International Telecommunications Users Group - INTUG
 Harnessing broadband technologies to achieve the information society

by Ewan Sutherland
14 November 2005, Hammamet

REMARKS AS PREPARED -- CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY

Disclaimer
The views expressed in this presentation and made ex tempore by the speaker are not necessarily those of the International Telecommunications User Group, or of its members or of their members or employees. They are solely the views of the speaker and INTUG accepts no responsibility for those remarks.


Salam Alaikum

Good morning ladies and gentlemen

Welcome to this session on harnessing broadband technologies to achieve the information society.

I would remind you to turn off mobile phones since they can interrupt the proceedings and interfere with the sound system.

I cannot be expected to resist the observation that at roaming prices they are also rather expensive.

The speakers in this panel are the result of a public call for participation and a subsequent beauty contest conducted by the staff of the ITU-Development sector.

There was no auction and there will be no trading of minutes between speakers!

I was not on the panel selecting the speakers.  My job is merely to keep them to time, not least by confining myself to five minutes, and to ensure that there is a high level of participation in the discussion. So please prepare your questions and comments.

We must not try to compensate limited time by speaking quickly, that just annoys the interpreters and makes their jobs more difficult. It is also frustrating for those who are not native listeners to the languages spoken. Rather we must all concentrate on identifying the key issues for regulatory decision making.

The speakers get a maximum of eight minutes. They are:
Before them, the GSR Discussion Paper on Broadband Provisioning will be presented by Bjørn Pehrson of the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology and Michael Best of MIT.

Anyone wishing to make comments on the paper, is welcome to do so. They should send their comments by 5th December 2005, to the ITU-D.

The speakers will be followed by Michael and Bjørn who get a chance to comment on the papers and by Knud Erik Skouby of DTU.

I should first note that our friends at UNESCO do not like the term "information society", they prefer "knowledge society". So there is a question about our target and the appropriateness of our focus on technologies. We need to keep in mind that there is more to this than infrastructure, that there are issues about business models, about competitive access across the infrastructure to provide services and about ensuring access to services and, of course, interoperability. We need to have a flourishing content business.

Some countries try to pass off 256 or 512 kbits/s as "broadband", but we could have built that with ISDN in the 1980s and saved ourselves a lot of trouble.

We are not looking at voice or dial-up speeds, but at "warp speed" connections and the services that they enable.

We need to focus on deliverable speeds, not on improbable speeds achieved only under light loading or under test conditions in a laboratory, but in real and especially commercial operations, especially in rural areas of developing countries. That may well mean trade-offs between using the same spectrum for voice or for value-added services and may require significant additional investments.

In Japan we can see very low, certainly very affordable, prices for speeds of 50 and 100 Mbits/s from fixed broadband, of the order of ¥4,000 to ¥6,000 per month. It was competition on ADSL that drove the increase in those speeds during 2004. Japan is adding around 100,000 fibre lines a month and has a total of over 2,000,000; so there is no shortage of investment. A significant part of the success comes from the momentum of very rapid attraction of customers.

The fastest residential service that I know of is in Hong Kong SAR, where HKBN has an offer of 1,000 Megabits/s directly connected into the HK IP exchange. That is on offer today.

So we can see that the target is speeds of the order of one Gigabit per second. That is before we allow for any further technological advances, which we can be quite certain will occur.

In mentioning Hong Kong, there was an ITU workshop near there, in Shenzhen, on Broadband wireless access for rural and remote areas in September. The documents are well worth reading as are those from an earlier event, the OECD workshop in Porto on Developing broadband access for rural and remote areas held last year.

There is a useful paper from the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) on The Economic Advantage of Wireless Infrastructure for Development.

In looking at broadband for rural areas we need to think in terms of Bottom Of the Pyramid (BOP), the term coined by C K Prahalad for the great mass of unserved or potential consumers. By designing services for them and by achieving the economies of scale that permits, we can ensure access for the poorest.

We have to think not only of the BOP as consumers, but also as producers of content. So we need to think of the return path to upload content to servers and for peer-to-peer and of access to appropriate software tools.

Traditionally, even in developed countries, rural areas have been the last place to see competition. Often supply has been made possible only with governmental subsidy. Sometimes, that subsidy is contrived to operate a way that excludes competition.

The European Union rules on state aid for electronic communications seem to have helped municipal and regional authorities to develop schemes that fit within a competitive market. By comparison, the debate in the USA has been much less pleasant, with municipal authorities having been accused of trying to do  everything up to undermining capitalism and the American way of life.

The problem with subsidies is that often there is no sunset clause, they go on forever. That sort of model is a problem in a developed country, it is utterly impossible in a developing country.

We need to consider the forms of interconnection between networks. Are these, for example, peering? Is there to be non-discriminatory access?

We have already seen some operators try to block access to certain services, based on terms and conditions of their contract. Some countries are familiar with the problems of "walled gardens".

The CEO of SBC, soon to be renamed AT&T, recently railed against providers of search engines and VoIP who were not paying to use "his" pipes, even if his customers have already paid. [see Business Week]

I think we can best steer clear of the point scoring of the various lobbies for CDMA, GSM, WiMAX, 4G, 5G and beyond. The concept that "my network is bigger than your's" or "we have more customers than you" is not especially helpful at the policy level.

Size matters because it should make the technology cheap and because it allows you to communicate with more people. However, you can interconnect heterogenous networks. Rapidity of uptake is also important to help reduce the unit costs in manufacturing.

One very real question concerns uncertainty about the scale. ADSL seems to need many millions of lines and so tends to be national in coverage. However, WISPs seem to be able to survive on much smaller numbers of customers. The policy implication is that we need to allow for variations in size. We might want to opt for smaller networks first, with the fallback that we can allow consolidation later if and only if it does not harm competition.

The pre-paid model for cellular telephony has worked well to help expand 2G voice and SMS.

However, it is far from clear what will be the equivalent for broadband Internet access. We do not seem to have the new business model yet. That has implications for regulation, again in encouraging experimentation. Since we do not know what the business model will be, we are obliged to encourage experimentation.

The questions for the GSR are what really works and where, what are we uncertain about and what issues do we need to see tested either technically or commercially and how can we keep each other informed about successes and failures.

We can also refer matters to the World Telecommunications Development Conference to be held in Doha in March and also to the World Radiocommunications Conference in Geneva in October 2007.

That is enough from me, the first speaker please.


copyright © INTUG, 2005.
http://www.intug.net/members/drafts
This page is maintained by the webmaster.
Last updated 9 November 2005