The Malaysian Insider :: Breaking Views
The Malaysian Insider :: Breaking Views |
| More funerals, gun-control push follow Connecticut shooting Posted: 20 Dec 2012 08:18 AM PST  Sophie Bell, 9, at an interfaith candlelight prayer vigil at Los Angeles City Hall, December 19, 2012, holds a sign to end gun violence. — Reuters pics Funerals were scheduled for a half-dozen people, some as young as 6 years old, who were shot and killed on Friday by a heavily armed 20-year-old man who attacked an elementary school with an assault rifle. The December 14 rampage, in which 28 people were killed including 20 children and the gunman, has sparked new discussion on tightening the nation's gun laws, a thorny political issue in the United States, which has a strong culture of individual gun ownership.  Police officers escort family members at the funeral for six-year-old victim Catherine Hubbard at St Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church in Newtown, December 20, 2012. The powerful firearms lobby, the National Rifle Association, which has long resisted any effort to restrict gun ownership, signalled this week it might be ready to bend. It said it would offer "meaningful contributions" to prevent future such massacres at an event in Washington tomorrow. In Newtown, a few dozen residents met at the town library last night to discuss ways they could influence the national debate. Senator Richard Blumenthal told the group it was time for a "seismic change" in gun policies. "This horrific tragedy has changed America, in the way that it is ready to stop the spread of gun violence," Blumenthal said. The shooter, Adam Lanza, used guns that were legally purchased and registered to his mother Nancy, his first victim, in Friday's attack. A funeral home outside Connecticut plans to claim her body, The New Haven Register reported, citing Connecticut's chief medical examiner, Dr. H. Wayne Carver II. Lanza's brother is a retired police official from New Hampshire. Speaking at the town library meeting, Connecticut Senator-elect Chris Murphy urged the participants to use the formerly quiet suburb's time in the national spotlight to pressure his future colleagues in Washington to act. "The most important thing is to build a movement here, to build a network," Murphy told the group, Newtown United. Both Murphy and Blumenthal are Democrats. US lawmakers are already taking steps to restrict access to the deadliest weapons. Democrats in the House of Representatives yesterday began to push for a vote on a bill that would ban high-capacity ammunition clips that allow a shooter wielding an assault rifle to spray dozens of bullets without pausing to reload. The backlash against guns has not been limited to lawmakers. Retailers including Wal-Mart Stores Inc took down an informational website about Bushmaster rifles, the sort used in the attack. Dick's Sporting Goods pulled all guns from its store closest to the massacre in Newtown, about 130 km northeast of New York City. Private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management LP this week said it would sell the Freedom Group, the largest US manufacturer of firearms, which produced the Bushmaster AR-15-type rifle used in the attack. Officials from states including Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York and California have begun a review of their investments in firearms manufacturers. — Reuters |
| Powered by the sun, telcos open up cellphone’s final frontier Posted: 20 Dec 2012 08:00 AM PST JAKARTA, Dec 20 — Until this year, 1,000 or so residents of Mambi on Indonesia's Sulawesi island used their mobile phones as calculators, cameras and music players. But only if they rode up to five hours by bus or motorcycle over muddy roads could they actually use them for their primary purpose: to make phone calls or send messages. And they're not alone.  A study finds that 1.5 billion people lack access to a cellpone signal in Indonesia. — AFP pic This is primarily because cellular operators haven't considered connecting remote communities such as Mambi worth the cost. But with demand for cellphone services in rural parts of the developing world rising, and the cost of the technology to connect them falling, the equation is changing. That means rural folk like those in Mambi will form the bulk of some 700 million new cellular subscriptions in the next five years, reckon the GSMA. "The barrier to entry is no longer the device but the availability of the network," says Prashant Gokarn, chief strategy and planning officer at Indosat Tbk PT, Indonesia's second largest operator. This shift has led to a rash of moves by operators to reach beyond the low-hanging fruit of urban subscribers to connect "the unsignalled". Driving this shift are small companies like Ireland's Altobridge, which offers base stations at a fraction of the cost of traditional ones designed for urban environments. They are powered by solar panels, removing the need for regular shipments of diesel to keep them going, and also reduce the load on traffic back to the network - called backhaul. While installing an urban base station with tower, power and air conditioning in remote areas would cost around US$250,000, says Altobridge's marketing director Peter Tuomey, his solar powered station costs a fifth that. And the monthly costs are reduced in part by routing local calls back through the base station— rather than sending them over the satellite backhaul. Not all such technology is exclusive to smaller players such as Altobridge, but their willingness to share some of the risk has helped them carve a niche away from main players like Nokia, Siemens Networks, Ericsson and Huawei. India's Vihaan Networks Ltd (VNL), for example, has deployed hundreds of thousands of such base stations across the developing world. Says founder and CEO Rajiv Mehrotra of his bigger rivals: "We start where they stop." In Indonesia Indosat and Altobridge have jointly installed base stations in nearly 100 sites, including Mambi. That's only a start: Altobridge estimates 35 million Indonesians — about 14 per cent of the population — do not have access to a cellphone network. But it's already making a difference. In Mambi, for example, Altobridge sent one of its engineers, Australian Sean Heffernan, at the beginning of the year to set up two base stations covering a cluster of villages. He was surprised at what he found: not only was he told he was the first white man many of the villagers had seen, but he observed a relatively prosperous life. Mambi had a paved high street, school and restaurants, all partly funded by thriving cocoa, coffee and rice growing and remittances from relatives working overseas. But soon after the network was up and running, the change was visible. Residents could phone doctors in the regional capital, Makassar, check market prices of goods they sold like chillies and lemons rather than guess them, and order supplies from town instead of trekking several hours there and back. "It basically changed their lives," he said. That may only be the start. In Indonesia's far east region of Papua, where base stations have been in place longer, their deployment has been followed by the arrival of bank branches, government services and retail businesses, says Indosat's Gokarn. That's because such services all rely on communications. Djemi Suhenda, deputy president director of Indonesia's Bank BTPN, said his bank was keen to reach out to such communities, but must first wait for the telephone operators, or telcos. "As the economy grows, as the middle income grows, these are the future customers of telcos," he says. "And for us, it's simple: we're a mass market bank and so these are the customers we'd like to see." Indeed, research indicates the arrival of a cell phone signal does have an economic impact. A study for Nordic telecoms group Telenor by Deloitte in 2008 suggested that a 10 per cent rise in mobile penetration would boost the long-term GDP rate of a developing country by 1.2 per cent. Indian researchers came to similar conclusions in 2009. Key, though, to any wider deployment is going to be whether such moves pay off for operators. Indosat's Gokarn said that while his company recognises the benefits of being the first to arrive in a village like Mambi, figuring out pricing is key. Charge local users too much and you hit "miscall culture" — where users call a distant friend but hang up before he or she answers. That prompts the friend to call back, potentially losing the operator revenue to a rival network. Instead, Indosat cut tariffs. While the average revenue per user didn't necessarily rise, the increased traffic pushed up a more relevant metric: the average revenue per base station. "It's probably not a good model to price it very high," Gokarn said. This seems to match Altobridge's broader experience. "Mobile spend levels in these newly connected rural villages is generally on par with the national average," says Tuomey. "However, in some cases, we are actually seeing average monthly spend in rural villages exceeding the national average." For some the technology has more ways to go. University of California, Berkeley, PhD student Kurtis Heimerl has spent the past few months in a remote Papuan village testing a base station he helped develop that powers down when it's not in use, saving up to 80 per cent of the energy usually required. Incoming calls automatically wake up the unit, while outgoing callers can activate it with modified cellphones. "It's not about the cost of the base station anymore," he said. "It's power." Others would like to see telecommunications spread to rural areas more quickly by turning to open source software that in effect replaces much of the traditional hardware needed for cellular telephony. Indonesia technology activist Onno Purbo, for example, has been pushing the government to allow his open-source base stations to connect to existing providers. Deploying such technology is not only cheaper, he says, but it means communities don't have to wait for operators. "The long-term goal is to bring connectivity to those who don't have it," he says. "The normal strategy is to ask commercial operators to do these things." Onno has had little luck so far. More promising is the commercial deployment of technology allowing faster 3G connections to rural areas. While most solar-powered base stations only support voice, short message service and very rudimentary 2G services, the next step is to add more power-hungry 3G data. Altobridge's Tuomey says he's working to commercially deploy mobile broadband with Malaysia's Maxis. Whether its 2G or 3G, says VNL's Mehrotra, there's no question that there's pent-up demand. "We see the traffic and it's unbelievable," he says. "They talk, talk, talk. They want to talk to everyone." — Reuters |
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