Mobile Edition Launched

Posted by Simon Didszuweit on July 7, 2009 under ICT, View all | 3 Comments to Read

Background: ICT in Laos
Due to UNDP Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme’s ICT profile, Laos’ overall teledensity is only 1.31%: the nationwide mobile coverage is 2.02% (GSM network is available in 9 out of 18 provinces with coverage usually available only in the largest towns and est. less than 10% of the population being covered by the signals); less than half of Lao districts (58 out of 142) have fixed-line telephone service; and probably less than 1% of Laotian households currently own a telephone (48,557 lines in the country). There is no internet-backbone in Laos, the (hypothetical) bandwidth of 2 Mbps for uplink and 4 Mbps for downlink (combined total for the coutry’s six ISPs) is seldom reached in reality.

There exists a National ICT Policy and e-Strategy Task Force with five Working Groups consisting of government, agencies and private sector but there is also a 5% tariff on all imported hardware and a 10% turnover tax applied to all computer retailers. As these taxes are passed on directly to customers, along with an additional 20-50% markup as operating profit, there are 0.371 internetcafés per 10,000 inhabitants and only 0.18 out of 100 Laotians own a computer. The overall size of the IT-market is considerably small.

Supporting Media Development now features a mobile edition.
Facing these few facts, it is easy to understand the importance for such projects as this WP-blog to think about ‘inbound’-compatibiliy, that is to try to make platform-based communication as easy as possible. Not only in Laos, but in many developing countries it is important to offer (or at least consider) low-bandwidth-solutions.

Thanks to alexking.org WP-Plugin for mobile devices (simply called “WP mobile edition” together with “Carrington Mobile Theme”) we are now able to alternatively present this blog ‘mobile friendly’. This means, the plug-in recognizes mobile clients and automatically shows an interface designed for a mobile browser. On tested devices (3G) it was possible to reduce traffic from something around 380kb to around 160kb (which is a good start, though we desire to further reduce this).

As the plug-in is both helpful and easy to use, we would like to recommend it to our readers (please follow the installation instructions on alexking.org). If you have another idea or even a different solution on ‘bandwidth’ and ‘ICT4D’, feel free to contact us anytime.