What
will it take to bring the next billion people online? These days, the answer
has as much to do with smart policy as with technical expertise. This week in
Washington D.C., policy experts worked alongside engineers at a meeting (hosted
in part by the IEEE Internet Initiative) intended to sketch a picture of what
such a transition might look like around the world.
Companies such as Google and Facebook would like to know,
and so would government leaders struck by the Internet’s power as an economic
engine. More than half the world’s population, or about 4.2 billion people, do
not have regular access to the Internet, according to the
latest report published last fall by the U.N. Broadband Commission.
Last year, the U.S. State Department announced the Global
Connect Initiative, which aims to bring 1.5 billion people online by 2020. As
part of that effort, some of the ideas discussed this week will be presented on
Thursday to financial ministers during a
high-level meeting at the World Bank led by U.S. Secretary of State
John Kerry.
Experts emphasized that there is no single technology or
network structure that makes sense for every community. However, they offered a
few good starting points for any country looking to bolster its number of
internet users:
1. Permit unlicensed use of white space.
White space is a term for TV and radio frequencies that
aren’t currently in use for existing channels. Originally, these extra
frequencies were packed between channels as a sort of buffer in order to
prevent interference. But companies have since found ways to operate on these
channels without causing any interruption to neighboring programs.
Furthermore, a global transition to digital television
and radio from analog has freed up an even broader swath of spectrum. Digital
signals can transmit on adjacent channels without causing a disruption to
either. Since rural areas tend to have access to fewer existing channels in the
first place, they would have even more leftover spectrum.
New devices including smartphones, tablets, and computers
that know how to detect unused spectrum can use it to transmit wireless
broadband signals, also known as “WhiteFi” or “Super Wi-Fi.” These frequencies
are especially useful because they can carry a lot of data over long distances
and reach indoors. Tech companies including Google, Microsoft, Intel, Dell, and
HP faced off against broadcasters to support early
efforts to reuse white space for this purpose, and launched some of
the first tests for new devices capable of doing it.
Now, enthusiasm for WhiteFi is picking up across the
world. A national
demonstration project in the United States conducted in public
libraries has since spread to Finland, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
Separately, Kenya has also experimented with
it in two rural communities while Microsoft and Google recently
led trials in South Africa. The Indian Institute of Technology has tested
the technology in 13 villages and hopes to eventually serve many more.
2. Adopt a “dig once” mentality.
Whenever a company wants to install a new optical fiber
cable to provide better Internet access to a house or community, it must first
hire bulldozers and a construction crew to dig a path to the new destination.
If multiple companies want to deploy fiber to the same area at different times,
they might wind up digging the same route again.
It’s easy to understand why this process is expensive and
disruptive to locals. Experts at this week’s meeting say a much easier and
cheaper approach would be for governments to require road construction crews to
lay a single conduit alongside each new road as they are building it, through
which all future fiber optic cables could be threaded. International
development banks could do the same for the projects they fund. Experts
stressed the value of these “dig once” policies; the U.S. Federal Highway
Administration has said that this way of doing things can reduce
the cost of deploying broadband by 90 percent.
This idea is gaining some traction, at least in the
United States. The U.S. Departments of Commerce and Agriculture promoted
it in a report published last fall. Around the same time, a lawmaker proposed
a bill to implement it for all federal highway projects. However, the
“dig once” policy is still not fully incorporated into federal, state, or local
requirements and has yet to take hold elsewhere in the world.
3. Develop local content.
One of the most consistent ideas to emerge during this
week’s meeting was that simply providing technical tools for Internet access
isn’t sufficient. To welcome the next billion users, companies and
technologists need to engage deeply with local communities to determine if and
how they intend to use this access. That way, said the experts, networks can be
built out in ways that best suit those purposes. In other words,
responding to actual demand for the Internet is as important as devising new
schemes to offer it.
One key part of that response is producing local content
that is relevant to potential new users in their native languages. Many
governments have begun to offer online services for employment, taxes, or
licenses, which is one way to generate local content. Developers are also
seeing success with local sites and apps that help people share with each other
in a particular region.
“You want to provide Internet access, but what do the end
users really need?”Dilip
Krishnaswamy, an IBM researcher based in Bangalore, India said. “Maybe they
don’t care about the presidential election as much as they want to connect with
each other.” India is a good example of the humongous potential demand for
local material—it’s home to 1.2 billion people who speak 22 major
languages.
All this new content must also be designed to work on
devices that are available and popular in that area, rather than the latest
smartphones used in Europe or the United States. During the meeting, experts at
one table discussed obstacles to Internet use in Africa. They mentioned the
ongoing challenge of simply charging devices in many parts of the continent. In
response, someone tossed out the idea of hosting a hackathon devoted wholly to
developing apps that consume as little power as possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment