Bridging World Divide Means Dropping Always-On Assumptions, Researchers Say
BERKELEY, Cal. -- Corporate efforts to bridge the digital divide internationally typically retain first- world assumptions of connections that are always available, when intermittent connections may be more suitable in less-developed places, researchers said. Intermittent connections are much better than nothing for many important purposes, and poverty, unreliable or nonexistent phone or electric networks, sparse populations and rough terrain may make continuous connectivity impractical, researchers Jessica Aalami and Kevin Fall told a U.N. Industrial Development Organization conference Fri. at the U. of Cal. here. They cited promising tests from a point of sale (POS) system in Uganda to a study of whether zebras are suitable for use in a store & forward system. But Ghanaian consultant Eric Osiakwan argued for a new communications development model for Africa that could provide the most advanced services.
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Corporate digital-divide efforts are based on trying to realize the $100 billion connectivity opportunity involving 4 billion world households whose annual incomes average less than $16,000, said Aalami, a Hewlett-Packard consultant and Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy research associate. Giant companies including AMD, HP, IBM, Intel and Nokia have lofty goals, like giving 500 million people the benefits of information technology by 2010, but “needless to say there are many obstacles,” she said. Many digital-divide projects seek to put current products to use by illiterate or semiliterate people or apply makeshift technology that’s a poor fit for the needs, Aalami said. S. Korea’s experience, and dreams for the China market, fuel efforts to provide continuous connectivity, she said. But any technology commercialized in poorer countries confronts the challenge of getting into the hands of users who often are rural and make $2 per day, she said.
But intermittent communications can supply many important services, starting with e-mail and education, Aalami said. HP’s POS project in Uganda indicates continuous connectivity “just costs too much” and isn’t needed for the purpose. Even European ATMs aren’t always online because of the expense, she said. Applications should be developed that keep cost, ease of use and lack of support at the top of mind, instead of automatically transferring richer-market assumptions of the primacy of flexibility, robustness and such attributes, Aalami said. They should be based on studies of actual conditions in different places, she said.
Voice calls are exceptional in requiring low latency, and asynchronous SMS can substitute sometimes, said Fall, a research computer scientist at Intel’s extremely Interconnected Systems lab who studies delay-tolerant networking. Before the Web, the Internet’s main uses were asynchronous, he said. E-mail remains the Internet’s most popular use.
Fall envisions a 3-tier architecture, involving conventional data centers at the back end, mobile devices for users, and connecting them, data repositories that might be anything from village kiosks to LEO (low earth orbiting) satellites, buses or people carrying storage devices to the zebras to which Princeton’s ZebraNet researchers have attached GPS collars in a study.
Many data uses follow the 80/20 rule, which predicts the great bulk of demand will be for a relatively small amount of information, said U.C. computer science Ph.D. candidate R.J. Honicky. Web usage logs and search queries show an even steeper curve than what’s also known as the power rule or Pareto graph. This argues in favor of intermittent connectivity with local caching of the most important information, he said: “You get a lot of bang for the buck.” Fall compared it to a distribution system like Netflix in which users all automatically get enormous update disks daily, providing them everything the Web can except intraday updates. Honicky contrasted the value of that concept with the poor connectivity the U. of Ghana library gets with a $2,000 satellite connection. Caching is well-suited to libraries, where “stack” material is likely to be in more demand that the latest news. But he acknowledged the importance of the data omitted under the 80/20 rule -- the “tail” cited by many as key to the unique appeal of Web information and commerce. In addition to voice, the tail cut off by reliance on caching alone includes chat, interactive Web pages and online gaming, Honicky said.
Growth of African bandwidth demand is running 20-30% annually but constrained by network limitations, said Osiakwan. He wears many hats: Executive director of the Ghana Internet Service Providers Assn. and the African counterpart, special adviser to the Ghanaian Communications & Technology ministry and visiting fellow with Stanford U.’s Digital Vision Fellowship Program. Routing local traffic internationally sucks $400 million per year out of a continental economy that can’t afford that, he said.
But the plight can be turned around with development based on “open access” principles, Osiakwan said. Infrastructure would be financed by public-private partnerships and applications and content allowed from all comers based on neutrality, nondiscrimination, decentralization and freedom of connectivity rules, he said. The network would be fiber-based except in great expanses where Wi-Fi would be more appropriate, Osiakwan said. It would eliminate dominance by govt. and monopoly incumbents, he said, and thereby change “the rules of the game” widely, spurring democracy and the rise of small and mid-sized businesses. “Most governments are not comfortable with this,” Osiakwan acknowledged. “They want to have more control.”