[governance] the sad broadband workshop...

[Carlos A. Afonso]

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[] fraterno

--c.a.

Presidencia Internauta wrote:
> 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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