[governance] the sad broadband workshop...

[Carlton Samuels]

Carlos:
Excellent report and very thoughtful reflections.  You have identified the
lack of a comprehensive policy perspective in the public space and that is
definitely the case in the Caribbean.

In the case of Jamaica, a few of us in the ICT4D Jamaica community is
developing a broadband policy proposal for presentation to the public
authorities. While we recognize that the market definition of broadband is
problematic for several areas of use, wireless broadband does have some
market pull.

Last mile wireline considerations remain a major obstacle to broadband
penetration and all providers blame the cost to provisioning the service. So
one of the central themes of this policy paper is a redefinition of
universal service away from the 2-wire plain old telephone service (POTS) to
broadband, whatever its provisioning method, and re-purposing the universal
access fund to support deployment at the edge.

Kind regards,
Carlton Samuels

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 5:42 AM, Carlos A. Afonso <ca at cafonso.ca> 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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