FINAL TRANSCRIPT
EIGHTH INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM
BALI
BUILDING BRIDGES ‑ ENHANCING MULTI‑STAKEHOLDER COOPERATION FOR GROWTH AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER23, 2013,
4:30P.M. ‑ 5:30
SESSION NO. 271
BRINGING BROADBAND TO THOSE WHO NEED IT MOST
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This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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>> DAVID GROSS: Hello. All right. If everyone can take their seats.
Welcome to workshop number 271. I feel like I'm doing Bingo here. 271. Right. We have a winner, please.
Bringing broadband to those who need it most. We are going to have four panelists, so we're going to try to keep this on schedule. I am David Gross, I am acting as moderator here, which means I get to make about a minute worth of opening comments, of which I've now done about almost 60seconds' worth, and then we're going to hear from Ambassador Daniel Sepulveda with some opening remarks and go to the panel. Now the key with all IGF workshops to make this interesting and successful and useful is to ensure that you all have an opportunity to participate.
Many of you will be on panels, but those of you not on panels, I welcome your participation. We need your participation, and that's true for those who are listening remotely. So we are setup, of course, for full participation.
I would like this to be a lively and interesting a session. It seems to me that one of the points that might be worth discussing, and we'll be going through this, is the topic we've been given, which is bringing broadband to those who need it most, which sounds to me like competition, like some people need it more than others. My experience has been that everybody needs it, everybody wants it. If they don't want it, it's because they don't know about it yet. So I'm not sure about the need to identify people who need it the most, what we need to do is get it to everyone in an affordable fashion.
With that incredibly brief, for me at least, introduction to the subject, let me turn the microphone over to the U.S. Ambassador who is responsible for all of these issues and policy, Ambassador Daniel Sepulveda, who many of you have already seen up on the big stage. He's the hardest working man at the IGF, because he's been on three or four panels already.
With that, Danny, can you give us introduction?
>> DANIEL SEPULVEDA: Thank you all very much for coming. I appreciate it. Garland, wherever you are, thank you for the invitation. This is actually a subject close to my heart domestically for many, many years. I think we can all agree that connecting the world to broadband is critical to growth and development. Failing to expand access to the network would further exacerbate inequality among populations and undermine or political and economic stability.
What we are here to discuss is what the best strategy for making the benefits of broadband technology as widely available in all countries is. As everyone knows, the wires, the wireless devices, the digital infrastructure that makes connecting people to the Internet possible, are very expensive. The cost per person of establishing a connection in rural areas where people are dispersed is much greater than in cities where people are concentrated. And because broadband service is a connection that allows for the delivery of multiple services rather than a single service, the revenue derived per consumer is greater in wealthier consumers than less wealthy consumers, obviously, because they purchase more of the services that can come over the pipe, but the input costs are the same. The wire production is the same.
So the challenge for deploying broadband networks in poor rural communities is that it's hard to recoup the cost of the build out and harder to make a profit on per person basis. So how do we overcome that economic reality and bring service to rural and poor communities around the world to ensure that everyone gets access? It's undeniably a difficult question to answer.
But we are here, participating on this panel, and you are here in this room because we believe that we have a moral responsibility to answer the question. We have an economic self‑interest in getting it right and we have a duty to construct public policy strategies that will meet the challenge by expanding access.
The communal benefit of broadband deployment is undeniable. One recent study estimates that when Internet penetration rises by 10percent in an emerging economy, it correlates with an incremental GDP increase of 1 to 2percent. For developed nations, the fixed line broadband penetration is alsoimportant to economic growth. Increase of broadband access in developed countries of 10 subscribers per 100 habitants corresponds to a 1.2 increase in per capita GDP growth.
But to overcome the very real economic challenges of connecting those still unconnected, it's imperative to understand there's not a one size fits all solution. So this means truly considering a range of options from purely market‑base solutions that seek to improve the regulatory environment to encourage investment, to public private partnerships that seek to create collaborative opportunities, to financing from international development banks and cross subsidization within countries under universal service programs.
It's also vital to consider the security of this critical infrastructure, as well as the need to enhance legal frameworks as connectivity increases. It is in gatherings like this where frank conversations can open the door to innovative ideas and spark a change that will facilitate growth.
For your consideration, I'd like to now touch on threeefforts of the U.S. government, and then I look forward to hearing from the panels and all of you.
The United States has made a commitment to expanding broadband in the first instance through our global broadband and innovations program. This program is administered by USAID.
It focuses on providing technical assistance to expand access and encourage the use of applications in order to extract greater value from the expanding network. A significant manifestation of thiscommitment is broadband partnership of the Americas which is designed to improve access to broadband and Internet in other communication technology in the Americas. The financial and technological resources we mobilize through Broadband Partnership for Americas includes developing and implementing national broadband strategies, creating or upgrading universal service funds to finance the expansion of mobile and broadband technologies to rural communities, improving international and regional connectivity by linking existing broadband networks, collaborating on regional effort to harmonize digital spectrum and sharing best practices.
Another program we are excited about is the alliance for affordable Internet. A new coalition of private sector, public sector, and Civil Society organizations who have come together to advance the shared aim of providing affordable Internet access in development countries. The U.S. government proposed this initiative last year with the hope of leveraging the expertise of various stakeholders with the specific goal of lowering the cost of access. In lessdeveloped countries, only around one‑third of the population is connected to the Internet, primarily because of persistently high access costs. This is acting as a major barrier to sociological and economic development. And the Alliance For Affordable Internet is eager to work with like‑minded countries to lower these barriers. We heard a little bit about it from the woman from Nigeria yesterday, I believe.
The alliance officially launched earlier this month in Nigeria as an independent entity with membership that includes theGarmine Foundation, the Internet Society, Inveneo, Google, Facebook, and many other key players from the private and public and not for profit sectors from developed and developing countries, and has included financial support from governments such as UK and Sweden. It is our hope that for A4AI, which is the acronym for this proposal, can become the first truly global coalition to tackle this issue head on.
In practice, the alliance will identify and address regulatory and legislative barriers to accessibility, compile case studies around specific success stories, and promote bilateral and regional cooperation to establish legislative and regulatory best practices. We are thrilled by the enthusiasm surrounding this program so far. We applaud its aspiration to help participating countries reach the broadband commission's target of entry level broadband services priced at less than five percent of average monthly income.
Finally, U.S. government intends to make broadband expansion a topic of international conversations wherever possible. We believe it's a critical issue for the Internet community to coalesce around and we intend to do all we can in our ability to focus attention on these needs and possibilities. So we'll continue to seek opportunities like this workshop to engage, listen and collaborate, we'll look to next year's world telecommunications and development conference as a key opportunity to work with the ITUs member states on meaningful solutions and will remain committed to devoting our own resources to help expand the accessibility of broadband worldwide.
Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
>> DAVID GROSS: Thank you very much, Ambassador Sepulveda. That was a terrific beginning showing the U.S. government's commitment, both as a matter of policy, as well as a commitment innocent terms of resources, which is extraordinary important and continues a long tradition there.
What we're going to do is I'm going to give you what I've been told is the theme. I'm not sure exactly how important the theme is here. But the theme of the panels that we're about to hear from is that with high capacity submarine cable access going and in interconnecting with fiber optic networks expanding throughout many countries and serving, as we heard, major urban areas and capitols, what about the rural areas? How do we provide service to rural areas in a way that is economically efficient, sustainable, and provides the robust connectivity that people in that region need and deserve.
We're going hear from the first panel with some examples. They've been told that they have five minutes. I'm hoping they'll do it in five minutes, every minute they save is more time for interaction and discussion about these things.
We're going to start with Mark Summer who is with Inveneo, Mark, can you give your presentation‑‑ very brief presentation.
>> MARK SUMMER: Thank you very much. My name is Mark Summer, the organization is Inveneo, we are a non‑profit organization and we focus on delivering connectivity and general access to ICTs in really underserved areas of emerging countries, mostly in Sub‑Saharan Africa, but we work as well Haiti and some of the Pacific Islands, as well as a little bit in South and Southeast Asia. One thing to recognize when we try to talk about what is rural and underserved, in Africa 80percent of the population in Sub‑Saharan Africa lives outside the urban centers. There's actually a whole continent which is largely rural and significant parts of the population don't live in towns like Nairobi, Mombasa‑‑ which have good service but the majority doesn't. That's as well true in places like Indonesia; once you leave there are significant populations who don't have arc assess to appropriate communication services.
Cost and revenue per customer is a key component of why services don't reach out to these areas. So reducing costs for building out these services and operating these is a key focus of ours.
And those are the three examples I wanted to mention just briefly. For example, in Kenya, we're working with an island in Lake Victoria where there's a significant prevalence of HIV/Aids infections and the population is mostly fishing and very poor. We're working there with NGO who has been trying for many years to get access to affordable broadband. The only option so far was satellite. So we worked there together with one of the existing service providers in a town on shore and established actually a wireless link from onshore to the island, which is about 90kilometers distance from the closest fiber‑optic connection and we used equipment that didn't cost us more from an equipment perspective of $2,000 to do that link. That now brings to that island, to that NGO, but as well to surrounding areas more than 10 megabits of service and it can be upgraded to do further.
What is really key here, these service providers haven't looked at new emerging technologies, and once they looked at them, they didn't know how to integrate them into their networks. So these are really important things we have been doing there and we need to see‑‑ get much more common. A lot of smaller rural service providers do this already in the U.S. and other places and we're really trying to take these, these models outside of that.
What this means on that island, people have access to these technologies, to communications, and really understand what their status means in terms of HIV status, but as well how to improve their income status and so forth.
Another project I wanted to mention briefly, in Haiti we started working after the earthquake and really saw that after the immediate need of getting connectivity and services back up and running in the Port‑au‑Prince area, that actually they have good coverage of service providers and broadband servers. But, again, a significant chunk of the population doesn't live in the capitol and outside was very little service options for real broadband services.
So here we worked together with incumbent service providers of establishing a shared network using low‑cost technologies and training local entrepreneurs to ensure sustainable technologies and the local entrepreneurs areoperating that network on behalf of the service providers who are sharing the network. By themselves would have not invested in a network like this, but we use donor funding to establish infrastructure they didn't want to invest in and now we're seeing more and more customers connected in those rural regions, which are mostly organizations benefitting their communities; that's schools, that's hospitals; that's government offices. Of course, they are small businesses, but that's just emerging. So we're really looking at how we can connect those key organizations in those communities to broadband services and reach further out. I think at that point I should end it and pass it over to Bob.
>> DAVID GROSS: Thank you very much, Mark.
Bob Pepper is a Senior Executive to Cisco who has extraordinary partner experience in this area and is a global leader. Bob, take it away.
>> BOB Pepper: Thank you.
So one of the things I do is sit on the UN Broadband Commission. We're focused, as the ambassador said, to bring broadband everywhere, and that includes the target of making broadband affordable measured by spending. The price for broadband should be no more than five percent of household income. And actually, we've made progress along those lines.
One of the things we did two years ago, three years ago when the commission was created, recommend that countries have national broadband plans. And this year‑‑ and by the way, the number of plans has increased, more than doubled, as a result of that recommendation. There's over 130 countries now that have plans. There's still about 60 that don't. But this year what we did is we asked a question that was always dangerous to ask, which is, if you have a national broadband plan, does it make a difference?
And we did a study with the broadband commission staff from the ITU. We looked at 165 countries, 10years of data, and the analysis is called a panel regression, and it's not just correlational, but it's causal. What we found is if you have a plan, it does make a difference. There are four take away conclusions I want to mention.
The first one is the difference between having a plan and not having a plan. If you have a plan, it can increase on average, especially across the emerging economies. It can actually increase fixed broadband adoption by 25percent. It can increase mobile broadband adoption by 30percent.
Second conclusion‑‑ or finding: Competition matters. We kind of know this, but empirically we have real evidence. The difference between ‑‑ for mobile broadband the difference between monopoly and competition is where you have competition it doubles. It doubles mobile broadband adoption.
Third conclusion: Public‑private partnerships are the best way to achieve the goals. Government by itself can't do it. Government doesn't have the money to invest. Government doesn't understand the technology. It's not at the cutting edge. It tends to be behind. Government processes tend to be incremental.
Industry by itself, if you just leave it to the market, there will be gaps, especially in the rural and underserved areas and low income people. So what we found was that the plans that were combinations where government sets the vision, sets the goals, sets out the objectives, but the private sector is primarily responsible for the deployment, except where there are the gaps, those are the broadband plans that have been most effective. As the ambassador said, you know, there are places where government has a role to fill those gaps. And it may be, you know, a variety of financial incentives, whether it's tax incentives or low‑cost loans or whatever, those are affected.
Fourth conclusion: Broadband plans need regular review and they need to be refreshed on a regular basis. We found that the average broadband plan was seven years old. Way too long. The markets are far too dynamic, technology is changing more rapidly, and what we believe is that national broadband plans needs to be reviewed every two or three years and updated and refreshed. So the question then is national broad‑‑ if having a plan is so important and it does make a difference, what does a good plan look like?
We did a study that was published by the world economic forum and the global information technology report that was published in April, and what we found was that the‑‑ a balanced broad‑based national broadband plan, by the way, it doesn't have to be national, it can be regional, provincial, or even local. But a balanced broadband plans includes five elements on the supply side and five elements on the demand side. It's not just about building networks and increasing reach.
The supply side components include‑‑ and later with, you know, time or offline, I'm happy to go into details. Supply side includes competition, elements on competition and investment, spectrum allocation assignment spectrum for broadband, reducing infrastructure deployment costs, access to things like rights of way, eliminating, frankly, local barriers to building out. Core network expansion that's market led that are components including what we've already heard about, undersea cables, access to opening up landing stations, Internet exchange points, and then having inclusive broadband availability with, for example, universal service programs.
On the demand side we include elements of making the devices more affordable. This is also reducing taxes on devices, reducing a luxury tax, what I sometimes refer to as the sin taxes. This is the only sector that has taxes as high as tobacco and alcohol. Taxes are a matter of life but don't overtax this sector. What we should be doing is reducing taxes to make it more affordable.
Third‑‑ second, government leadership in broadband usage, government leadership in online activity, and government being a smart buyer of broadband services that extend the availability and also help create the best case.
Third, ICT skills and development. Right? Skills on how to use broadband both by consumers and small business.
Fourth, online and local content, local applications, local language content.
And then finally, fifth on the demand side is consumer protection. And we believe that having a balance of all of these elements on supply and demand will make the most effective broad‑based balanced broadband plans and we know that having plan makes a difference. Thank you.
>> DAVID GROSS: Thank you very much, Bob.
Now going from that policy sort of global view, we're going to hear from Omar who is with the National ICT Alliance of Afghanistan, and he's going to talk to us‑‑ brief us a bit about what's going on in Afghanistan and the good news out of Afghanistan, at least as to broadband.
>> OMAR ANSARI: Thank you. My name is Omar Ansari. I'm President of the National ICT Alliance of Afghanistan and presiding at a firm called Tech Nation where we provide access services, community technology, and incubator management services to different population groups in Afghanistan. I'll be talking about Afghanistan, the situation of the Internet users in the country and a specific case about a project that we are doing, it's called Tec Terra.
About 86percent of Afghanistan is covered by telecom services, that's between 2003 and 2011. Before that, Afghanistan didn't have any telecom provider in the country. And it was only line phones that were traditionally provided by Minister of Communications and that would be local analog connectivity providing that to the people. And most of the time Afghans would travel to the neighboring countries to make an international call.
But today we have about 18 million mobile phone users. We have five telecom operators and about 50 ISPs are licensed in the country. Optical fiber network has introduced, which helps reduce the cost of telephone. And 12‑‑ 12 out of 34 provinces are connected through fiber.
This fiber, does not only connect the afghan cities, but it also connects neighboring like Pakistan, Kazakhstan, and‑‑ only regional hump in central Asia that can connect South Asia to Central Asia and Middle East where the two regions.
We have DSL in six major provinces of Afghanistan. But with all this, we only have 2 million, which makes 80percent of the Afghan population having access to having access to the Internet. That's very low. Internet price in 2,000‑‑ initially in 2002 was 5,000 U.S. dollars per A and B where the ISPs were using satellite for the Internet access. But it reduced to 300U.S.dollars, and now it's about 97U.S. dollars per A and B.
Further production is planned by the government. It's in pipeline. This shows that major Internet users are based in the urban areas, but in the rural areas we still have an issue of connectivity. And the two basic reasons are the price of the Internet and the connectivity issue in the rural areas. And the other challenge and problem Afghans in the rural areas have that technology is not in their language, nor the content is in their language. So they do not know how to utilize technology.
What we are doing in order to address the issue of connectivity and affordability in Afghanistan, we have set up a community technology centers branded as Tec Terra. And Tec Terra is a traditional meeting place for the villagers in rural Afghanistan where they come together. They hold their business meetings, it's normally under a big tree where the Afghanistan people come and sit there and discuss it. It serves like a club.
And in general, it's a community center.
So we brought that concept together and combined it with the technology and called our technology, community technology centers Tec Terras. Tec Terras are one of the first and fastest, first and fastest growing community technology center. It improves life's long learning for children, youth and adults. It creates a new generation of leaders, develops technology and management skills of the community. It provides a common network and support platform and is a multi‑purpose facility allowing Afghan women and men to establish many programs and services that can provide technology, support, and social and economic benefits.
It was initiated in Kabul in 2011 and its expanding to other major cities in Afghanistan. The services Tec Terra provides are public access and connectivity. Currently we are using Y‑max technologies to connect our Tec Terra's, we're the backbone, and then using WiFi to connect the users at Tec Terra. We have membership services that provide access services 24/7 to all members enhancing technical professional capacity and many more.
Training and education services, we provide computer training, social media and communication training, leadership and management in trust building, business development training, writing and public speaking training, and job skills training. With that, we provide mentoring and counseling services to our members, job search and internships, entrepreneurial in e‑commerce services, digital printing and multi‑media services so people can come in and access technology as well as utilize the printers and multi‑media devices there. And it also provides gaming and entertainment services and facilities to our members.
With that, we host tech communities. There are a few communities established in Afghanistan that includes Open Source of Afghanistan, Tech Women of Afghanistan, and Read and Open, Alliance of Central Asia, Read and Open Source Alliance of Central Asia, Afghanistan Computer Sciences Association. So we all utilize the tech there. It's a common place for meetings and access services, as well as essentially share Afghanistan Computer Science Association. So they all utilize the Tec Terra is a commonplace for the meetings and access services, as well as holding their events in the meeting with each other to work on different activities.
That's it.
>> DAVID GROSS: Terrific. Thank you very much.
Let me call on Jackie, and also Kathleen from Internews to come up and join us. Now what I thought might make sense, since we're running a little behind, rather than go and have Q and A for this panel, we're hear from the next panel which has very complimentary, particularly to what was being talked about by Pepper and others. We'll have that and then we'll go immediately from that to Q and A. So as you‑‑ as you're listening to these presents from Jackie and from Kathleen, please prepare your questions as well.
We have seats over here.
Kathleen from Internews, could you‑‑ she's going to talk a little bit about local access and local policy, which is obviously comes from directly from what we were just hearing. We were hearing very specific stories together with from Pepper, some of the underlying policy the imperatives.
Kathleen.
>> KATHLEEN REEN: Thanks very much.
My name is Kathleen Reen, I work with ICT programs and policy at Internews, which is international media and IT development organization that works in about 45 countries around the world. A few weeks ago I was talking to an NGO based in Eastern Africa about how they were going to work on policy frameworks to expand broadband access in their own country. And he said, listen, Kathleen, the broadband idea starts across the massive sea beds around the world, and on those sea beds are the pipes that are the global comments, but the minute it hits my country, it's completely local. And when we're thinking about policy frameworks, you have to remember that they're entirely focused on the legal and rule of law environments and the marketplace that's specific to every single country in the world.
So that's some of the thinking we have to bring to how we address this issue regarding getting broadband to rural areas, but also making it more affordable. So some of the least likely places are presenting the first experiments and ideas for how we can start to think about this.
In June of this year, Myanmar granted the first licenses as part of a massive deregulation for its mobile network operators‑‑ and to Norway's Telenor. And under that deal, with over 90 providers applying, part of the question in their submissions and their applications had to be how they would deal with so‑called last mile. So the winners were the true winners of the whole country. The commitment is within two years they'll get access across 90percent of the country. Right now there's only 9percent coverage. So this is a promise and an idea and an experiment. It's spelling out how in the developing world in the global south there is some new thinking brought to bear around these issues.
Now, at the same time, the Telecommunications Act in Myanmar is yet to be passed and been up for debate in development for more than 12months. It's been held up by something pretty fantastic, which is an enormous engagement with Civil Society and the private sector to get inputs. Now, it's rocky. It's really difficult, and it's an experiment that doesn't have a huge amount of precedent anywhere else yet in the developing world. But it is one of the positive signs in an environment that's traditionally considered one of the most censored and repressive and difficult for access to information and dissemination of information. So we're seeing some potential lessons there for how we can think about these issues.
The newest country in the world, South Sudan, is competing with the same question. And while Internet access has grown 3,000percent in Africa over the last decade, Sudan represents some of the lowest access rates in the world. So they don't have a broadband plan yet. But what they do have is an emerging discussion about how to provide mobile and how that mobile will actually be broadband in its offerings.
The big challenge for South Sudan is they're also learning lessons, and those lessons they bring to bear whether or not and how policy should be brought prioritized when bringing that broadband. So it's a big surprise to many people that there's a Presidential initiative actually focused on Internet security before there's a broadband plan. When we think about rule of laws, setting those priorities is actually up for grabs and there's a broader discussion to be about how those priorities are set and whose participant in those discussions and what kind of transparency is actually brought to bear.
>> DAVID GROSS: Great. Thank you very much.
We're next going to hear from Jacquelyn Ruff, Vice President from Verizon who has been active in this area for many years, that would probably be impolite of me to say‑‑ almost as long as me.
>> JACQUELYN RUFF: That's true.
Great. Thanks. I think one of the things we're doing is crowd sourcing policy ideas, because you'll hear similar things being repeated. So I want to talk about three examples, or three issues. Verizon is, in the U.S., a big mobile service provider. Globally we provide enterprise services, cloud services around the world, but in the U.S. So we're very familiar with trying to serve what, even in our own country, as the ambassador had said, our underserved areas, rural, et cetera. The latest thing that we and others are doing is fourth generation wireless.
Our regulator and our government in general has made a strong commitment to finding enough spectrum and suitable spectrum to do that. And obviously this is applicable around the world.
In fact, I was recently reading a March study from, let's see, research ICT Africa, which really illustrated the extent of which mobile broadband and communications generally are so very important. It had looked at 11 African countries and found so many instances where the first access to Internet was mobile, instances where users were using Facebook, and I've heard that discussed here a couple times, using mobile Facebook access much more than e‑mail or other types of access.
So that's clearly happening. So I would say, you know, the key policy point, get the spectrum out there, have certainty associated with it, and think seriously about how as governments to promote fourth generation and LTE is a standard that we're using and is being used in 124 countries to some extent.
Second point is obviously what we're talking about. You need a favorable policy environment. And I was, I think just last week, at a meeting of the GSM associations, operators from around the world, and heard a very interesting description of a project that that association had done with ministers from six southern Africa countries and they signed a program, a communique of a vision for digital southern Africa in September on ways to promote universal access to broadband and associated services.
So what were the themes there? Joint public‑private efforts, just like Bob Pepper said, public awareness, widespread deployment of e‑government as a compliment to the private sectors' investment. Develop a road map. Sounds like a plan, broadband plan. Then, of course, spectrum, harmonize frequency allocation plans among those countries to the extent possible. And look at wide ranging review of policies, including‑‑ so it's not just the Internet services, but education, science, technology, innovation, and do capacity building.
Okay. I thought that was a very interesting illustration of the local policy.
Third major point, demand drivers. Again, what people have been talking about a bit, since we offer enterprise services; that could be a school system, it could be a large company, it could be health care system and this isfront line to us. These are really sort of anchor tenants that create demand. They're offering important community services, or important business services, but they're also creating a certain level of demand that can get the broadband built that is then used by everybody, including the individual users, of course. So the anchor tenants, they're wanting reliable high‑quality skilled technical work force, an important part of the ecosystem.
They're often using broadband in ways that have multiplier effects. One project I've been hearing about recently is for community health workers, it's mobiles for midwives; M4M, the acronym. So those midwives are helping with childbirth, that's a very important part of the health care system, but they're also doing birth registrations which in many developing countries are just never happening. If you're never registered upon birth, you're not part of the system thereafter. So, in a way, it's arriving multiplier effect.
Finally, on the broadband policy plan, certainly agree on their importance. I would add a dimension of multistakeholderism there because I think that particularly if you're looking at the demand and what are the services going to be used for, the input into decision making by the many stakeholders is very important
And the cutting across governmental silos, so you if‑‑ we now can work toward tele‑health on these broadband networks, we need to get the people who deal with medical devices and are mobile phones medical devices, we need to have education, teacher training for using mobile devices in the education system.
So those are the main points that I thought would be useful.
>> DAVID GROSS: Terrific. Thank you.
Let me open it up to the audience either for questions, we already have a couple questions, or examples of what you see in your country that might be of interest.
Let me go right over here. I think you need a microphone so remote participants can hear you.
>> Thank you, Mr.Chairman. So I'm from Indonesia. I just have one question. Are you happy with the quality of the ICT in this building? I just want to check it.
>> DAVID GROSS: Yeah.
>> Okay. That is our dream. That is our dream.
(Applause.)
>> That is our dream. But when you go out, you will find difficulty. You will find difficulty because, if I may say again, that I am from the ICT Society of Indonesia. So since 2009, I convince the government that we need broadband. We need broadband and then we tried to put that in the five‑year development plan.
The definition of broadband of Indonesia‑‑ government of Indonesia is the speed 512 kilobit per second. This 2009.
And yet for me, broadband should be minimum, mega. Very ideal to mega. Then we are preparing within this week, we prepare our national broadband plan. This is for the next proceeding, not for this proceeding. We will finish next year. This is the first.
The second, why sit so slow? This because if I may say, 90percent of the broadband in Indonesia, carried out by wireless, five percent with a cable. So this is the problem again. For me, I work for the Internet development of‑‑ 40years. So I'm very conservative. For me, 60percent of the traffic must be carried physical and 40percent you can use the wireless. You can enjoy the wireless. But if not‑‑ 95percent wireless, you have problem. A lot of stagnation. You will‑‑ using 7.2 mega, when you download, you can only get 1 kilobit per second. This is a fact.
Well, so therefore, I appreciate very much the topic of this discussion, but actually not the cable. The most important for contract in Indonesia is the last mile. Within the big island we are fiber optic. We have the satellite. We have the microwave. Very luxury. We have the‑‑ but we don't have to go to the home. This is the problem, again, regarding the last mile.
I invite the telco members of some of my members is that the‑‑ is too long. From the time‑‑ only one national, that is telecom. That is my company before. The rest, the nine is all foreign company. So we liberalize modern liberal country. Then because there is come from the foreign investor, they only have the south side. They prefer using the GS‑9. Tricky. And maybe the next LTE.
Okay. This is situation what happened. Why is actually, if I say, upstream, this because we lack of leadership. We lack leadership including less from the country or in the village. So when we build therural, if you just provide the network, but thehead of the village, they don't have the feel, they don't have the‑‑ let's say the‑‑ I think useless. So, therefore, we complain or so the next will be maybe next Monday we'll have a big conference, what we call the meaningful broadband.
>> DAVID GROSS: Let me get some reaction‑‑
>> Okay. I just want to say, meaningful broadband, it mean it will be affordable. You already discuss. The second is useful. The third is empowering. With these three, let's say, if I may say, approach, I think‑‑ thank you very much.
>> DAVID GROSS: Let's get some quick reactions, particularly on the issue of leadership and those three points.
>> MARK SUMMER: I have so much to say, actually, to the points you made, I could take a whole hour for this. So I'll concentrate on just a few ones I think are important. You mentioned there are 10 telcos in the country, only one domestic. Actually, in Indonesia, you have many service providers. The problem is many don't have a lobby. The big service providers, being the GSM operators, are represented very well. The small service providers like the ISPs in Bali, all over your country, they're not represented well. They don't have a clear voice. They provide the some very key services, especially when you look in the big areas, which is where the big guys don't want to build out. Or if they build out, because of the low income potential for them, they might have a 3G base station there but the backhoe might be under provision. They might have too many people competing for the same base station.
The technologies they're using make a lot of sense in certain environments. But in other environments you need different technologies. You need, like you say, wired or fixed line or fixed wireless. So I think this is a really important point of separation of looking where the problem is. I think you really put‑‑ hit the nail on the head when you said the last mile is the key. The key in order for a good last mile is good middle mile fiber in my mind. If we can get good middle fiber to key points so local ISPs or GSM operators can build out their network and compete with each other. I want to see that competition happen head to head. Let then the best one win and then you will have an affordable broadband offering.
>> DAVID GROSS: Thank you very much.
Before‑‑ Pepper, you don't mind? Is there another question we can have? Maybe we can package them up. Since Pepper can talk about anything, we can do that.
Yes, ma'am, let me bring this over to you, I guess. I keep hoping there are more microphones, it's the way I get my exercise.
>> Thank you, hi. I'm Shas Na from Indonesia. I'd like to‑‑ I'm trying to get my head around how broadband plans increase production. That is what you said, 25 percent fixed and 44, mobile. Is it because of government mandates that require the operators to provide access? And if that is the case, what about incentives? That is create incentives for operators. It's not only about providing affordable, that is important, it is adequate quality of service. I managed some research in Indonesia, we test broadband connection and these are urban, usually capital cities, forget the rural, and the Internet is not even 52 KPS.
>> BOB PEPPER: So that fits nicely to what I was going to say to the earlier comments. Leadership makes a difference. Where we've looked at that in previous studies that national leadership or it can be regional or even local leadership makes a difference. That's where having a plan, it focuses‑‑ it's not necessarily government mandates, but by focusing, by having a plan‑‑ by the way, some of the plans we looked at were nothing more than a statement by a Prime Minister or President saying that broadband was important; right?
On the other extreme‑‑ not extreme, the other end; right? You have similar to what's going to be announced at this major conference on November13th and 14th in Jakarta on meaningful broadband for Indonesia that is the result of several years of intensive work and that's going to be a national strategy. When that occurs, what happens is the‑‑ we tend to find that the focus from‑‑ on the national leadership is on clearing the way for build out from middle mile, for making more spectrum available. They're the various component pieces that get put in place that also work towards skills development. It's a total package of creating the right ecosystem for broadband to grow.
So it's, you know, you have to unpack what it means to have a plan. We didn't care if they called it a plan or strategy or something else. But having the leadership and the national focus that‑‑ we found makes the difference because it provides for increases the deployment and as a result of the increased deployment, it also focuses on other aspects, including skills development and that leads to the shift and the significant‑‑ statistically significant increase in adoption.
>> DAVID GROSS: I had to go back and get the microphone so it's not too hot next to yours. What we're going to do now before we go to the next question, we're going to switch out the panels. I'm going to have the next two panels come out.
We're going to thank in the normal way.
(Applause.)
>> DAVID GROSS: And keep those questions, because I feel confident that whatever your points or questions for this panel will be well done by the next one. So if we could have Virat, Alice, Chris, Thomas and Subi, please come on up. We're going to combine the two panels. I'm a little concerned about our time since we're supposed to finish this up by six o'clock and we only have too little time for the richness of this conversation.
So has Virat gets ready, the first panel is on growing ICT infrastructure through workforce development. Virat from ATT India is scheduled to start us off.
So, Virat, if you could keep it short, all the panels as short as possible. We obviously have a lot of questions and a lot of participation.
You have a microphone right in front of you. Thank you, Virat.
>> VIRAT BHATIA: So I'm going to run through some really quick numbers to give you an idea. Talk about the global numbers come down to what's happening in Asia India and then the ‑‑ impacting theworkforce. So 7 billion mobile phones on by 2013. 3.5 billion of those are in Asia Pacific. India hosts 18 percent world's population, has 860 million connections of which approximately 700 million are active. Africa is the least penetrated with 63percent. 2.7 billion people in the world are online, of which 170 million reside in India. Half of those online are also on social media, approximately 19 million. Just in terms of numbers, that is bigger than the total vote cast on the last winning party in the last general election. So quite a large number in terms of what you can do with those influences.
40 percent of the world's population is online. 77 percent of the developed world is online, but only 31 percent of the developing countries are online. 41 percent men and 37 percent women have access online, which means the gender access online has been much better than the gender access to mobile phones when that first began.
We have about 16 million broadband connections, those divided to MPS, 175 million expected by 2017, and 600 million broadband connections expected by 2020.
Fixed broadband prices, as you're all aware, have dropped 82percent since 2007. It's a big barrier which was the challenge. But the price of smart phones haven't. So that remains as a big problem.
Two billion mobile broadband connections worldwide. Out of state, 71 million. Africa, 93 and Asia Pacific, 890 million.
We think that the future for India, and I suppose by consequence for the rest of the developing world, will be mobile Internet and mobile broadband. That's much easier because of the challenges that have been spoken by the distinguished delegate from Indonesia.
We also think that in terms of pricing, mobile broadband prepaid is the cheapest, while computer‑based broadband is the most extensive.
In terms of strategies and going forward, we think from India point of view, I could sort of talk about the experience a little bit. The‑‑ it's the most unique experience wherein five percent of the revenue contributed by every mobile subscriber every month was sitting in the user fund totalling up to $7billion. And what was thought to be a sum that was required for putting out rural telephones was never needed because the business case for rural telephones works really well. What doesn't work is the business case for Internet penetration, even in‑‑
So the government has converted the law and redirected 4.5 billion dollars of U.S. fund to build a national fiber optic network which will connect 250,000 villages. And in the last mile the operators will come in to provide broadband connectivity because the signals will be carried very much to the last mile in rural India. This is a unique case. It's under way. By 2014 we should be ready with this network. That will change rural access employment and populations of future growth dramatically as we see it. But it requires more e‑governance, more government‑related material to go out online in languages. Just so you know, we have 22 official languages, 1,000 mother tongues, and a dialect every 15 kilometers. So not an easy one.
>> DAVID GROSS: Thank you very much, Virat.
Having now heard a little bit about India, we're going to a person who I consider an IGF hero, Alice Munya, who was responsible for the Nairobi IGF. And we are all still in her great debt and she has now moved from focusing on Kenya to focusing on the entire content of Africa.
Alice.
>> ALICE MUNYA: Thank you very much.
I come from a country that has, I think, the greatest or the most examples of successful initiatives, especially because we tend to involve all the stakeholders from a government perspective and from an Internet perspective. We tend to actually get our hands dirty all together, nearly all three‑quarters, you know, Civil Society, government and industry, and also now, increasingly, the technical community. And that has resulted in extremely successful initiatives and also, you know, a huge increase in the communication sector.
You know, just, for example, mobile penetration is now at nearly 80percent, you know, compared to four, five years ago. 30.7million, nearly 31 million Kenyans haveaccess to mobile telephony. Mobile traffic, however, declined by 1.2percent in 2012 and 2013 and increase in broadband subscriptions by nearly 17.5 percent.
In Kenya we have a saying‑‑ meaning, you know, we feel really great about it. But we can't say that yet because we still have a long way to go. There's still quite a number of challenges. Just by the fact that we launched a draft broadband strategy, obviously with support from the U.S., and we've kind of come as far as defining what broadband means to us. And it means connectivity that is always on and delivers 5 MBPS to homes and business with high speed access to video, data and voice for applications and devices. We still have a long way to go. There's a lot to be done to ensure that we actually achieve that, that vision. And with that, the Kenya government especially have always taken an attitude of build and they will come.
When you look at the east African region five years ago did not have any single international fiber‑optic cable. The government of Kenya, working with the private sector, decided we will build it and they will come. In fact, more than 80percent of the initial funding was put‑‑ was put down by the government. And within two to three years we now have three, three fiber‑optic cables landing in Mombasa, which is quite a great achievement. And that has seen an 80percent increase in costs and increase in Internet access, obviously. An increase in services and improved opportunities for creativity, for innovation, you know, for knowledge creation and for information.
And we continue to promote capacity through development, developmental capacity ensuring that these are conducive policy between the environment, as well as the government taking a lead, for example, in ensuring that citizens are able to use them by putting out services online, for example, our own open data access.
So in terms of what needs to be done, I think I tend to agree with Bob Pepper here, there's quite a lot to be done in terms of okay, yes, we do have a broadband strategy, but how do we implement it? It needs to be practical. As well as agreeing with Jackie, that while the government defines ‑‑ constantly looks at private ‑‑ public partnerships, I think we do need a‑‑ aspect so that we're taking care of the demand‑‑ Civil Society and other stakeholders, not just private and public sector.
And a regulator environment that also ensures manage spectrum in a way that is sustainable.
Currently I think spectrum, rather than becoming just a technical issue has also become political issue, obviously because radio and television. So that is something that I think requires quite a lot of political will, and not just in Kenya but in Africa generally in terms of freeing broadband spectrum, mobile spectrum for use for mobile broadband. And also perhaps using TV white spaces, as well, to cover, you know, to cover areas, some of the rural areas.
I think I'll stop there and wait for questions. Thank you.
>> DAVID GROSS: I would just add to what Alice was saying, Kenya, I think in my experience, is one of the best examples of the importance of political will. Alice worked very closely with some great leaders, both the permanent secretary and a number of ministers who basically identified the submarine cable access as being the single most important way of bringing that connectivity and over tremendous potential barriers made sure that happened. It was really, it's a sign at the top if you have that political will much can happen.
Chris, you going to talk to us a little bit about Mozilla.
>> CHRIS RILEY: Sure. Actually, you set me up very well. I'm going to reframe on the fly. So my topic and my approach is quite different than the others, but I think it place into the political will narrative very well by talking about what can happen when you do get broadband connections out to the world. So my focus is on a different layer than the installation of the telecom infrastructure. It's more about devices and the users in the developing world that will use this and the economic benefits that can be generated by that that then I think contributes to the political will and the political conversation you need to have to get these national broadband plans out there, to get the investment into that infrastructure.
So Mozilla works very differently than the other companies representing here today. We self‑identify as a project and as a global community. There are hundreds‑‑ actually, well over a thousand people who contribute to the Mozilla Firefox web browser code base who are not paid Mozilla staff. They are volunteers, some of them make a small amount of money as part‑time contributors. They're part of our family. We send them T‑shirts. We send them computers sometimes. They're part of our community. And these are people from all around the world, from many, many, many countries around the world.
And what that means for this conversation is just I want to bear in mind, I want us all to bear in mind the power of the people here, the power of the local communities that we're trying to tap into and the real economic benefits that these communities can generate for their country and for the world. The contributions that are latent out here to the global digital economy that we're trying to tap into.
So when I looked at workforce development in the title of this panel, it's not to me just about the workers that install the telecom cables, although that's obviously a big part of it. It's also about the workers who are empowered by that, who use that infrastructure to then create and grow.
So the other thing I want to talk about is how Mozilla is trying to contribute, and that is this device. This is the Firefox phone. I think there's a real big gap that changes when you go from having mobile connectivity to broadband over mobile, and to broadband over mobile connected to a smart phone. That's why I'm excited about this. I'm also a bit of an engineer, so I'm excited about the engineering for this, but I won't geek out about that in this panel. Instead, I will talk about two things: First, this is a smart phone. It has a web browser. It allows you to share content, play games, listen to music, take pictures. It's an open smart phone so you can write and use your own apps for it. But the second part is the bigger one; it's cheap. It's $80 unsubsidized. That's a fraction of the cost ofan iPhone or an Android phone and that's why Mozilla is excited about this. It's slightly older hardware if you're used to U.S. subsidized phone. But we have a lot of hope that this when we're able to roll it out more broadly, will helpaddress some of that gap that was identified by some of my previous panelists earlier.
And we think that‑‑ it rolled out in Brazil a couple days ago and it's in a handful of countries around the world. So that's a little bit of an advertisem*nt and I apologize for that, but I wanted to use that to talk about what will happen here, right?
And to put a face on this to get you to picture an amateur web developer in Zimbabwe who gets a smart phone, who gets connects to broadband infrastructure, who starts writing apps, who starts generating economic gain and for their community, for their country and, in fact, contributing to the global world by writing an app that anyone in the world can use.
So I think that's a big part of the future that we're all collectively working towards, and I think we're almost there and that's pretty exciting.
>> DAVID GROSS: That's tremendous. And I understand that all the panelists get one of thenew Firefox ‑‑
>> CHRIS RILEY: No, sorry, I didn't bring enough to share.
>> DAVID GROSS: All right. We're going to keep going here and then we're going to go as we did with the first sort of combined panel.
Subi, can you talk‑‑ why don't you go first from India. I think everyone knows Subi, everyone in the world knows Subi, a Professor in India at the Lake Shri Ram College.
SUBI CHATURVEDI: Thank you, Ambassador Gross. Thank you for that introduction‑‑ thank you, everyone, for being here. I think it's a wonderful opportunity. I want to start first by ‑‑ which is I accept with love the kind of passion that language brings together. As Indians grow, stories are important to our culture. The Indian culture is about telling stories.
When we talk about the importance of local content, communication and content is about the ability to tell stories, to tell stories in languages that people can identify with, associate with. At the periphery there might be a lot of things, but at the core, at the Internet, the wonderful empowering thing we know as the Internet. And I will come to broadband access in just a second. It is about the ability to be able to communicate in languages that people understand. When it came to industries, the story is phenomenal. There are laws that make sure and ensure that when you're working in domestic economies there is a certain amount of localintegration, whether it's manufactured in our path that we see. There is no such thing that exists for local content and local content needs upstreaming. It needs to be pulled up.
When it comes to organizations like Y‑com, the Walt Disney, I have a fellow panelist here, my life choices were informed by what I saw on TV, which restaurant where I would eat my food was determined by what they had in the lobby. So when they played Tom and Jerry, I was there and so were my parents. A lot of these choices are influenced by cultural preferences. As someone who studies the media, we did an experiment and that's why I'm probably here, and that's the story that I want to tell. These are young women journalism students ‑‑ it is called satire in the age of letters and technology. They use $20 cell phones to record community media and that is what they're sharing, commenting and discussing; issues that they care about. The world is moving to a narrow casting. Of course, broadband is important. But concerns of hyper‑local communities issues that don't get reflected by big media, not just big data. I think big media is an equally important question. The multiplicityand plurality that comes in developing countries like India and I'll shed some numbers, and I want to throw some more at you, my head is swimming with numbers. But I'll make it as quick as possible. We're at 30 billion right now in terms of revenue, 1.6 percent in terms of contribution to the GBD. This in the next three years can change to 350 million people coming online, and in terms of revenue 100 billionUS dollars, and 3.3 contribution to India's GDB, which is big numbers. When it comes to challenges and obstacles, that is where our issues lie for developing country perspective. Not just infrastructure in terms of last mile connectivity and optic fiber cable, which is the wonderful experiment that we all just alluded to, the ‑‑ fund that is empowering 250 rural self‑governments, local‑‑ and putting them online. But the issue is despite the fact there is a pilot project running, there is no content.
Garland just alluded to the idea of power and sustainable power that needs to be made available. The roles that each of us can play become really important and this is the issue that we have to tackle. Broadband access not just needs to be universalized, but it also conceptualized. We have to get governments to do more. There's an experiment in India called data.gov, but we don't have data sets and we don't have ‑‑ information coming from across government. Health records, land records, these are the things we need for citizens to be able to engage better.
Local content, I can't emphasize more. And I want to give the floor across to Thomas who perhaps can talk about the importance and what we can do more in terms of integrating content and how big media also can play a bigger role. I do want you to respond about that. Thank you.
>> DAVID GROSS: Thomas from Disney, in case anybody around here doesn't know.
>> THOMAS SPILLER: First question is for Chris. Does your phone come with preloaded Disney content?
All right. Jokes aside, I think what Subi said is a fantastic segue way because indeed what we are seeing from global perspective and, as you may know, Disney is a global company, but we develop all of our content in local language around the world. India is an example when we partner and we own the UTV studio in India, which is probably the largest Bollywood studio. So the movies in India, in different local Indian languages, they are from local regulation based on local stories. Any story telling is absolutely essential there. That's what drives and we all know that.
You have read the UNESCO report of two years ago. Content, and local content in particular, in local language, linked to local stories, that's what drives production in many countries and, in particular, in major economies. And by content, I mean, there are different forms of content. There is a professional content, so think large blockbusters like the one Bollywood produces, as well you have UGC, user content and what you can produce yourself shooting your own video. You have also public content. So all the archives and at one of the main sessions in IGF we have a good discussion with UNESCO about some of that. I don't know if some of you were there, what they are doing, they are actually‑‑ there is a tradition in the Balinese culture to write stories on palm tree leaves. They're writing traditional stories. And it is a tradition which is disappearing because of the generations ongoing. So there is project to keep that content by making it digital and actually by translating it in other languages to keep the tradition alive. So that's also‑‑ if I'm not mistaken. So that's also part of the heritage content which is so important for other countries around the world.
Having said that, talking about content once you have indeed the broadband capacity and devices, it's not enough per se. I mean, content doesn't fall from the sky. You have the story telling, but you have to have also the content development infrastructure in place. That's what also Subi was talking about.
So I would very briefly‑‑ and I will use one example before going there, we see the example of Naliwood. So Naliwood is the‑‑ Hollywood from Nigeria, a very large industry in Nigeria. Naliwood is the second largest movie producing industry in the world after Bollywood in India. It's 40 films, 40 movies a week. Every week, week after week after week. So it's lot of movies.
Having said that, one of the issues Naliwood is facing, it's not making money. It's not generating enough revenue to make it a long‑term stainable industry. The movie cost per project is on average $40,000. Think about some Hollywood projects running into the $300million per movie. I'm not saying that's same thing, but it gives you idea. The issue from Naliwood, and we are working with a number of people there in Nigeria, is to develop legal infrastructure in particular to help develop the sales and distribution. Also the actors, the producers, the directors get some revenue back so they can invest in the next project and make it bigger, with bigger names from Nigeria and other African countries. So think about since you are also talking about legal issues, e‑commerce regulation for the countries for their distribution of content.
Think about‑‑ excuse me‑‑ consumer protection infrastructure. I know it sounds grim, but it's important so people who buy the movies online can also have some degree of protection. Think about production for free expression as part of the this legal framework. It's very important to make sure that people who have ideas, who have script can shoot movies the way they want. And last one is also protection for intellectual property. In case of Naliwood, this is recognized by the government and Federation of Nigerian actors, producers and directors as being key element.
So what I'm just saying here, and I will stop there, it is key for development and in local language, it's essential to the story telling, relevant for the communities, that's what we have seen all over the world, but this also needs a legal framework in place the same way that broadband development needs the legal framework. Thank you.
>> Did you want to comment on that?
>> I just want to say that there are millions of stories of empowering. A fisherman in India, you don't have to order your food, medicine, newspapers, dry‑cleaning, everything in big cities happens over the phone. So there are millions and millions of people who are empowered because of the phones. We don't know even how they actually had a job before this. Now the plumber doesn't have to go back home to know that he has to go to the next place. He's on the move all day.
We also phased out‑‑ inthree months or so. But the phone system worked because the prices fell and the prices of the handsets fail, and the access fail. I go to the point about broadband access and how it's going to go finally, the whole thing with content and local content. I think the killer app from India will be‑‑ (music playing.)
(Applause.)
>> DAVID GROSS: Wonderful. And with that, that slight musical interlude here, we open it up for questions and comments.
Here we go. Top that.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. My name is Farid, I'm from ‑‑ in Indonesia. That was very interesting. ‑‑ bringing the broadband to those who needs the most, who are these people who need the most? Number one, my question.
My organization work with poverty. So it’s like nail up‑‑ hammer also look everything like a nail. So I also have that bias. From my work point of view, I think those people are the important, people living on $2.50. There's 147 million of them in Indonesia. So my question is that broadband concept‑‑ broadband connect directly to them or just connect with ‑‑ the phone.
We have‑‑ we have several‑‑ we work on a‑‑ we have several in Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, but I don't think that broadband really matters. It's just the connectivity. Kenya‑‑ SMS, even in Indonesia, a lot of the content of the 2G‑‑ content supposed to deliver also‑‑ the 2G content is supposed to be delivered in 3G networks. So what does it actually contribute to providing content that really matters to this people who need the most? For me, it's like people living in the base of pyramid. Thank you.
>> ALICE MUNYA: Can I respond to that?
>> DAVID GROSS: Yes, you can. I'll ask Alice. She has a lot of experience.
Virat, you can comment, and everybody else.
>> ALICE MUNYA: I think there's a lot broadband can contribute to the poor people, and I think you mentioned it. I think for Africa, for example, just by the various challenges, one of the reasons why governments, African governments are clamoring to ensure that broadband is available at all levels is exactly that, to bring‑‑ to enable and increase novelty applications for development. You know, emphasize to make it fast, speedier, more secure, and to build on additional applications that are similar for education purposes, you know, for health purposes, for agricultural purposes. That's exactly the point. If we have fast and speedy broadband, then all of those facilities will be available because of the fact that we have so many other challenges, for example, infrastructure. So they're able to deliver all the other development goals that we have.
>> DAVID GROSS: Virat.
>> VIRAT BHATIA: This is exactly the debate we had in 1995 and 1996 when mobile phones were being will launched and each one cost $1,000. And villagers came to us and said, we don't need more mobile phones, what we need is more fixed line phones. Don't do this stuff. And it changed everyone's lives; the poorest of the poor. So my request is please don't second guess the importance of broadband when the connectivity is there to those who need it the most. We have gone through this‑‑ we were told by politicians and bureaucrats and they gave the contracts to the private sector, like they're doing in Myanmar. They didn't thinkthere was a market in it, otherwise the government would have run it forever. They gave it out because they didn't think it was going to work. It wasn't going to work because it was $0.50 to call, it's less than a cent to call now.
So let me give three quick examples: E‑knowledge, E‑governance and E‑health in schools. We probably cannot build brick and mortar schools fast enough to educate 60percent of the population that is below 25. We are the youngest nation in the world and the world's second largest nation. We have to deliver knowledge on screens and on broadband. We have to deliver health and x‑rays on screens. We cannot build hospitals the way the West has. We cannot build the schools the way the West has. We will have to circumvent even the poorest of the poor. Broadband connectivity, not just the smart phones, will be life changing in the next five to ten years.
>> DAVID GROSS: I have one more question here. Let me see if I can get over.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you, I'm from Kenya. I have two questions if you allow me. One for the gentleman from India. You say your government is providing fiber to villages. And I just thought about Kenya where government actually pulled fiber to districts and wants to go to constituency level. But here's the question, the operators are not using that government platform. They're building their own fiber all the way. That's one.
Then the second question is to the first panel, the broadband group, why you say you need a broadband plan and things will look good. But recently Kenya launched the broadband plan, I think Alice alluded to it, implementation, how do you go about it? You can launch it a lot of fanfare, you know, and then they find it somewhere in the government offices.
Thank you.
>> DAVID GROSS: Thank you. Who wants‑‑
>> Okay. So to your question about fiber‑‑ it's called DHQ district headquarters to the fiber has been taken to district headquarters. And from‑‑ and ‑‑ sector is not building it because there is no room in this case, to take fiber to the district headquarters. Once the big fat fiber reaches the district headquarters then there are sufficient number of people who will take it from there, smart operators who will take it. The business case for them is not yet clear. It's not clear what they will do with it. Therefore, the broadband plan, the second question, we talk about should start with a plan, then you should go to put spectrum out there, get it regulated, get the national fiber optic network and backbone going because people expect them to do it. If they don't do it, they will‑‑ there is no business case. You can't justify it to the board. Somebody has to come.
So public investment has to come back to this group. There is no way of doing it, reduce the price of access, reduce the price of smart phones, local language content we've spoken about, and get the government content forms, applications, passports, all that stuff in local languages. And I think that's when the business case will start trickling in from rural areas. But if we don't build infrastructure, then it will never start.
Public funding‑‑ and this case by the way, imagine this, the consumers are paying for the infrastructure. Those who are using mobile phones are paying for the broadband infrastructure. And we're still left with 3 billion dollars.
>> DAVID GROSS: Subi.
>> SUBI CHATURVEDI: A Twitter response to your question, and I want to debate that, too. I think the private sector and the government can do more. Sorry Verizon and sorry AT&T. There is a lot more we want from companies and they have a lot to contribute.
When we make the journey from the slave to the citizen, let us remember that we want more and we need to get more. This is not about being handed out charity. We're a country of aspiration and we're a country of dreams. When we talk about emerging economies in developing countries, we have people who come from villages with memory cards and chip cards and they download lectures, IT lectures, open source lectures and they go back to the villages. And that's what broadband can change; it can change the fact that you don't have to buffer your videos and lectures and videos any more.
It is also important, and it's a very relevant point, what happens to those grand plans and schemes? They are pilot projects and there's one person who has been trained in every house in every village out of the 250,000 villages, but there is no power and they are sitting with a box and they don't know what to do it. And that is where governments have to come in. So referencing back to the agenda again, rightful goals of each stakeholder. Yes, we need broadband access and we need to universalize access. That's what you wanted to respond to the initial question.
>> DAVID GROSS: Actually, our time is up. So let me with that enthusiastic last comment, let us not only thank this panel and the first panel and Ambassador Sepulveda, but let us thank Garland McCoy who put this together and who sitting in the back.
Let me thank you all for your attendance. Again, thank you very much and see you next year.
(End session 6:01.)
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