BANKOK, THAILAND - Connecting rural areas to broadband is one of the most pressing and challenging issues in telecoms today. But no one country, region or place is the same and the problems of power, impenetrable terrain and of course, cost, weigh heavily against remote areas in getting broadband access.
Nur Sulyna Abdullah, from APEC Telecommunications and Information Working Group said their goal is to help facilitate universal access to broadband in all APEC economies by 2015. “We recognize that every member economy is at a different stage of development so we recommend rollout is done quickly in rural areas,” she said.
But achieving it is no simple matter. “In a competitive world, we have to prioritize where we rollout infrastructure where there is a low penetration of customers,” said Alan Horne of Broadband Pioneer. He argued that there is no reason why disconnected communities can’t take broadband access into their own hands. Using the UK as an example, he explained how communities without broadband decided not to wait until the dominant operator invested in optical fibre networks in their area, and set up their own services. Horne suggested that the same approach could be adopted in the developing world, which might not involve optical fibre but the use of satellite and wireless technologies instead.
In answering the question of appropriate technologies for rolling out broadband to rural areas, Bruce Gracie from Industry Canada referred to ITU’s Telecommunication/ICT Policy forum in Geneva, which advocated Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) as a long term solution to advance connectivity. “In Latin America and the Caribbean, IXPs have helped to decrease international transit costs and increase service quality,” he noted. Secondly, “a robust network of ISPs in all settings would appear to offer a number of key benefits from costs savings to increased speed, increased bandwidth and reduced latency,” Gracie added.
Defining universal service is a problem, maintained Janez Ori, from Iskratel in Slovenia: “What is the appropriate service to offer to those (rural) areas There is no clear definition of that today.” He noted that delivering fibre to the home in many situations, especially in rural areas, is so expensive that it can take public funding from the universal service and a better approach might be to develop services on the existing tower wireless infrastructure.
“One of the major challenges around delivery is power,” said Areef Kassam from Energize the Chain. Electricity is often either unavailable or unreliable and when operators add the high energy costs of running generators into the equation, it takes the business case out of the service.
Charging smartphones is also difficult. Usually a local entrepreneur will take over the charging, and customers pay anything from 20 to 40 cents per charge, said Kassam. Affordability of devices and services is a further obstacle “How do we get devices in people’s hands and get their limited income into this broadband service” he asked.
Mark Summer of Inveneo, said competition should happen for the last mile, to allow service providers in the community to go head to head with the major operator.
In winding up the panel, Horne said broadband access must be “Community driven, community focused”, while Gracie said he would “encourage states to develop the policy and regulatory environment that would encourage the right mix of services.” Kassam argued that there was a need for partnerships to provide network access to rural communities, and Summer advocated a decentralized playing field in emerging markets with local solutions for local needs. “The telecom industry has had an easy ride so far. It hasn’t seen what’s coming to them,” he also warned.
