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.
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.
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.