Slashdot Mirror
Developing Nations Crippled By Broadband Costs
eldavojohn writes "If you live in the EU, you probably enjoy low broadband costs. If you live in Finland, it's even a legal right. If you live in the US, you probably pay a moderate cost. But if you live in the developing world, a UNCTAD report paints your picture pretty grim. Ridiculously high bandwidth costs are inhibiting developing nations from enjoying productive use of the internet — like online banking and market tools."
Broadband access, of course. I'd imagine that narrowly edged out security, stability, access to medical care, and clean drinking water.
Pigeon net. Apparently a carrier pigeon is faster as well.
Here is the thing, in developing and third-world nations the infrastructure simply isn't there. Most of the time their countries are located in hostile terrain, either they are isolated by mountains, the sea, have extreme climates, have a corrupt government that doesn't want to help its people, or the people simply live in remote areas. Just look at rural America, there are lots of places where the best you can get is cell phone internet speeds, and a lot of these people live just a mile or two outside of a town. Think of how bigger of a challenge this is where you have people who live many miles from any major town, are dirt poor, and you have to cross hostile terrain. Thats how its like in most of these countries.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
is online banking.
...You know why? Because for most developing nations, entire major cities are unplanned (read unmapped).
All they do when one is looking for directions is to say something to the effect..."Just near that big tower...behind the "Kofeko" market.
And I know because I am originally from one of those developing nations. The concept of an address does not exist. In fact, I had to think hard and ask my family what I should put on the visa application forms as an address before coming to these United States.
Nuff said.
This is news? Basic transport is a more important aspect to everyday life in these places. They are not going to have well-planned highway systems or electrical grids. And you want broadband? Build roads, water pipelines, sewer systems and power lines first. Then you can focus on broadband.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
I think the term you are looking for is Economy of Scale.
In this case, in the African nations, the cost of Infrastructure and transport to other Internet connected companies is both relatively large (because of a large geographical area that infrastructure has to be deployed to), and has to be shared by a fairly small population of customers. Even if you tried to 'scale up' in Africa, by lowering the cost, there are many people so utterly poor they could not even afford the equivalent of $5/mo for Internet access. That's not to say African nations don't have wealthy people, but as a friend of mine from Nigeria described it to me, there is essentially no middle class in Nigeria (and I think that might be fairly typical of most of Africa) - you have people who are well connected with the government, oil companies, etc, and are rich, and then you have destitute poor people who are exploited by the rich.
Without a middle class, there's no way the ISP's in Africa can get the economies of scale necessary to make broadband cheaper (and, you know, if the only people who can afford your product are the rich, what is your business incentive to make it cheaper? To a rich person, making hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars a year, $500/mo is 'affordable', and to the poor, $20/mo is 'unaffordable', so why *try* to get broadband down to $20 or $30/mo? In 1st world nations, the pressure to get the price down is that, even though you might reduce your price by, say, 10 percent per month per subscriber, you have a possibility that you might increase the total number of subscribers by 20 percent oor 30 percent, meaning you actually make more money. Not so in Africa.
That'd be why telecos are gearing up for big business including cellular banking in Africa http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0826/p07s01-woaf.html.
I write software for banks for a living. Web, mobile, voice, atm, teller, whatever. As far as my industry has indicated, these developing nations rely on cell phones for the majority of their banking, and anyone with enough money to care about banking will likely use a cell phone for that purpose - at least for common daily usage. There are people out there who have to rely on a hand-crank generator or pay a vendor to charge their phone - they have no access to electricity, but you'll note, they STILL have a cell phone.
Even in developing nations, cell phones are incredibly pervasive.
Once you've got the basic stuff covered
Let's let them get that covered first, then, shall we? Can you give me an example of a "developing nation" that has the basics covered adequately?
I think it's kinda funny that the wikipedia entry mentions that many "developing" countries don't like the term "developing nation" because it implies they aren't "developed." Hmmm. I wonder who in the country doesn't like that - the poor that are starving to death, or the rich that seemingly are keeping the country poor by their greed and careless attitude towards the people.
Or that "Cuba" (the nation?) has decided not to follow the "Western model." Yeah, no kidding. I'm sure the entire country is happy with their model and Castro is in power because the people/nation as a whole like him there...
Being dismissive is easy. But online banking improves productivity, especially in rural areas where banks cannot afford to set up branches to serve a few customers. Online banking also eliminates the need to go to the bank. Simply visit the cybercafe and conduct transactions. It is not the luxury that people make it out to be, once they realize how useful it can be.
It is the same with cellphones - they were a luxury earlier. But now, they are necessities in rural areas too. Run a search for Reuters Market Light to see how they have made the cellphone a way of helping farmers earn more money and improve crop production.
Better availability of broadband can open up a new world for rural communities, give them better access to information. There is nothing wrong with striving for better broadband. Other basic needs and the internet are not mutually exclusive.
um, aren't there still poor people who don't get food or basic medical services in 'developed' nations like the USA? One thing that all nations have in common is that if you have the money, you'll have access to those luxuries. Though i do have to say that in canada you can get food and medical services for free, hell in vancouver you can get your junk for free.
the phone and stringing wire and cable costs more because of the climate, the ground tends to flood a lot and won't hold the poles, and the economy is so bad that the technology costs a lot.
My Thai in-laws had ISDN 128K BPS speed but paid a lot for it, and only had the USB interface to it. I wondered why they didn't have DSL or Cable modems, but it seems ISDN is cheaper and uses the ordinary phone lines.
Most Thai people have cell phones because the land near them won't take on ordinary phone lines and cell phones are cheaper than the land based phone. But something like an iPhone or Blackberry costs them like $900USD or almost 30,000 Thai Bhat. Not because they are being price gouged, but because the economy is so bad that technology costs more there. The cost of computers, game consoles, cell phones, DVD players, TV sets, etc are all high because of that. But food and clothes are cheap because they are not technology based and produced by native farms and companies. The technology made by native companies is usually cheaper than technology from foreign companies, but the iPhone, Blackberry, etc are all foreign made.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Just get rid of unnecessary graphics on their webpages and they don't really need "full" broadband. Most of the stuff moving over the web is useless eye-candy or gimmicky JavaScript junk. To do basic stuff requires very little bandwidth (by today's standards) if they simply design web-pages right.
True, international commerce-related info may still be bloated. I've been pondering the idea of a graphics-off-friendly browser addon. Most pages can be browsed with the graphics off if one could choose which graphics to keep activated, such as "image" buttons. Once you mark a page appropriately, then it either only loads those graphics you previously selected as necessary (usually for navigation), or gets them from cache.
Table-ized A.I.
The point here isn't the irony of delivering broadband to lost pygmy tribes with no indoor plumbing.
Hasn't anyone noticed that to use the internet efficiently for even mundane tasks it requires more and more processing power and bandwith? I wouldn't pay for broadband either, since I rarely use the web for video, gaming or large image downloads -- I could easily get by with dial-up and my PowerBook G4. Heck, I was using a circa 1998 Thinkpad two years ago. But both machines became an increasing hassle to use even for basic browsing of primarily text sites due to the ton of gimmicky overhead in the form of useless bells and whistles and un-optimized content.
I agree that people in the 3rd world probably have larger priorities than high-speed internet. But certainly the internet is a tool that they could benefit from, and the sad fact of the matter is that without high-speed, an increasing portion of the internet is functionally inaccessible. That is a legitimately dire state of affairs, IMO.
Africa has a smaller population than Europe, and a larger land area than Europe.
In other words, it's not overpopulated by a long way.
The poverty in Africa has many causes, mostly to do with what passes for government in much of Africa. But overpopulation isn't the issue.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"