Mobiles across the digital divide

In lawless Somalia, where for the last 15 years factions have competed for power in the absence of a government, and average annual income is $500, nine private network operators have established themselves.

They supply service to 160,000 fixed-line or mobile customers, resulting in a teledensity rate three times higher than neighboring Ethiopia and some of Africa’s lowest call charges.

It’s hard to keep people from communicating with each other. Impoverished Somalians managed to build networks despite, or quite probably because, of the lack of a government regulator and incumbent carrier.

It’s worth bearing this in mind as the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) heads into the final lap. The second WSIS summit will be held in Tunis in November, following an initial summit in Geneva 15 months ago and dozens of regional meetings.

Judging by the WSIS’s own Web page, it’s hard not to conclude that the main purpose is to raise money to actually hold the event (the organization has raised 55% of the 5 million Swiss francs required, in case you were wondering).

We know the wider political purpose of the WSIS is to provide a platform for the ITU to snatch control of domain name management from the US-based ICANN. But the WSIS plan of action contains nothing more definitive than a “commitment to build a people-centered, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society”.

Good luck with that. But when it comes to dealing with the digital divide, the ITU could take a leaf from another international organization, the World Bank (which has had its own minor controversies recently).

It is the World Bank that cited the Somalia example in its recent report on financing IT and communications infrastructure in the developing world.

But while the ITU and the WSIS merely hanker after proliferation of ICTs, the bank study points out that the digital divide is already being closed by the mobile phone.

“The WSIS plan of action called for more than one half of the world’s population to have access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) by 2015,” the bank said. “If that is defined as access to mobile services, that goal has already been surpassed in every developing region.”

As the report notes, it took fixed-line systems 113 years to achieve 10% teledensity. Mobile achieved the same result in 15 years. Some 77% of the world’s 6.4 billion population now lives under the footprint of a mobile network, and 23% has a mobile phone.

The killer combination for ICT development is cellular communications backed by “competitive, well-regulated private investment”, although governments can play a role by leveraging their purchasing power and as a provider of other utility services.

“In developing countries with private, competitive provision of services, enterprises rarely see poor telecommunications as a constraint to doing business – the picture is significantly different in countries that have yet to complete their reform agenda.”

“If the 30 remaining countries covered by ITU data that have not introduced competition in the mobile segment were to introduce competition, an additional 50 million people would come under the mobile footprint.”

But what’s the point of deregulation or putting mobile phones in the hands of people when you can hold a grand summit in Tunis?

Robert Clark is a Hong Kong-based technology journalist rclark@protocolresearch.com

(The views presented in this article series are those of the author and in no way reflect those of Lucent Technologies)