UNCTAD Information Economy Report 2009

See also Page 2 and Page 3 of my notes

The UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) Information Economy Report 2009 was launched last Thursday, 22nd October.

I was able to attend an event organised by the Centre for Development Informatics (CDI) in Manchester on Friday, at which Torbjörn Fredriksson of UNCTAD introduced the report, Richard Heeks of CDI presented a commentary and Brian Nicholson (also of CDI) chaired the meeting and discussion.

Here's some highlights that caught my attention.

The report divides the world up into three groups: Developed countries, Developing countries and 'Economies in Transition' (EIT). The first two are familiar, the third, EIT, consists mainly of former 'Eastern Block' countries in Europe - Croatia, Belarus, Azerbaijan etc.

The way in which that third group are 'in transition' is wonderfully displayed by the Figure 1.2 of the report (I've extracted this figure from Torbjörn's presentation - I hope no-one objects, but since it is available in the freely-downloadable report, I'm assuming they won't):

Global mobile telephone subscriptions by the main economy groupings, 2003-2008.

You can see from this that even in developing countries mobile subscriptions are rising rapidly, but that probably isn't news to anyone. There's been lots said about the uptake of mobile telephones in developing countries (including in some OU courses such as T324: Keeping Ahead in ICT) but this report - of course - explores it in depth.

The report is chock-full of statistics to get your head around - and to make up stories about. In the list of 'Twenty most dynamic economies in terms of increased mobile penetration, 2003-2008' (figure 1.4 of the report), no. 1 is Montenegro which now has 2.35 sim cards per person, which compares with 1.22 sim cards per person in the UK. There was some discussion at the presentation about why that (no. sim cards/person) is the measure used and what it means. Torbjörn explained that the reason it is used is simply that that is the measure available (I guess you know how many sim cards are sold and what the population is). Fair enough! Concerning its significance, one point made by a member of the audience was that network coverage and reliability may drive the need to have more than one card. You might need more than one sim card to increase your chance of getting access whenever and wherever you are. Maybe that is more of a problem in Montenegro than in the UK. (Torbjörn asked for a show of hands in the room, for who had more than one sim card. I'd say something like 60-70% of us put our hands up.)

Torbjörn talked about the way in which applications of mobile phones are being developed locally - in the developing countries themselves. This ties in with what Hannah Beardon discussed in the interviews that she recorded for the OU earlier this year.

Overall, the gap between the developed and developing countries in terms of access to a phone is decreasing, but in contrast the gap in terms of access to broadband is increasing. I'll say more about that another day.

Post for 'Blog action day' on climate change

What can I say to contribute to Blog Action Day on the subject of climate change?

I want to be part of it, because, as I said in an earlier post, I think climate change is THE big issues at the moment, but I'm not sure I have anything new to add. Mind you, equally, there is loads I could say about it.

So, here's just a couple of very brief things, pretty much at random.

1 A technical comment. My field is ICT, and it seems to me that ICT generally is part of the problem but could be part of the solution. This was one of the few comments I made via Writetoreply on Stephen Carter's Digital Britain report. The report as far I could see made no reference at all to climate change, which was ignoring the elephant in the room.

2 A personal thought on why I think it is real. Basically, I read the New Scientist, and I believe it. Not everything in there, of course, but the overwhelming message : Climate change is real, and if we don't do anything about we're in a mess. And more, the first people to suffer - are suffering already - are the poorest, the least powerful in the world. This is why the likes of Christian Aid now make it a priority.

To me, the message of Easter Island speaks very loudly. I think many people still have a vague belief that the environment is somehow out there independent of us, a sort of limitless resources that is so much bigger than us and that it'll absorb everything we do to it. But the message of Easter Island is that we can cause an environmental disaster. Easter Island was small-scale and local. Now we are talking about the whole earth.

Optical fibre: Charles Kao and where it has got to today

The standard story of optical fibre for communications invariably identifies a 1966 paper by Kao and Hockham: "Dielectric-fibre surface waveguides for optical frequencies" (Proceedings IEE 1966),as where it all started.

The paper reported the theory of light propagation in optical fibre, and some experiments at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories in the UK.

It is good to see that work now acknowledged in the Nobel prize for Physics awarded to Charles Kao.

Forty-three years later and optical fibre is the backbone of communication networks. It is a long time since copper cables have been used for communication links between towns and cities, or for trans-oceanic communication links: fibre is just so much better. The technology has developed pretty much continuously since 1966, and here are a couple of recent reports:

FCC approves new trans-Pacific fiber-optic cable

By John Boudreau

jboudreau@mercurynews.com
Posted: 10/08/2009 02:39:07 PM PDT
Updated: 10/09/2009 07:29:56 AM PDT

TAIPEI, Taiwan — The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has given the green light for a trans-Pacific fiber-optic cable funded by an international consortium that includes Google. The new cable, expected to be carrying data traffic by early next year, links the U.S. West Coast and Asia to meet the demand for more bandwidth to handle explosive global Internet communications.
[...]
The 6,200-mile cable, costing about $300 million, is being funded by six companies that, in addition to Google, include telecommunications companies Bharti Airtel in India, SingTel of Singapore and Pacnet, a Hong Kong-based deep-sea fiber-optic cable network operator.
[...]
The cable will run along the ocean floor from Southern California to Chikura, Japan, dipping as deep as 2,000 feet below the surface, and then connect into other networks. Pacnet will control two of the five fiber pairs in the new cable.
[...]
Each pair of fiber cables is capable of carrying up to 960 gigabytes per second, roughly the amount needed for 15 million simultaneous voice calls. ....

Meanwhile, in the labs, more and more bits are squeezed into individual fibres:

Alcatel-Lucent Hits 100-Petabit Optical Milestone

No, it's not warp speed, but Alcatel-Lucent has research technology that can transmit more data faster and further than ever before.

September 29, 2009
By Sean Michael Kerner

New research by Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs division has reached a new optical network transmission record: 100 petabits per second.kilometer.

The bit-per-second.kilometers unit of measure is a combination of speed and distance and is considered by Alcatel-Lucent to be a standard measure for high-speed optical transmission.

The researchers used 155 lasers to transmit the data at rate of 100 gigabits per second. The total of 100 petabits per second.kilometer was calculated by multiplying the 155 lasers by the 100-gigabit speed (15.5 Terabit per second) over the entire 7,000 kilometer distance used in the study. In practical terms, that's the distance between Paris and Chicago.

As a result, the Alcatel-Lucent test's speed maxed out at the equivalent of 100 million gigabits per second.kilometer.

This is a typical 'hero' experiment - labs competing with one another to get the headlines - so you have to be a bit wary of interpreting the practical relevance, but on past experience in the field of optical fibre comms, commercial reality might only be a few years behind.

There's some interesting features to this demo that I might write about another time, but for the moment it is interesting to compare the Alcatel-Lucent report with the previous report of the trans-Pacific system.

(My instinct as an OU author is at this point to set it as a 'Self-Assessment activity'... so I'll leave a bit of white space just in case someone reading this wants to do it for themselves before seeing my answer!)
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
6,200-miles, which is 8 x 6200/5 = 9,920 km
960 gigabytes per second, which is 8 x 960 = 7,680 gigabits/s, or 7.68 terabits/s

Performance in bits-per-second.kilometers, is 9,920 x 7.68 x 10¹² = 7.6 x 10¹⁶

That is 76 petabits-per-second.kilometers, not so different from the Alcatel-Lucent demo - if I've done my calculation right.

Intellectual property , thoughts arising from a seminar

I attended a very informative seminar this afternoon, Ray Corrigan talking about the book The Public Domain, by James Boyle.

Doug Clow has produced a superb liveblog from the event, so I needn't add anything about what was said.

(Aside: How do people do that - produce liveblogs? I saw Doug typing, but how can he follow what's being said at the same time? He clearly does, but there's no way I could do that, but then I've never been any good at taking notes even for myself.)

A couple of observations.

- Yes, of course, the general case is right. It is difficult to understand how anyone defends some of the nonsense. And dangerous nonsense too. But...

- I am uneasy about the comparison with environment issues. Global warming really is the big one. We are talking about 'the end of civilisation as we know it' with global warming, and I do not think IP concerns are on the same scale.

It's not that I don't think it's outrageous, some of what's gone on about IP - the prosecutions, the fines, patenting gene sequences and the like. But I think the cause is damaged by the comparison with global warming, because it is claiming too much.