as mainframes threw IBM’s main moneymaking business into disarray.
With its legacy and very survival at stake, the company was forced to embark on a wrenching restructuring.
One of its major achievements turned out to be re-engineering itself during the upheavals of the 1990s. Viewed as too bureaucratic to compete in fast-changing times, IBM tapped an outsider as CEO in 1993 to help with a turnaround.
Louis Gerstner, a former executive with American Express and RJR Nabisco, had little knowledge of technology or IBM culture. In his first meeting with top IBM executives, he was the only one in the room with a blue shirt.
But he broke up old fiefdoms, slashed prices and eliminated jobs. IBM, which had peaked at 406,000 employees in 1985, shed more than 150,000 in the 1990s as the company lost nearly $16 billion over five years.
Gerstner resisted pressure to break up the company and instead focused on services, such as data storage and technical support. Services could be sold as an add-on to companies that had already bought IBM computers. Even barely profitable pieces of hardware were used to open the door to more profitable deals.
The shift allowed IBM to ride out two recessions: When times are tough, businesses pay IBM to help them find ways to cut costs and handle technology chores that would be more expensive to perform in-house.
The change in strategy was risky for a company that helped create the PC industry, yet IBM rose to become the world’s biggest technology services provider.
With around $100 billion in annual revenue today, IBM is ranked 18th in the Fortune 500. It’s three times the size of Google and almost twice as big as Apple. Its market capitalization of around $200 billion beats Google and allowed IBM last month to briefly surpass its old nemesis, Microsoft.
Though transformed, IBM remains a pioneer, the envy of the technology industry. Hewlett-Packard Co.’s new CEO, Leo Apotheker, says one of his primary goals is to strengthen the company’s software and services businesses to compete better with IBM.
Some things haven’t changed. The company still spends heavily on research, about $6 billion a year. It still comes up with flashy feats of computing prowess, most recently when its Watson computer system handily defeated the world’s best “Jeopardy!” players.
And, just as in 1911, it’s still in the business of finding data solutions.
While IBM’s Watson attracted buzz by beating two human “Jeopardy!” champions, the company wants to put it to real-world use as a medical diagnostic tool that can understand plain language and analyze mountains of information. That’s in line with IBM’s focus on other big data projects, such as analyzing traffic patterns citywide to predict and stave off traffic jams.
The company that built its success making sense of millions of punch card records sees future innovations in the analysis of the billions and billions of bits of data being transmitted in the 21st century.
“The scale of that enables you to do discovery, whether it’s in the case of drugs, medicine, crime—you name it,” says Bernard Meyerson, IBM’s vice president for innovation.
In Photo: The IBM PC makes its debut in 1981. (AP Photo/IBM Corporation)
YouTube in network deal talks with operators, manufacturers
Saturday, 18 June 2011 16:05 Bloomberg News
GOOGLE Inc.’s YouTube division said it is in talks with all major mobile operators on an agreement to pool efforts to reduce the impact of video content on telecommunications networks.
YouTube, the world’s most popular video-streaming site, is also in discussions with handset manufacturers, whose devices can help optimize the flow of data over increasingly clogged data networks, Andrey Doronichev, an executive responsible for the company’s mobile offering, said in an interview in London today. “We’re in the middle of the process.” He declined to name any operators or manufacturers.
Telecom operators including France Telecom SA and Telefonica SA are seeking a new deal with Internet companies including Google and Apple Inc., who they say are overloading networks without contributing enough to their upkeep. France Telecom is in talks with Google that will likely lead to a pact to jointly develop network technology, two people familiar with the situation said.
“You hear the content industry say they struggle to make money with piracy and so on, while we have challenges with the investment requirements versus the revenues,” Richard Feasey, public policy director of Vodafone Group Plc., the world’s biggest mobile-phone operator, said in an interview in Athens last week. “Everybody faces a challenge in the long run.”
Even though telecom operators’ first choice is direct payments by content providers, network congestion can be reduced with new technologies. Such stopgaps include storing more content on mobile devices, rather than sending it over wireless networks, and finding segments of radio spectrum that are underused by current equipment.
The number of mobile data connections in western Europe will rise by an average of 15 percent a year to 270 million in 2014, as overall end-user revenue falls by about 1 percent annually, research firm IDC estimated last year.
Former state monopolies including France Telecom, Telecom Italia SpA, Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom AG are also trying to convince investors that they are more than conduits for other companies’ electronic commerce.
Deutsche Telekom plans to introduce various levels of connection quality to manage the surge in data traffic and enable high-bandwidth services such as video conferences and telemedicine, spokesman Philipp Blank said. The Bonn-based company is also tripling the capacity of ports that connect its network with that of Google over the coming weeks to eliminate a bottleneck that slows down service.
“One could imagine services that would allow people not only to get their content closer to the customer but also then to have it delivered faster or with higher quality to the actual device,” Vodafone’s Feasey said.
A spokesman for Telefonica declined to comment.
Foot-dragging on finding a solution to the network-traffic issue may create a situation where governments feel compelled to step in. French officials, including President Nicolas Sarkozy, and Industry Minister Eric Besson, have told Web companies to remember the value of network investments.
While technology cooperation “is a step in the right direction of the telecom world working with the Web world,” imbalances between revenues and investment remain that may only be addressed with new regulation, said Paolo Pescatore, an analyst at CCS Insight in London.
(Bloomberg News)
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Next-generation Internet addresses tested
A worldwide test was under way on Wednesday of the next generation of Internet addresses designed to replace the dwindling pool of 4.3 billion unique identifiers in the original system.
Hundreds of companies, organizations and institutions around the world are taking part in “World IPv6 Day,” including Internet giants such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!
Internet Protocol version 6 is the new system of unique identifying numbers for websites, computers and other Internet-connected gadgets and is replacing the original addressing system, IPv4, which is nearing exhaustion.
IPv6 provides more than four billion times more addresses than IPv4 — more addresses, for example, than there are grains of sand on Earth.
The number of available IPv4 addresses will run out later this year and the transition to IPv6 is needed to keep pace with the explosive growth in Internet use.
US networking company Cisco forecast in a report released this month that the number of devices connected to the Internet will top more than 15 billion by the year 2015, more than double the world’s population.
Web users, for the most part, will be oblivious to the switch to IPv6 since an IP address such as 74.125.71.103, for example, will still appear in the address bar as google.com.
Google, which is enabling IPv6 on Google Search, Gmail, YouTube and other services, said “the vast majority (99.95 percent) of people will be able to access services without interruption” during the IPv6 test, which began at 0000 GMT Wednesday and is to last for 24 hours.
“Either they’ll connect over IPv6, or their systems will successfully fall back to IPv4,” Google network engineer Lorenzo Colitti said in a blog post.
Colitti estimated that 0.05 percent of systems may fail to fall back to IPv4, making Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Bing and other participating websites “slow or unresponsive.”
Facebook network engineer Donn Lee said World IPv6 Day “will enable the industry to gain insights about potential IPv6 issues, find solutions, and accelerate global adoption of IPv6.”
Lee estimated that 99.97 percent of Facebook users would not be affected by the test.
The change to IPv6 mainly impacts Internet service providers, websites and network operators who have to make sure their systems can handle the new online addresses and properly route traffic.
The non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which manages the technical architecture of the Web, doled out the last batches of IPv4 numbers in February.
ICANN has been calling for a switch to IPv6 for years but many websites and Internet service providers have been clinging to the old standard.
Former ICANN chairman Vint Cerf, a Google vice president who is considered a “founding father” of the Internet, has said he and other engineers did not imagine there would be a need for more addresses when they created the IPv4 protocol in 1977.
“I thought it was an experiment and I thought that 4.3 billion would be enough to do an experiment,” Cerf told the Sydney Morning Herald in an interview. “Who the hell knew how much address space we needed?”
AFP
Tuesday, June 07, 2011
wi-tribe drops data cap on broadband service
JM TUAZON, GMA News
06/06/2011 | 05:35 PMWireless Internet provider wi-tribe on Monday said it is removing the limits on amount of data users of its WiMax broadband service may upload and download each month, but that it will also put in place its Fair Usage Policy to curb abuse of network bandwidth.
This development means wi-tribe subscribers will be able to download an unlimited amount of movies, music, software and photos but subject to the fair use.
It also comes on the heels of a bandwidth cap imposed by other telecom firms on subscribers that exceed a certain amount of data used each month, which consumers opposed.
wi-tribe, a partnership of conglomerate San Miguel Corp. and Qatar-based QTel, is among the few broadband providers in the country with a clear and transparent provision on data usage allowances that vary depending on the subscribed package, Simon Burckhardt, wi-tribe chief commercial adviser told reporters in a briefing Monday.
Simon Burckhardt (right), wi-tribe chief commercial adviser, and product manager Edmund Pike, tell reporters Monday that the company has adopted a new policy lifting the ceiling on data usage. Victor D. Sollorano
The firm's 598, 998 and 1998 plans previously came with a monthly usage allowance of 1 gigabyte (gb), 6 gb and 12 gb, respectively.
Burckhardt said their relatively small and young Philippine operations gives the company the leverage to implement such a change in its bandwidth usage policy.
"The beauty is because we're small, we can be much more nimble and smart with how we [implement it]," Burckhardt said. "One of the joys of coming to a company with only thousands of subscribers, and not millions, is that you can be flexible."
wi-tribe has about 55,000 subscribers, and has been operating only in the Metro Manila region since its commercial launch in February 2010.
Burckhardt revealed that more than 50 percent of their subscribers come from other broadband Internet providers, which has convinced them that there are still growth opportunities that can be tapped in the capital region.
Stringent policy
Despite dropping its data usage cap, Burckhardt said that wi-tribe will exercise its right to implement the Fair Usage Policy as a necessary tool for the broadband industry to survive.
Other telcos, such as Globe, impose a 1-gb daily bandwidth cap for users to supposedly manage the network.
The wi-tribe executive said there are no "hard [and fast] rules" as to how to implement the policy, but that they will go after heavy users—which take up anywhere from 15 percent to 25 percent of network bandwidth—in order to better manage the network.
"For very heavy user, there will be caps that we will be implementing. Nobody will receive less than what they have in the old plan. We will monitor it every day," he stressed.
However, Burckhardt did not disclose a definite usage volume for a subscriber to get a heavy user tag, nor did he reveal the particular consequences of going beyond the threshold other than saying the connection speed will be “throttled down."
He said wi-tribe has a system that is checking every customer's bandwidth usage, and that will be consequences that will be triggers should any one user exceeds and encroaches too much on the overall network bandwidth.
In the fair use policy on its website, wi-tribe said "the term 'unlimited...’ does not mean wi-tribe will not take steps to reduce Subscriber’s data rates during periods of congestion or take other actions... when Subscriber’s usage is negatively impacting other subscribers."
Asked if the policy will be to the detriment of the subscribers, Burckhardt said: "Majority of our customers don't understand [our monthly usage allowances]. I would hazard a guess that most customers don't even know that we have usage allowances."
Network capacity
Burckhardt said wi-tribe's network is poised to handle a surge in network traffic following the lifting of data allowances.
"We have a network that is not full. Very few of our base stations are reaching anywhere near their [full] capacity. Others have plenty of capacity to grow," he explained.
As of March 2011, the company said it has invested over P5.5 billion to improve its IT and network infrastructure — setting up base stations and fortifying its technology infrastructure.
Asked if they are looking into upgrading their network systems to LTE (Long-Term Evolution) or HSPA+ or high-speed pack access soon, as what other telecos have done in recent months, Burckhardt said: "Absolutely. We have a very rich spectrum, and we'd be foolish not to look [into those]."
He added that they have begun field-testing WiMax-based MyFi-type or hotspot products in February, and will soon be introduced to the market.
"[As of the moment] we don't have firm plans yet (for mobile). But we acknowledge that the opportunities in mobile devices are huge," Burckhardt said. — VS, GMA News
Monday, June 06, 2011
Lower Internet interconnection rates eyed
By JAMES A. LOYOLA
June 6, 2011, 2:39am
MANILA, Philippines — Globe Telecom is asking the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) to put in place an official domestic IP peering policy, which will help improve the quality of Internet services and lower access costs in the country.
IP peering is similar to interconnection among local telcos for calls and texts, as it involves connecting subscribers and applications of one Internet service provider (ISP) to another.
Globe explained that, without this policy, IP traffic takes longer to route as data is sometimes sent overseas before reaching its target destination.
To customers, the experience is sluggish response times and lower service quality. To ISPs, it is a waste of international capacity and resources when the transmission should be direct and not routed outwards especially when both the origin and destination are located in the Philippines.
Globe explained that the circuitous data routing also means added costs as the peering partner can charge a fee for transmitting the data. Globe said domestic IP peering can be free-of-charge as data need not be pushed out of country. It should ply and pay a domestic route only.
In the same way that landline calls made within the same calling area are free calls that are covered by the monthly service fee, peering costs for domestic data transmission can be offered free to help reduce internet access rates.
“As internet penetration grows, we must continue to improve the way we serve customers by providing them with faster and better internet experience,” said Globe counsel Rodolfo Salalima.
He said the absence of a domestic IP peering policy today stifles healthy competition as subscriber of an ISP will experience unsatisfactory interlinking with another ISP if the latter refuses to leverage efficient domestic IP peering.”
“With higher costs for the ISP taking international routes, customers cannot expect lower internet access rates and they would have to contend with a degraded internet experience,” he added.
To date, Globe has been able to establish IP peering with other telcos and ISPs with sufficient bandwidth, but alleged that Philippine Long Distance and Telephone Company has refused to allow connection upgrades.
Globe underscores the importance of a domestic IP peering policy today as it calls on the NTC to safeguard a level playing field in the industry for the benefit of the consumers.
IP peering is similar to interconnection among local telcos for calls and texts, as it involves connecting subscribers and applications of one Internet service provider (ISP) to another.
Globe explained that, without this policy, IP traffic takes longer to route as data is sometimes sent overseas before reaching its target destination.
To customers, the experience is sluggish response times and lower service quality. To ISPs, it is a waste of international capacity and resources when the transmission should be direct and not routed outwards especially when both the origin and destination are located in the Philippines.
Globe explained that the circuitous data routing also means added costs as the peering partner can charge a fee for transmitting the data. Globe said domestic IP peering can be free-of-charge as data need not be pushed out of country. It should ply and pay a domestic route only.
In the same way that landline calls made within the same calling area are free calls that are covered by the monthly service fee, peering costs for domestic data transmission can be offered free to help reduce internet access rates.
“As internet penetration grows, we must continue to improve the way we serve customers by providing them with faster and better internet experience,” said Globe counsel Rodolfo Salalima.
He said the absence of a domestic IP peering policy today stifles healthy competition as subscriber of an ISP will experience unsatisfactory interlinking with another ISP if the latter refuses to leverage efficient domestic IP peering.”
“With higher costs for the ISP taking international routes, customers cannot expect lower internet access rates and they would have to contend with a degraded internet experience,” he added.
To date, Globe has been able to establish IP peering with other telcos and ISPs with sufficient bandwidth, but alleged that Philippine Long Distance and Telephone Company has refused to allow connection upgrades.
Globe underscores the importance of a domestic IP peering policy today as it calls on the NTC to safeguard a level playing field in the industry for the benefit of the consumers.
Exclusive: Meralco ‘frequency’ bared
The government should take back the frequency it had allotted to Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) because the power firm, now under the business group headed by Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) top honcho Manny V. Pangilinan, can use it to further its already dominant presence in the telco industry.
This is what an official of the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) told the BusinessMirror as he intimated that, apparently, PLDT made a bid for the control over Meralco because of this frequency.
“Two irregularities immediately stand out,” the source said. “One is that Meralco, being a nontelco player, is not entitled to own a frequency, which has become one of the battlegrounds among telco companies.
“Another is that the frequency given to the power firm is a government band, and a very powerful one at that. And as we all know, Meralco is not a government corporation.”
Data show that Meralco was granted a 2.4-gigahertz band by the National Telecomunications Commission (NTC) way back during the Ramos administration. Since then, the power firm has apparently been using the bandwidth for effective communications among its various offices in its franchise area—Metro Manila, and Southern and Central Luzon.
The bandwidth is said to be so powerful that it interferes with other frequencies, such as those used by ham- radio operators. Another source told the Mirror that a frequency that powerful is granted only to sensitive national security offices of the government.
In another unexplained move, the NTC subsequently prohibited the use of radio equipment in the 2.4-gigahertz radio frequency because of complaints from Meralco.
But sometime in August 2003, the NTC, under the Arroyo administration, lifted the ban on the use of the bandwidth, which has now come to be an important cog in Wi-Fi technology, a wireless networking route that lets users connect their laptops, netbooks and other PDAs to the Internet without the need for the wires.
This bandwidth is said to be so powerful that PLDT can use the same to connect Internet users to its Wi-Fi devices up to a range of 15 kilometers and with a radius of 400 meters.
Internet connectivity is now the looming battleground for telco firms since this is considered a growth area. This is why there are broadband sticks that PLDT, Globe Telecom Inc., Digital Telecommunications Philippines Inc. (Digitel) and even the Lopez-led Bayan Telecommunications Inc. are selling to the Internet generation.
The discovery of Meralco’s bandwidth is expected to further spice up the word war between PLDT and Globe relative to PLDT’s acquisition of Digitel.
PLDT has been buying companies with their frequencies. This includes Connectivity Unlimited Resource Enterprise Inc., now a wholly owned subsidiary of Smart Communications, the Philippines’ largest.
CURE, which used to be owned by the group identified with former Marcos minister Roberto V. Ongpin, won one of 3G licenses and which later sold the company to the Pangilinan group for more than P400 million even without rolling out its committed telco infra as per its agreement with the NTC.
It could not be ascertained whether NTC allowed the substitution of PLDT and Smart’s own telco infra facilities to qualify for the required rollout of facilities.
“In fairness,” the source said, “we are not sure if PLDT is now using the frequency for purposes other than it was originally intended for. But we have to go back to the original questions about the preferential treatment granted by the NTC to Meralco during Ramos’s presidency—why it was given a powerful government band despite the fact that it is a nongovernment firm and why it was given a frequency in the first place, when it was not entitled to one, being a nontelco.”
Saturday, June 04, 2011
Facebook use in gov't saps productivity: CSC
Posted at 06/03/2011 4:31 PM | Updated as of 06/04/2011 3:07 AM
MANILA, Philippines - The Civil Service Commission (CSC) on Friday said it bans computer games and social networking sites such as Facebook in government offices because it saps productivity.
In an interview, CSC chairman Francisco Duque said he first implemented the ban on Facebook and computer games inside his own office as far back as June 2010. He said he instructed the information management system (IMS) director to restrict the use of social networking sites.
He cited a report by Challenger, Gray and Christmas that showed that Facebook use leads to millions of dollars in losses to productivity in the US.
"They said this was a productivity killer. Human resources offices of certain companies had also established how frequent use of social networks would bring down productivity levels," he told ANC's "Headstart."
Under CSC rules, government employees found playing computer games or going to social networking sites face a reprimand or warning for the first offence, suspension for the second and dismissal for the third offense.
Duque said there was practically no resistance when he implemented the ban. He said the Office of the President also asked for the CSC's recommendations on social media use in government, which were later approved.
Manila City Hall earlier banned Facebook use and computer games for employees during office hours. Only department heads, elected officials, personnel from the public information unit and electronic data processing unit have free access to the Internet.
Officials said the restriction is to provide better service to the public.
Should a need arise for the employee to use the Internet for work, the employee must get permission and a password from the department head.
Makati, Parañaque and Quezon City halls have also implemented limited access to the Internet.
The Quezon City Mayor's office said this is to ensure their employees are more efficient and professional.
Other local government units now plan to follow the various city halls in banning computer games and social networking sites to further improve the service they give to the public. -- with a report from Jing Castañeda, ABS-CBN News
In an interview, CSC chairman Francisco Duque said he first implemented the ban on Facebook and computer games inside his own office as far back as June 2010. He said he instructed the information management system (IMS) director to restrict the use of social networking sites.
He cited a report by Challenger, Gray and Christmas that showed that Facebook use leads to millions of dollars in losses to productivity in the US.
"They said this was a productivity killer. Human resources offices of certain companies had also established how frequent use of social networks would bring down productivity levels," he told ANC's "Headstart."
Under CSC rules, government employees found playing computer games or going to social networking sites face a reprimand or warning for the first offence, suspension for the second and dismissal for the third offense.
Duque said there was practically no resistance when he implemented the ban. He said the Office of the President also asked for the CSC's recommendations on social media use in government, which were later approved.
Manila City Hall earlier banned Facebook use and computer games for employees during office hours. Only department heads, elected officials, personnel from the public information unit and electronic data processing unit have free access to the Internet.
Officials said the restriction is to provide better service to the public.
Should a need arise for the employee to use the Internet for work, the employee must get permission and a password from the department head.
Makati, Parañaque and Quezon City halls have also implemented limited access to the Internet.
The Quezon City Mayor's office said this is to ensure their employees are more efficient and professional.
Other local government units now plan to follow the various city halls in banning computer games and social networking sites to further improve the service they give to the public. -- with a report from Jing Castañeda, ABS-CBN News
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