[governance] the sad broadband workshop...

[Carlos A. Afonso]

Hi people,

I come from one of the ten largest economies in the world, with nearly 
200 million people, 8.5 million km2, and 5.564 municipalities, where 94% 
of the people do *not* have access to any form of broadband - the "B" in 
the famous BRIC acronym.

I am just coming out of the IGF workshop "Expanding broadband access for 
a global Internet economy: development dimensions". I left the workshop 
a bit shocked with the concepts expressed, not by the AT&T 
representative (who not surprisingly said AT&T subdsidiaries countries 
other than the USA should be considered local companies because they 
employ local people), who as usual is just doing his job in defending 
the so-called "market", but by other speeches which seemed to completely 
ignore that, in most of our contries, there is a de facto monopoly or 
cartel situation regarding the telco infrastructure, and that public 
policy ought to centrally take this into account if the aim is to 
universalize broadband access with quality to all families.

One of the speakers (from LIRNEasia) said that "lower prices require 
lower costs" and therefore one should just "phase out universal access 
levies and rationalize taxes". I retorted that pricing per Mb/s of ADSL 
broadband in São Paulo might be 65 times higher than the same price 
charged by the same company in London -- and therefore no amount of 
levies or taxes would justify such scandalous pricing difference, not to 
speak of the much lower QoS.

I suggested that, instead of eliminating the universal service funds 
(whose levies are a very small portion of price composition of 
broadband), we should insist on reforming policy regarding the use of 
these funds. The reply I heard was that it makes no sense to keep funds 
that are not used or are squandered (!!). Impact of the fund's levy in 
Brazil is just 1% of the price of the fixed line telephone connection -- 
its impact in the price of broadband (a separate bill even if the 
service is not unbundled) is zero.

There was also a recommendation that we should be "gentle on QoS" to 
facilitate things regarding universalization of access -- fascinating. 
Again, examples abound in which telcos guarantee only 10% of the nominal 
contracted rate, and in practice this might be even less. Should we just 
agree with absurds like this in the name of "it is better to have 
something than nothing"???

And then there is the crucial question of unbundling, central to the 
policy debate in the developed countries as it directly impacts 
universalization through an effective reduction of prices for the final 
user. It is a major challenge for broadband public policy in developing 
countries, where regulators are usually in the hands of the telco 
cartels. The word was not mentioned (not a single time) by anyone in the 
panel, as if irrelevant to the development dimensions of broadband.

The speaker also mentioned that the "need" to reduce costs for the big 
telcos would require reduction of international bandwidth costs. One of 
the two big carriers in Brazil, a Brazilian conglomerate, owns redundant 
fiber running from Brazil to Miami in rings passing through countries in 
the Caribbean and Central America. They own their own international 
link, in summary. So do the other carrier in the de facto duopoly --  a 
major operator from Europe. This does not make any difference in pricing 
for the final user, although it does contribute to their profits in 
Brazil being far higher than in Europe for example.

Finally, the fascination with mobile. Of course the AT&T speaker started 
his talk by waving a fancy iPhone to the audience -- mostly natural for 
a commercial wireless giant. But the infoDev representative and others 
mentioned mobile as a "solution" for the poor, and not even bothered to 
separate the discussion in the two main topics here: first, the mobile 
phone as a connectivity device to enable the user to fully use the 
Internet through a friendly human-machine interface, be it a common PC 
or special equipment for people with disabilities; second, the phone 
itself as *the* alternative to the full user experience that a PC or 
similar might provide. It seems the agency bureaucrats are satisfied 
with having two castes of users: a small minority of the ones who can 
fully use the Internet as it evolves requiring more and more multimedia 
capabilities on both sides (server and client), and the ones relegated 
to a small device on which it is barely possible to type small messages.

In the first regional LA&C preparatory meeting for the IGF, in 2008, a 
representative of a major telco said we should not worry about bringing 
the next billion to the Internet -- they have cell phones, so they are 
connected already, problem solved. I wonder if this executive would take 
the place of a carpenter looking for a job, who has to compose and send 
by email his CV together with images of letters of recommendation to his 
would-be employer, and had nothing but a cell phone (smart or not) to do 
it. Not to speak of comparing the executive's thin-fingered hands of a 
pianist with the big callous hands of the carpenter.

fraternal regards

--c.a.
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