Our Global Future in the 21st Century is based on "The Third Industrial Revolution" which finally connects our new ICT infrastructure with distributed energy sources that are both renewable and sustainable
German copyright troll Urmann + Colleagues' (U+C) pain is only just beginning. U+C misrepresented a streaming service as a file-sharing site to a German court in order to obtain subscriber info on thousands of German RedTube users. U+C then used this fraudulently-obtained data to send out collection letters to over 10,000 users, demanding a payment of $345 for copyright infringement.
Red flags were raised by a handful of German lawyers who noted that almost everything about U+C's actions bordered on illegal. At the very least, U+C couldn't demand payment for activity not considered to be infringement by the German courts. The backlash began there.
Range uses low power components, and their network runs from a small hydroelectric generator that produces about 5,000 watts. The village, which is a four-hour drive from the nearest town with cellular service, now has both voice and SMS service.
Click headline to read more and watch video clip--
IBM inventors have received a patent for a breakthrough data encryption technique that is expected to further data privacy and strengthen cloud computing security.
The patented breakthrough, called "fully homomorphic encryption," could enable deep and unrestricted analysis of encrypted information — intentionally scrambled data — without surrendering confidentiality. IBM's solution has the potential to advance cloud computing privacy and security by enabling vendors to perform computations on client data, such as analyzing sales patterns, without exposing or revealing the original data.
IBM's homomorphic encryption technique solves a daunting mathematical puzzle that confounded scientists since the invention of public-key encryption over 30 years ago.
Ikea is not only furnishing people’s bedrooms, living rooms and kitchens. The company’s French unit has also been conducting surveillance of employees and even customers who complained about items that were not delivered. It’s not just that Ikea has a record of what color of couch or size bookshelves that you prefer. Ikea has been able to access personal records including bank account information, driving records, vehicle registrations and property records. It has used these in vetting job applicants and in building cases against employees accused of wrongdoing.
Ikea operates in 42 countries, but the reports about surveillance have only surfaced in France. A regional court in Versailles outside of Paris is currently investigating whether officials in Ikea’s French unit illegally ordered personal investigations of hundreds of people.
How do you build a wind farm offshore without using the specialized boats required to do so?
That's the dilemma facing the American offshore wind industry, thanks to a 1920 federal law.
The Jones Act, passed to protect maritime merchants, requires vessels transporting cargo or equipment between two U.S. points to be American flagged and manufactured.
Because the offshore wind industry has not yet taken off in the States, the only vessels capable of helping it along are manufactured in Europe.
That could leave Massachusetts stuck in a Catch-22: Manufacturers don't want to build vessels for an industry that doesn't exist yet.
But state officials say they are banking on the unique engineering of South Terminal in New Bedford to circumvent the problem.
The Jones Act restricts commerce to U.S. vessels between American "points," not ports, said Washington, D.C., maritime and admiralty lawyer Charlie Papavizas. He said the word "points" could have made its way into the law to address concerns that people could "pick up cargo somewhere that wasn't technically a port and get around the law."
Originally, the law applied only to areas within 3 nautical miles of the coastline, but that changed with the Outer Continental Shelf Land Act of 1953, which extended U.S. law, including the Jones Act, to the Outer Continental Shelf.
"Basically, anything attached to the seabed, either permanently or temporarily, is a point," Papavizas said. "As soon as someone drives a pile into the seabed, it counts as a new one."
That leaves the American offshore wind industry in a bind, because you have to drive a pile, or place a foundation, before putting the turbine on top of it.
Offshore wind turbines are extremely heavy and extremely tall, meaning not just any boat can be used to put them in the seabed.
In Europe, where the offshore wind industry is well-established, special barges have been manufactured that jack up above the water level for stability while they drive piles into bedrock. They also have 300-foot-tall cranes to help lift the turbines and racks to hold turbine blades.
But because they were not made in America, those barges cannot be used to transport a wind turbine from port to pile here.
So what's the solution for a state like Massachusetts, which is hoping to become a hub for offshore wind?
The government is planning to give state-level coordination committees (SLCCs) the power to regulate companies running collective investment schemes, a move aimed at checking illegal deposit taking and Ponzi schemes.
An SLCC coordinates between a state government and financial institutions to ensure development of credit-based programmes in the state. It has representation from banks, departments of the state government, key intelligence agencies and the local chapters of the financial sector regulators. SLCC meetings are convened by the Reserve Bank of India.
The proposal to empower SLCCs was made by an inter-ministerial group set up by the finance ministry after it failed to secure a consensus on setting up of a central coordinating agency to share information between regulators, central and state governments.
"There were structural and functional issues of setting up such an agency," a finance official said on condition of anonymity. "Besides, the idea is to gather information and take corrective action against unincorporated bodies and unauthorised entities collecting deposits, which can be done through such a platform."
A parliamentary panel headed by former finance minister and Bharatiya Janata Pary leader Yashwant Sinha had also suggested single regulator to oversee the functioning of investment schemes promising unreasonable returns.
The official quoted earlier said the Department of Information Technology will also be roped in to help regulate online deposit collection schemes floated by foreign-based entities.
The scheme awards money to local authorities for a six-year period, allocating funds yearly, with the borough receiving £3million for 2014-15.
Areas in the borough that have seen a rise in development such as Rooksdown, Popley Fields and Sherfield-on-Loddon have attracted the most funding.
The scheme aims to support areas and communities that have been affected by housing growth since October 2009. For every new home built and occupied in Basingstoke and Deane, the Government gives the borough a New Home Bonus grant.
The fund will help to deliver ‘larger ticket’ facilities and infrastructure improvements of over £25,000, and has to make a significant and long-lasting impact on the local community. This can include a better broadband service or a new community facility.
BT Sport looks set to increase its investment in rugby union by agreeing sponsorship deals with the four Welsh regions and four Irish provinces, it has been reported.
The Telegraph reports that the broadcaster - which already sponsors Edinburgh and Glasgow in the RaboDirect Pro12 - is to inject funds into the teams.
From next season, the elite Celtic competition is to be broadcast live on Sky Sports.
As such, a shirt sponsorship deal could enable BT Sport to promote its own brand via its main rival's rugby union coverage.
According to the news provider, negotiations are believed to be at "an advanced stage", with an agreement looking likely.
BT Sport said rugby union is "at the heart" of its TV offering, and the broadcaster "talks to people all the time" about potential broadcast opportunities.
Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him.
The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn’t happening or humans aren’t responsible for it.
It then spits back at the twitterer who made that argument a canned response culled from a database of hundreds. The responses are matched to the argument in question – tweets about how Neptune is warming just like the earth, for example, are met with the appropriate links to scientific sources explaining why that hardly constitutes evidence that the source of global warming on earth is a warming sun.
The database began as a simple collection of responses written by Leck himself, but these days quite a few of the rejoinders are culled from a university source whom Leck says he isn’t at liberty to divulge.
Like other chatbots, lots of people on the receiving end of its tweets have no idea they’re not conversing with a real human being. Some of them have arguments with the chatbot spanning dozens of tweets and many days, says Leck. That’s in part because AI_AGW is smart enough to run through a list of different canned responses when an interlocutor continues to throw the same arguments at it. Leck has even programmed it to debate such esoteric topics as religion - which is where the debates humans have with the bot often wind up.
In January 2010, numerous homeowners in San Antonio, Texas, stood baffled in front of their closed garage doors. They wanted to drive to work or head off to do their grocery shopping, but their garage door openers had gone dead, leaving them stranded. No matter how many times they pressed the buttons, the doors didn't budge. The problem primarily affected residents in the western part of the city, around Military Drive and the interstate highway known as Loop 410.
In the United States, a country of cars and commuters, the mysterious garage door problem quickly became an issue for local politicians. Ultimately, the municipal government solved the riddle. Fault for the error lay with the United States' foreign intelligence service, the National Security Agency, which has offices in San Antonio. Officials at the agency were forced to admit that one of the NSA's radio antennas was broadcasting at the same frequency as the garage door openers. Embarrassed officials at the intelligence agency promised to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, and soon the doors began opening again.
It was thanks to the garage door opener episode that Texans learned just how far the NSA's work had encroached upon their daily lives. For quite some time now, the intelligence agency has maintained a branch with around 2,000 employees at Lackland Air Force Base, also in San Antonio. In 2005, the agency took over a former Sony computer chip plant in the western part of the city. A brisk pace of construction commenced inside this enormous compound. The acquisition of the former chip factory at Sony Place was part of a massive expansion the agency began after the events of Sept. 11, 2001.
One of the two main buildings at the former plant has since housed a sophisticated NSA unit, one that has benefited the most from this expansion and has grown the fastest in recent years -- the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. This is the NSA's top operative unit -- something like a squad of plumbers that can be called in when normal access to a target is blocked.
According to internal NSA documents viewed by SPIEGEL, these on-call digital plumbers are involved in many sensitive operations conducted by American intelligence agencies. TAO's area of operations ranges from counterterrorism to cyber attacks to traditional espionage. The documents reveal just how diversified the tools at TAO's disposal have become -- and also how it exploits the technical weaknesses of the IT industry, from Microsoft to Cisco and Huawei, to carry out its discreet and efficient attacks.
The unit is "akin to the wunderkind of the US intelligence community," says Matthew Aid, a historian who specializes in the history of the NSA. "Getting the ungettable" is the NSA's own description of its duties. "It is not about the quantity produced but the quality of intelligence that is important," one former TAO chief wrote, describing her work in a document. The paper seen by SPIEGEL quotes the former unit head stating that TAO has contributed "some of the most significant intelligence our country has ever seen." The unit, it goes on, has "access to our very hardest targets."
A study by Drexel University has identified the major sources of funding for climate change denial. Some of the names are all too familiar such as the Koch and Scaife families while some have done their best to remain obscure and have yet to get noticed.
Cenk Uygur (http://www.twitter.com/cenkuygur) host of The Young Turks discusses this story. Did this story surprise you? Tell us what you think in the comment section below.
Click headline to view the YouTube video full screen--
The New England groundfishery is a disaster. Conservationists know it, the federal government knows it, processors, shipyards and supply houses know it. And nobody knows it like fishermen do.
The source of the disaster can be summed up in a word: Complexity.
Around every corner in the quest to manage the groundfishery lurks another tangled issue.
Fishery managers declare catch limits that are little better than arbitrary because our definitions of overfishing are at odds, a condition created by murky, imprecise language in the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery and Conservation Management Act, further complicated by the inability to agree on the size of the fishery, its relative vitality, the impact of warming and acidifying oceans, the number of fish versus the size of the fish, the role of economics and management mechanisms "¦ you get the idea.
Dr. Brian Rothschild points out in the policy paper intended as a launching point for debate over the looming reauthorization of Magnuson-Stevens that a network of national institutes might make sense of this complexity.
Rothschild, the president of the fledgling Center for Sustainable Fisheries based in New Bedford and the former — and founding — dean of the UMass Dartmouth School of Marine Science and Technology, met with The Standard-Times editorial board last week to discuss reauthorization and the center's policy paper.
In answer to a question about whether the resources being put toward "best science available" are adequate and properly allocated, he said he believes the simple questions are being adequately addressed: what is happening with one species, for example. For proper management of the fishery, however, an entity akin to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites in Colorado is needed: How do multiple species interact? How do the changing waters affect them? How does the economics of fishing affect them? The complex questions, he said, must be tackled by top experts in science, policy and law if Magnuson-Stevens hopes to live up to its promise.
The world's mobile phone carriers have failed to implement technology fixes available since 2008 that would have thwarted the National Security Agency's ability to eavesdrop on many mobile phone calls, a cyber security expert says.
Karsten Nohl, chief scientist with Berlin's Security Research Labs, told Reuters ahead of a highly anticipated talk at a conference in Germany that his firm discovered the issue while reviewing security measures implemented by mobile operators around the world.
Nohl also told Reuters that the carriers had failed to fully address vulnerabilities that would allow hackers to clone and remotely gain control of certain SIM cards. Those vulnerabilities were pointed out in July.
While the German cryptologist criticized carriers for failing to implement technology to protect customers from surveillance as well as fraud, he said he does not think they did so under pressure from spy agencies.
"I couldn't imagine it is complicity. I think it is negligence," he said. "I don't want to believe in a worldwide conspiracy across all worldwide network operators. I think it is individual laziness and priority on network speed and network coverage and not security."
A spokeswoman for the GSM Association, which represents about 800 mobile operators worldwide, said she could not comment on Nohl's criticism before seeing his presentation on the topic at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Europe's biggest annual conference on hacking, security and privacy issues.
Main roads to the Argentine capital Buenos Aires have been blocked by people protesting against power cuts.
They are demanding government action on shortages that have been affecting many parts of the city.
Residents set fire to rubbish bags and tyres on the roads, causing long traffic jams as many left the capital for the New Year festivities.
The authorities are blaming the energy crisis on Buenos Aires' worst heatwave in decades, with temperatures over 38C.
Some neighbourhoods have been without power for two weeks, with a marked increase in the use of air conditioning.
But the opposition accuses the government of mismanaging the crisis.
Buenos Aires mayor, Mauricio Macri, says President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner should change the time zone in the east of Argentina - where Buenos Aires is - to save energy.
Mr Macri, a former ally of Ms Fernandez, said the private energy suppliers cannot take all the blame for the crisis.
"Private companies are also responsible, but the main responsibility is with the federal government," he said.
"The government must control to make sure there is an investment programme, which has not happened in the last decade. And now we are regretting the consequences of that," Mr Macri added.
Argentina's ageing power grid has been struggling to keep up with demand.
Bottlenose dolphins in Louisiana’s Barataria Bay have lung damage and adrenal hormone abnormalities not previously seen in other dolphin populations, according to a new peer-reviewed study published Dec. 18, 2013 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.
The Deepwater Horizon spill heavily oiled Barataria Bay. The study was conducted in August 2011 as part of the Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) by a team of government, academic and non-governmental researchers. In the NRDA process, federal and state trustee agencies working cooperatively with BP identify potential injuries to natural resources and lost public uses resulting from the spill, along with restoration projects to ensure that the public is fully compensated for its loss.
The publication details the first evidence that dolphins in heavily oiled areas are exhibiting injuries consistent with toxic effects observed in laboratory studies of mammals exposed to petroleum hydrocarbons. The dolphin health study concludes that the health effects seen in the Barataria Bay dolphins are significant and likely will lead to reduced survival and ability to reproduce.
Twenty-nine of the total 32 dolphins sampled in Barataria Bay received comprehensive physical examinations, including ultrasound examinations to assess lung condition. The researchers assigned almost half (48 percent) of the dolphins a guarded or worse prognosis. In fact, they classified 17 percent as being in poor or grave condition, meaning the dolphins were not expected to survive.
These findings are in contrast to dolphins sampled in Sarasota Bay, Florida, an area not oiled by the Deepwater Horizon spill. For Dr. Lori Schwacke, the study’s lead author and veteran of a number of similar dolphin health studies across the southeast, the findings are troubling: “I’ve never seen such a high prevalence of very sick animals — and with unusual conditions such as the adrenal hormone abnormalities.”
The warnings were there from the very beginning. Installing any sort of internet filtering is doomed to fail. First, it's often easily circumvented. Second, it's never as accurate as its proponents claim it will be. Filtering overblocks, sealing off access to legitimate sites while simultaneously allowing targeted material to leak in around the edges.
The UK's national porn filter is already a failure, even before the mandatory 2014 implementation deadline. A single coder has created a Chrome extension that allows the blocked to circumvent the filter with ease by automating proxy access. The filter has also blocked off access to legitimate sex education sites as well as sites offering help to victims of rape and sexual abuse.
On Christmas Day, Russian state-owned gas company Soyuzneftegaz inked a $90 million, 25-year deal with Damascus to start exploring for the first time some of Syria's offshore energy resources. On the surface, it represents another show of support from Russia for the beleaguered regime of Bashar al Assad. But the deal also fits into a larger pattern of Russian energy adventurism in one of the world's newest frontiers for oil and gas development. If the investments there work out as planned, they could help cement Russia's eroding hold over Europe's energy supply -- and help boost Moscow's standing as a global power on the rise.
At a time when the whole post-war architecture of the Eastern Mediterranean is crumbling, from the breakdown of Egypt's relations with Israel to tensions in the U.S.-Turkish relationship, Moscow seems to spy an opportunity to reassert itself in a region where it once loomed large, get a grip on a potentially big alternative to Russian energy, and make it easier to flex its military muscles.
"They can kill two birds with one stone," Jeff Mankoff, Deputy Director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said of the Russians. "They want to be in the Eastern Mediterranean, and if they can get the added bonus of bolstering this relationship with Syria, that's two for the price of one."
Israel, Lebanon, Cyprus, and now Syria are all agog over the seemingly vast reserves of natural gas discovered offshore; the U.S. geological survey estimates there could be as much as 120 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Levant basin, bigger than any single gas play in the U.S.
As China's smog levels crept past record highs in early December, the phone lines at pollution-busting kit maker Broad Group lit up with Chinese customers worried about hazardous pollution levels that have gripped China this year.
China's government is struggling to meet pollution reduction targets and has pledged to spend over 3 trillion yuan (299 billion pounds) to tackle the problem, creating a growing market for companies that can help boost energy efficiency and lower emissions.
"Recently, we haven't been able to make products fast enough to keep up with demand," said Hu Jie, a general manager at Broad Group, which makes pollution-related products ranging from hand-held monitors to eco-friendly buildings. Sales roughly doubled this year from 2012, Hu said, without giving details.
Pollution problems in China, the world's second-biggest economy, are by no means new. But heightened public anger - and a growing political will to deal with the issue - has created opportunities for firms with sustainable know-how to earn a slice of China's clean-technology market, which is set to triple to $555 billion (336 billion pounds) by 2020, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Companies like U.S. clean-energy expert Fuel Tech Inc , design engineer WS Atkins Plc and others have seized the opening by boosting staff numbers and clinching contracts.
"China has reached a saturation level which people can no longer tolerate," said Feng An, president and executive director of the U.S.-China Clean Tech Center, which takes U.S. clean technology companies to China to meet potential partners.
"Five years ago people could pollute and get away with it. Now they can't. This year you can really see the difference."
The new iteration of Silk Road, a popular online black-market bazaar for drugs and other contraband, returned from a scheduled week of holiday downtime Saturday — but without its former leader.
Silk Road's operator, who goes by the alias "Dread Pirate Roberts" or "DPR," has been noticeably absent from the site's forums since three of his top lieutenants were arrested in a global sting on Dec. 20. A new administrator "Defcon" has assumed temporary control of the site, and confirmed that Dread Pirate Roberts has taken an indefinite leave of absence.
"This past week, our ship suffered major damage," Defcon wrote in a Silk Road forum post Saturday night. "Three of our crew were lost, and our Captain was forced into exile."
The relaunched Silk Road, often referred to as "Silk Road 2.0" or "SR 2," opened for business on Nov. 6, about a month after the FBI seized the original Silk Road, and arrested its alleged owner Ross William Ulbricht, who is believed to be the original Dread Pirate Roberts.
In the weeks leading up to the launch of Silk Road 2.0, the new DPR granted Mashable an exclusive interview, during which he or she was ambitious that his or her site would surpass the original Silk Road's two-and-a-half-year run.
The new Dread Pirate Roberts has only posted on Silk Road's forums once since three of the site's top moderators were arrested for their roles as employees of the original Silk Road. In the post, the new DPR addressed a rumor that the FBI had access to the new Silk Road's servers.
"Silk Road has not been compromised even if the allegations are true," the new DPR wrote on Dec. 20. "I will make an announcement later to address the concerns this has raised."
The converging media-telecoms sectors, source of the biggest deals of all on London share markets in 2013, will continue to occupy centre stage in 2014. There is much unfinished business.
Vodafone, having extracted itself from its minority relationship with America’s Verizon, is flush with cash after selling its 45 per cent stake in Verizon Wireless for £84billion.
The transaction focused on Vodafone’s weaknesses as a standalone enterprise and the possibility that the mobile giant could itself become a takeover target, with US behemoth AT&T seen as a potential merger partner.
Another possibility is that Vodafone could form closer links with other players in the UK market, BSkyB or BT.
In many ways BT is the most fascinating company in the sector. It has managed to transform itself from leader in landlines to leader in broadband. Under Lord (Ian) Livingston and his successor Gavin Patterson, BT (in which I hold shares) has plunged into pay TV, with BT Sport spending boldly on Premiership football TV rights, forcing Sky on to the defensive, and has recently bid a further £897million for Champions League rights.
When all this began it was seen as a marketing ploy to underpin BT’s leadership in broadband because of the opening offer of free BT Sport to domestic customers. Some have seen the hand of former BSkyB chief executive Tony Ball, an independent director at BT, in what is going on. Ball was one of those Sky executives who saw sports and film rights as a battering ram to power Sky to the top of the pay TV leagues.
The continued destruction of the Amazon to exploit its resources for mining, agriculture and hydro-power is threatening the future of the South American continent, according to a report by campaigning groups using the latest scientific data.
Five countries – Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru – share the Amazon, and for all of them the forest area occupies more than 40% of their territory. All face threats to their water supply, energy production, food and health.
In addition, the report says, because of the over-exploitation of the region rainfall will fall by 20% over a heavily-populated area far to the south of Amazonia known as the La Plata basin, covering parts of Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay.
Last month it was reported that deforestation in Amazonia had increased by almost a third in the past year, with an area equal to 50 football pitches destroyed every minute since 2000.
There always seemed to be an endless supply of water, but the combination of industrial and agricultural pollution and droughts is creating a once unthinkable vulnerability for the five countries of Amazonia.
The article about South American states having the potential to face threats in water loss, food, health and energy production. Cutting down the forest can significantly effect these five states because of the amount of space the amazon takes up. If these states do start to decline in health, power and other resources then the states will have to think of different methods to keep the state from having a major population and environmental decline. Trees are a major source of oxygen so cutting down the trees was probably not a great idea because the south american country needs healthy oxygen to keep the people in the area alive. What is going to happen to the people of these five states, how is the nation going to come together and figure out a plan for success?
Deforestation is not a good thing not only does it threaten the water supply and food supply, but it also endangers the animals habitat, which quite frankly is food for humans as bad as that sounds. We need some forests!
I find great comfort in learning more about the people who are leading the efforts to protect and preserve our planet. Check out these not to miss interviews of 2013 that will inspire you in the New Year.
The charismatic executive director of Greenpeace International, Kumi Naidoo, joined Bill Moyers in September to discuss the politics of global warming and the urgency of environmental activism. Activists “are putting their lives on the line on a regular basis,” he tells Moyers. “What is at stake is humanity’s ability to live in coexistence with nature for centuries to come.”
Click headline to read more and watch video clips of these seven interviews--
On the flat lava plain of Reykjanesbaer, Iceland, near the Arctic Circle, you can find the mines of Bitcoin.
To get there, you pass through a fortified gate and enter a featureless yellow building. After checking in with a guard behind bulletproof glass, you face four more security checkpoints, including a so-called man trap that allows passage only after the door behind you has shut. This brings you to the center of the operation, a fluorescent-lit room with more than 100 whirring silver computers, each in a locked cabinet and each cooled by blasts of Arctic air shot up from vents in the floor.
These computers are the laborers of the virtual mines where Bitcoins are unearthed. Instead of swinging pickaxes, these custom-built machines, which are running an open-source Bitcoin program, perform complex algorithms 24 hours a day. If they come up with the right answers before competitors around the world do, they win a block of 25 new Bitcoins from the virtual currency’s decentralized network.
The network is programmed to release 21 million coins eventually. A little more than half are already out in the world, but because the system will release Bitcoins at a progressively slower rate, the work of mining could take more than 100 years.
The scarcity — along with a speculative mania that has grown up around digital money — has made each new Bitcoin worth as much as $1,100 in recent weeks.
Click headline to read more, view charts and watch video clip--
The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) is consolidating on the broadband initiative. It took a further step in this direction on December 17, 2013 during the maiden edition of the Telecoms Stakeholders Summit which held at the Intercontinental Hotel, Victoria Island, Lagos. The event was an opportunity for intense discourse about the industry, its potentials and its direction. The event which was themed: “Transforming a Nation with Broadband: Telecom as Instrument for Sustainable Development”, was a collaboration between the Ministry of Communications Technology, the NCC, as well as other stakeholders in the nation’s telecom sector.
According to the Executive Vice Chairman of the Commission, Dr. Eugene Juwah, the summit provided veritable platform for interaction and sharing of ideas by different stakeholders, as well as an opportunity for appraisal of the performance of the industry, while projecting for the future. He said the summit evolved out of the need to achieve a more inclusive consultation among the different stakeholders in line with the consultative approach to NCC’s regulatory mandate.
Chairman of the Organizing Committee of the Summit and Director, Public Affairs of the Commission, Mr. Tony Ojobo, said key stakeholder in the industry were fully represented at the event.
This is coming barely a month after the NCC summoned the global community to savour broadband opportunities in Nigeria. The commission’s boss had called the world’s attention to the investment opportunities in Nigeria’s broadband market at the 2013 International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Telecoms World event which held in Bangkok, Thailand.
This accelerated drive towards the broadband model is very welcome. Given Nigeria’s potential as the largest market on the African continent, the NCC will have to ensure that liberalisation of the telecoms market comprises key elements of the broadband service delivery: international gateway, national and regional backbone, and Internet access. Competition will ultimately strengthen broadband penetration and facilitate higher levels of investment in the sector.
A new survey of 2,011 British citizens (aged 16-75) by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) has reported that 43% saw more economic benefit in extending the reach of superfast broadband to all premises in the UK than they did from building new Nuclear Power plants, airports or high speed trains.
The Ipsos Mori study found that support for extending superfast broadband was followed by a call to build more nuclear power plants (32%), plans to build new airports (17%), construction of the new HS2 high speed trains network (16%) and the idea of merely adding extra runways to existing airports (12%).
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