Okay, I have to eat my words: 13 base stations around my house isnt really that bad because this is what you get in downtown Tokyo.

46 base stations! O_O

Yes, I am in Tokyo right now. Tokyo is one of my favourite city (not the cost of living tho). I always like Japanese people and their culture. One of the things that impressed me most is the “common sense” in their society.

Take a simple thing thing like escalator. I am sure all of us experience some people standing on escalator while others trying to walk. If you are in a hurry, it is pretty irriating to manoeuver around those standing on the escalator. The solution is simple: There is an unspoken rule in Tokyo that if you want to stand, stand on the left so others who wants to walk can do so on the right. That’s just common sense.

Of course, if you are in Osaka, then you stand on the right and walk on the left. Thats also common sense :-)

Anyway, it is sakura season in Japan. Hopefully I have some time for that :-)

First, let me congratulate Boon Leong who has successful setup Resolvo office in Cambodia. It is incredible to have a local partner who can with a phone call get the folks from the company registry to come to your office to register the company, bank clerk to turn up at your office to setup your bank account. And any business partners you want to meet all at a phone call away. (And they say “guanxi” is a Chinese thing ;)

I also have to change my perspective of Cambodia…before I come over, I heard stories about how lawless Cambodia is with guns and stuff. If those were true a couple of years ago, it certainly wasn’t today.

Anyway, this is an exploratory trip for me. Getting accurate data is probably the most difficult so I better record what I found before I forgot them.

1. The average salary for people in the city is 300-400 USD/mth. Yet, you will find people driving the newest 4wheel drives, lexuses and using the latests models of mobile phones. Some may jump into conclusion about corruption until you realized this is a huge segement of middle class. This is puzzling to me until someone explained two things to me (a) while corruptions may occurs at the top, the money stays within Cambodia and thus spur the economy growth (b) many people also do part-time business or hold multiple jobs but only declare one income. This is why officially, the GDP per capital for Cambodia is only 300 USD but the purchasing power per capital is 2300 USD. Go figure!

2. I nearly bursted out laughing when a director at Mobitel I met this morning used the word “incumbent” to refer to the only fixed line operator. There are 20,000 fixed line users but Mobitel alone has 800k (out of 1.3M) mobile phone users.

3. PC pentration is estimated to be at 300k out of 14M population. Not too shabby but lots of room for growth. The sweet spot for CPE (including computer) is 200-300 USD so the 100$ PC would really be great here. While IT engineers are hard to find, people generally knows how to use computer. Internet cafes are popular (0.5 USD/hr).

4. 10 licensed ISPs but only 4 are operational. The latest one, AngkorNet, a 60-40 joint venture between the Anana and MediaRing, is offering 128kbps 5Gb cap for only 230 USD compared to Telesurf (part of Mobitel) 350 USD per month. This is going to be interesting to watch. (Oh, thanks for sharing how AngkorNet deploy their wimax network! Fairly interesting and good luck!)

5. The growth is incredible with the GDP estimated to grow at 7% year to year. As a reference, the land downtown cost 2-3 USD/sq meter 3 years ago is now worth 200-300 USD/sq meter. A friend bought a piece of land for 15k USD 4 years ago and it is worth 125K USD now.

6. The politics also look very stable. The US has the largest Embassy in Asia right here in Cambodia. In fact, I was having dinner with some folks from Intel and they told me they need to get clearance from various bosses before they can go Jakarta but none from Cambodia.

Oh yes, the best office I being to today goes to the Supreme National Economic Council of the Office of the Prime Minister (somewhat like EDB in Singapore). It is a small villa with a huge garden and a private tenis court right in the middle of downtown. I was told they are the think-tank for the Prime Minister on economy issues. I wish I have taken some photos.

And in case you wonder, yes, they are extremely professional. The director I met could pass off as an EDB scholar in the the way carried himself got his master in Australia and PhD in US. Young and smart people are in charge ;-)

Holy Cow! Thats dinner!

Okay, I am in Phnom Phen, Cambodia right now. Its a really last minute trip as a friend of mine is setting up his office in Cambodia and asked me if I would come along. I also have some friends here in Cambodia but guess I wont be able to catch them this trip.

The telecom industry here looks very exciting (at least growing very fast). 1.2M mobile users, 10 ISPs and 2 more coming up. 300 cybercafe and wireless broadband providers are poping up :-) Got to go..maybe update more about it later.

I left Vietnam a couple of days ago .. I didnt stay for the whole event as it is really depressing. If we believe everything that is said, my PC is probably infected by a dozen of (undetectable) spywares with maybe a stealth ‘rootkit’ or two, part of being a botnet participating in DDoS against Ebay while sending paypal phishing spams right now. Some of the slides showing what these spywares and rootkit collect and send back are worrisome (they even able to latch up ssl encrypted https so bye bye credit card #s).

CNCERT alone, for example, reported 125,000 security incidents and found 300+ botnets. To put it into perspective, thats 350 security and 1 botnet incident per day! Now, that with 110M internet users of course but if we scale it to Singapore size, we should expect about 1000 security incidents and 1 botnet. I am most concerned with that 1 botnet which we never found…especially we know the # of botnet is directly related to the broadband pentration.

Anyway, I am now in Kuala Lumpur for a couple of meetings. I didnt stay at a fancy hotel this time (hey, I am on my own now!) so I have to hunt around for wireless hotspot. Luckily, that proof to be pretty easy as most building has two to three hotspot operaters: Airzad, Timedotcom and TM.net.

Sitting at a Starbuck in PJ, I noticed a lot others also have their notebook open. I could count 10 notebooks in this tiny Starbuck. This is quite unusual because I dont see that much of this Singapore (except maybe Holland Village starbuck where NUS students gathered). More importantly, Malaysia has a lower notebook pentration than Singapore….I wonder why….

Before arriving here, I was pretty worried about Internet connection. The last time I was here 3 years ago, I remember I have to do IDD dial up back to Singapore to get my mail. So I was really happy to know there is a broadband and the hotel is wifi-enabled. I also have a chance to speak to their deputy manager yesterday evening and he told me they are paying about US$800 to US$1,000 a month for 640kbps. That’s not too bad at all!

The presentation was well-received altho I have a feeling the audience (mostly government kind of people from ASEAN countries) going to hear similar story again and again over the next couple of days. But it never harms to have people repeating the same story, esp. if they come from different people. :)

I learnt from Mr Kim, Head of KISC that there is no phishing attacks against Korean banks. His explaination is that Korean banks had implemented two factor authentication (single-sign-on and/or PKI solution). And before you are able to logon, the banks will scan your PC if you have anti-keyloggers and spywares and if not, will install one for you. How cool is that?

There could be another possible explaination: the banks dont report the phishing. Afterall, you really do not want to tell the world you just lost X dollars of your clientee money especially if you are a bank. Most banks will sallowed the loses quietly (which makes even more sense to target the bank if I am a phisher btw). But I rather believe Kim’s story. :-)

I should also spend some more time talking to Meng Chow. I enjoy the discussions we had, many we agreed but more importantly on issues we don’t agreed. When you speak to a smart guy that don’t share some of your ideological belief, you get your brain screwed around and really start thinking and questioning. :-)

The sky looks a bit polluted which really spolit this great view. But the weather is great here!

I just packed my stuff and head for Hanoi to attend the Workshop for Network Security for ASEAN CIOs. I will be giving a talk on NGN and Security…I haven’t finish the slides yet but here is one for you :-)

This will be my second trip to Hanoi. The first one was done 3+ years ago to attend the Ideographic Rapporteur Group (of SC2) meeting when we were doing CJK Extension C of Unicode. I remember fondly of the place…

The highlight of the day should goes to Geoff Hutson’s keynote on Convergence. Geoff as I noted previously has a talent for writing and giving really good speeches. A short summary:

1. Convergence is something the industry has always being doing constantly.
2. Triple Play is game over. Bittorrent has won!
3. What your users wants may not be what you want. But focus on doing what your users want you to do – shuffle the bits!
4. All the exciting stuff is happening above the network so stop trying to build smarter network.

(3) is similar to what I had said before: “Stick to what you do best (within your layer) and you will still make your money, in ways you never expect to be in future.”

Oh, one slide is particularly interesting

As you can see, the market already redistribute to value applications service providers and the supplier higher than infrastructure providers. :-)

I agreed with almost everything he said and I doubt I could do a better job in delivering that message. If you are interested, here are his slides which is an adaption of his paper published at ISP Column.

I spend most of the day at the APIA ISOC-AU Joint Forum. Seem like the whole gang of the typical IETF suspects (IAB & IESG) are here among other speakers.

The speech of the day has to come from Chris Disspain from auDA at the last session. His description of the prepcomm3 of the WSIS process can be summarized by one comment he made (I am writing from memory): “One government official said: It is great that WSIS is a open transparent multi stakeholder process but never forget the government is in charge”.

This is pretty much consistent from what I gathered from other folks over the last few days: WSIS Tunsia is quite a disaster. Other stories includes countries asking for basic stuff like “I need power station in my country” and some outright asking for money. The sense I got was many are glad that WSIS is finally over although IGF is still around.

Now, this is not to say I have no sympathy for those who ask for money or basic infrastructure like power but obviously it is the wrong forum. More importantly, I am extremely scared these folks has an equal (and often veto) voice in the process.

Not all of WSIS is bad: At least a lot of countries has an understanding what Internet is about and how it is coordination function after 5 years of activities.

Personally, I believe something like WSIS is a good thing. Network is global and there are many things governments could and should work together, like cybercrime, spams, phishing etc etc. Unfortunately, WSIS tries to do too much in too little time without enough clue. Perhaps it is not meant to be for now.

Reminder to self: As I was trying to find some clueful folks to help me to solve a routing problem in SingAREN GIX, one said: “Is this related to TEIN2? TEIN2 routing is one of the most complex network, far more then any commercial networks I know.” Coming from Randy Bush, that say alot. I probably should pay more attention to the routing group in TEIN2.