[governance] the sad broadband workshop...

Presidencia Internauta presidencia at internauta.org.ar
Mon Nov 16 06:37:20 EST 2009


The text is in Spanish and English

Spanish:
Exelente reflexion!, estoy totalmente de acuerdo con lo que expresas querido Carlos...me 
permites colgarlo en nuestro portal? Seria muy bueno que los Usuarios de Internet de 
Argentina lean esto y vean lo que se discute en las listas sobre gobernanza de Internet.
saludos cordiales

Sergio Salinas Porto
presidente
Internauta
Asociación Argentina de Usuarios de Internet
http://www.internauta.org.ar
Integrante de FLUI
Federación Latinoamericana de Usuarios de Internet
Http://www.fuilatin.org

English:
Excellent reflection!, I totally agree with what you express dear carlos ... I may hang it 
in our site? It would be very good for Internet users in Argentina read this and see what 
is discussed on the lists on Internet Governance.
best regards
Sergio Salinas Porto
presidente
Internauta
Asociación Argentina de Usuarios de Internet
http://www.internauta.org.ar
Integrante de FLUI
Federacion Latinoamericana de Usuarios de Internet
Http://www.fuilatin.org

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Carlos A. Afonso" <ca at cafonso.ca>
To: <governance at lists.cpsr.org>
Sent: Monday, November 16, 2009 7:42 AM
Subject: [governance] the sad broadband workshop...


> 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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