Internet
How Much Asia Communicates (Or Not)
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.
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Thomas Crampton was a correspondent for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times for more than a decade, reporting from five continents, writing a column on Asia and covering Asian politics, economics and culture. Currently based in Hong Kong, he writes here about China, the Internet and New Media seen from Asia, while also advising companies on digital communication strategies. For more information click here...
Do you think the Middle East is a part of the world away from Asia? Is Pakistan included in Asia or not? Strange bias! I don't like it.
@mkhalidrahman
Is Pakistan in Asia? I would consider it so, yes. It is, after all, part of the Sub-Continent. Do you consider it Asia?
the UAE to India comms must be all those construction slaves…. :@ Is there a higher-rez version of this map ?
Without zooming in all the way it looks like the imbalances generally follow the rule of higher per capita GDP to lower, which makes me think this might have to do with migrants calling home.
Agree that it is remarkable to see zero between India and Pakistan. But it seems pretty much impossible that zero is really the amount. Missing data, perhaps?
Thomas- do you have a higher-resolution image of that map? Or a link to the report at telegeography? Very curious to know more. Thank you in advance.
Thomas, danny bloom in Taiwan trying to reach you here via email or whatever about the need for a new word for what we do when we read on screens, and it's not really READING, so I coined a new word, screening. can you blog on this pro or con? Lots of comments from top people here: Email me if time allows at danbloom in the gmail account. thanks
Thomas- do you have a higher-resolution image of that map? Or a link to the report at telegeography? Very curious to know more. Thank you in advance.
Thomas, danny bloom in Taiwan trying to reach you here via email or whatever about the need for a new word for what we do when we read on screens, and it's not really READING, so I coined a new word, screening. can you blog on this pro or con? Lots of comments from top people here: Email me if time allows at danbloom in the gmail account. thanks
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