TeleGeography‘s map of intra-Asia Telecommunications Traffic Flows shows a few interesting things about how Asians communicate (or not).

The measure is millions of minutes of telecommunications traffic over one year on the public telephone network. (Total combined volume for Asia is more than 100 million minutes).

Squint hard and you can see arrows that show strong imbalances of traffic in one direction (more than 60 percent).

- Australians make significantly more outgoing calls than they receive from the Philippines (81%), China (76%), Japan (61%) and India (84%).

- India is the exact opposite, with inbound imbalance running high from UAE (91%), Saudi Arabia (74%), Singapore (61%) and Australia (84%). Someone must be running a highly profitable callback service from UAE!

Based on these figures alone, it is not difficult to see who has the more deregulated telecom market for international calls.

Since this data is from 2004, I would be interested to see how much impact the Internet, VOIP, Skype and MSN have on traffic flows.

Another point of – sad – interest is the effect of government-level conflicts: There seems to be no communication directly between India and Pakistan. The traffic between China and Taiwan, on the other hand, is huge with a 63% imbalance of calls from Taiwan into China.

Sadly, North Korea, Burma/Myanmar, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Laos, Camobia and Vietnam apparently did not have enough traffic to even make it on the map.