[governance] the sad broadband workshop...

[Jacqueline A, Morris]

Thanks for this excellent reflection, Carlos. Much to think about.
Jacqueline

Carlos A. Afonso wrote:
> 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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