L I R N E . N E T

New presentations are available at Research ICT Africa! (RIA!) based on the findings of RIA’s 2008 nationally representative household survey on e-access and usage.

• Towards Evidence-based Policy in Africa: Access & Usage across 17 countries by Alison Gillwald, presented at ITS, Montreal, 2008
• First glance: E-access and household survey 2008 by Alison Gillwald, presented at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Geneva, May 2008

• Click here to download the RIA policy brief (in .pdf format) summarising the 2008 survey results and recommendations.

• Click here to go to the Research ICT Africa! website.

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In a new working paper, Ewan Sutherland, Research Fellow at the LINK Centre, considers the role of national auditors in telecom policy oversight. “With almost two hundred NRAs the question of their oversight, or the regulation of regulators, is now a very general concern. The processes auditors general use can and do improve the overall system and the workings of both ministries and regulators.” Sutherland sketches out the roles of auditors in ten countries and draws conclusions around the advantages that national auditors can bring to national telecom regulation in terms of processes and oversight; and the parliamentary level requirements to benefit from auditor’s assessments.

Click here to download the full paper in .pdf format.

Click here to go to the International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI) and here for the Intosai Development Initiative (IDI).
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The recent LIRNEasia publication ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia: Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks in its Chapter 3, “I Just Called to Say: Teleuse under a Ceasefire,” explores the value and modes of access to telecom in the Jaffna District of Sri Lanka. Clearly there is a great need for infrastructure in such areas to replace infrastructure targeted by war. This chapter observes that post conflict societies “despite considerable financial constraints, have a higher demand for telecom services than people in areas directly unaffected by conflict.”

Another new paper by Agnieszka Konkel and Richard Heeks, considers the issue of ICT infrastructure development in conflict zones from the perspective of investment. Drawing on the cases of Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia, the paper elaborates some counter-intuitive evidence to conventional wisdom, in that insecurity does not necessarily deter investment. The authors speculate on three possible hypotheses:

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What kind of information should regulators routinely make available on their websites? Are national regulatory authority (NRA) websites a useful information point? Four new LIRNE studies provide feedback to regulators across different categories of information provision. Some NRAs already provide extensive information via their websites others from the same region offer only a bit of static of information. These regional assessments of national telecom regulatory authority websites seek to illuminate best practices for using NRA websites as vehicles to provide information about the sector to the full range of stakeholders.

The draft Working Papers are available via the links below.

Benchmarking Latin America NRA Websites by Hugo Carrión (DIRSI)
Estándares de comparación para los sitios web de los Entes Reguladores Nacionales de América Latina

Benchmarking Caribbean and North American National Regulatory Authority Websites by Opal Lawton

Benchmarking Asia Pacific National Telecom Regulatory Authority Websites by Lara Alawattegama and Chanuka Wattegama (LIRNEasia)

Benchmark Indicators for African National Regulatory Authority Websites, Monica Kerretts-Makau (Research ICT Africa!)

Please use our Contact Form to order a copy of the full final report with comparative appendices (available in August 2008).

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For World Telecommunications Day, Research ICT Africa! (RIA!) released a South Africa Policy Brief based on the preliminary findings of RIA’s 2008 nationally representative household survey on e-access and usage. The brief details covers issues mitigating access and cost, and summarises findings in a number of figures; and concludes with a set of specific recommendations for moving South Africa towards conditions that are more conducive to investment in the sector.

Click here to download the policy brief (in .pdf format).
Click here to go to the Research ICT Africa! website.

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Vic Hayes and Wolter Lemstra of the Economics of Infrastructures section in the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at Delft University of Technology, have co-authored a paper entitled, Unlicensed: The case of Wi-Fi, which argues that the current day success of Wi-Fi is a combined result of (1) a change in the US communications policy in the 1980s; (2) the industry leadership provided by NCR to create a global standard; and (3) the influence of the users that moved the application of Wireless-LANs from the enterprise to the home, from indoor to outdoor use, from a communications product to a service, and from operators to end-users as the provider of that service. This paper was presented at the Genesis of Unlicensed Wireless Policy Conference at George Mason University School of Law in April 2008, and will appear in a forthcoming issue of info.

Click here to download a preprint version of the paper.
Click here to download the conference (.ppt) presentation.

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Ewan Sutherland, Research Fellow at the LINK Centre has just completed a draft study, “Counting mobile phones, SIM cards & customers.” This paper discusses the challenges of counting the number of mobile subscribers in context of the reality multiple SIM card ownership. This has implications for counting the unconnected, for roaming and mobile termination rate regulation, among others.

Click here to download the full paper in .pdf format.

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