More on Broadband

While summer is approaching in Tanzania, wintertime dicsussions take place in the northern emisphere. One of my favourite: broadband.

Everyone around the world wants a broadband plan and, for once, the US is looking at what we are doing on the other side of the Atlantic. In fact, we are not doing that bad and we have had a couple of good ideas that may be copied elsewhere.

One of them is open access obligations on dominant network operators. Even (some) Americans telecom experts now think it's a pretty good idea.
Another one, and I am a little proud of it, is giving guidelines on how to publicly fund broadband networks (having given a hand with it).

The difficulty being how to accelerate fibre rollout without creating new digital divides, how to pour public funds in the economy without replacing private investments, how to leave market forces free without recreating old monopolistic bottlenecks. We think we have found some good balance, regulators and telcos will have to do the rest.

But for us (day-to-day case handlers) the funniest point of the part on the EU Guidelines in the Harvard report (pdf) is the reference to the fundamental experience with Holland and Sweden which became the basis for the document. In fact, the Dutch project was quite peculiar to become an widespread example, and as of today represents an exception rather than the rule. As for Sweden, we are still wondering what is the example the contributors had in mind.

In fact, the Guidelines were born out of the experience with dozens of "low profile" cases from different regions and countries eager to bridge their local digital divides and a few "high profile" (i.e. contentious) ones. Anyways, glad to see that some US regulators may be finally take a look at a good piece of EU legislation.

Broadband in Africa

Before resuming the Tanzanian stories - or changing subject even - a digression.

Broadband connection in Tanzania wasn't great, no surprises there. A (rather slow) Internet access was available at the hotel in Arusha, some sort of Internet café (without coffee) with 90s style computers in Nungwi (Zanzibar) and a slightly better business point in the hotel in Dar Es Salaam.

But locals (source: Isack the driver-guide) had hopes: some optical fibre cable had reached East Africa (Mombasa) and soon would Internet traffic be routed faster.

Come back to Europe and suddenly broadband in Africa is a debated topic.

For example, courtesy of a colleague, I learnt that in Africa, instead of broadband, one can use a pigeon carrying a USB to transfer data:

Broadband promised to unite the world with super-fast data delivery - but in South Africa it seems the web is still no faster than a humble pigeon. BBC News

Few days later, the web is full of reports on fibre optic in East Africa (Isack's info was correct).

BBC here, talking about the economics of Broadband take up. Prof. Juma talking about it at the Berkman Center in Harvard.

Pondering: maybe my next broadband project could be for Africa.