News

It is with great pleasure that we announce the results of the evaluation of the proposals submitted to the Fourth Young Researcher Fellowships.

The Temporal Mutisectoral Commision in charge of setting up  the National Plan for Broadband Development in Peru continues its work and on Thursday 19 July 2010 organised its second workshop.

Policy-Briefs, a new series of DIRSI's documents, aims at disseminating the network's research activities.

Tis first set of Policy Briefs includes four documents, each one in Spanish, in Portuguese and in English:

Interviewed by SEMANAeconómica, Dr. Roxana Barrantes, member of DIRSI's steering commitee, commented on the discrepancies between the incumbent operator Telefónica del Perú and the regulatory authority OSIPTEL, regarding the current methodology for establishing the productivity factor and the mobile termination charges.

DIRSI was present at the Communication Policy Research - Africa (CPR Africa) conference in Cape Town, South Africa, from April 20 to 21.

The conference's main goal was to encourage research and analysis of ICT policy and regulatory issues in Africa. CPR Africa was created to be a forum in which scholars and researchers from the region can participate and debate the issues and eventualy become involved in the regulatory processes in their respective national contexts.

The fourth annual conference of the Americas Communication Research Network - Red Americana de Investigación en Información y Comunicación (ACORN-REDECOM) was held from 14-15  May in Brasilia. As with earlier editions, DIRSI members were actively involved in the conference's various panels and roundtables.

Most of Brazil's urban areas have access to good telecommunications services and in the case of major cities there is a diversity of technological possibilities for network access. However, there are significant access inequalities in the country since many rural and isolated communities do not have access to an appropriate mobile telephony infrastructure or to mobile or fixed broadband. 

DIRSI's report on mobile affordability received media coverage in Argentina and Uruguay this week. On Tuesday 13 April the report, “Mobile Telephony in Latin America and the Caribbean: Who can afford it?”, authored by Hernán Galperín was the subject of an article on the website of the Buenos Aires daily Clarin and of a two page feature in the print edition of the newspaper.

The Amy Mahan Research Fellowship Program to Assess the Impact of Public Access to ICT has announced the winners of the awards. Twelve teams from 12 different countries - four each from Africa, Asia and the Latin America and Caribbean region - will receive up to €22,000 in funding plus specialized mentoring guidance to enable them to carry out an original research project that addresses one or more critical questions regarding the impact of public access to ICTs.

Rural telephone networks deployed in Peru since 1998 and funded by the universal access fund (Fondo de Inversión en Telecomunicaciones - FITEL) are at a critical moment, facing severe sustainability problems. In response Peru's regulator -OSIPTEL- proposed a system of differentiated interconnection charges, depending on whether the network was urban or rural, and called for a public consultation.