Indrajit Basu: March 2010 Archives

The 10 months of brainstorming, 36 public workshops that drew more than 10,000 attendees, and 74,000 pages of comments that provided the framework for FCC's National Broadband Plan announced last week, may still have left many wanting for more. 

Yet for the rural on-shoring community of America, this is far more than the country's first  comprehensive broadband plan that is laying the foundation of the next generation Internet. It could also facilitate formation of an entirely new class of workforce comprising millions of Americans, who, from their homes or communities -- even if it is in the middle-of-nowhere America -- will be able to compete on a global environment. 

"In America if people know that they can work from home, they will. A lot of people we hire are people who tried working from home and found that to be very difficult. Working from home would be a new way to make money for them," says Christopher Hytry Derrington, CEO, Rural America Onshore Sourcing, a Louisville, Ky.-based IT company that provides business process outsourcing services using professionals who telecommute from rural areas.

"I am very pleased by what I see in the National Broadband Plan. Not only are they addressing today's issues but they are laying the foundation of the next generation of Internet connectivity in America, says Hytry Derrington."

Aspects of the plan that particularly excites him are;

- the initiative to reform the current universal service mechanisms to support deployment of broadband and voice in high-cost areas; to ensure that low-income Americans can afford broadband; and in addition, support efforts to boost adoption and utilization. 

- that it will ensure every household and business location in America access to affordable broadband service that has the actual download speeds of at least 4 Mbps; actual upload speeds of at least 1 Mbps; as well as an acceptable quality of service for the most common interactive applications.

According to other experts, NBP has given rolling out of broadband in rural areas a big push as well through what the FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski calls the "100 Squared" initiative. This initiative wants to ensure 100 million households have access to affordable, 100 Mbps connectivity within 10 years.

Its ramifications are far reaching, feels Caron Carlson, the editor of Fierce CIO, a newsletter for executive IT management. This goal, she says, would help subsidize network build out in rural areas as well as provide greater connectivity options to any company, small business or enterprise moving into rural areas.

Gartner analyst Alex Winogradoff sees increased capacity and access for telecommuters as the other feature going in favor rural broadband build out. In his comment on the plan he said that workers living in rural areas would no longer have to commute long distances for meetings if they can attend them more easily through high-quality video conferencing.

Besides the ability for an American to have access to more locations in rural areas rather than just cities will help from an enterprise standpoint, too, he adds.

Indeed rural America has reasons to cheer. "I view the NBP as a 30,000-feet plan that shows where we are headed and I think the impact of this is going to be huge," says Hytry Derrington.

According to a research conducted by Rural America Onshore Sourcing, an increasingly flat world does not necessarily mean that jobs have to move out of America. As labor cost in the preferred outsourcing destinations around the world- like India, China, Eastern Europe, etc - continue to rise, spreading connectivity in the rural areas is actually helping rural America to emerge as a viable and often a more cost-effective destination for outsourcing.

"Moving from vendor to vendor and country to country comes with a cost," says Martin Gardocki, an outsourcing professional specializing in rural onshoring.  "With rural labor acquiring skills in a wide variety of relevant technologies and spreading connectivity in rural areas, it has become possible for domestic outsourcing outfits or even distributed rural teams to provide onshore IT-enabled services."

"The quest for savings in the outsourcing arena has come 360 degrees. Access to high-speed internet will enable many of the estimated 50 percent Americans who do not have broadband but are willing, and able to work at rural rates, enter the virtual workforce and compete on a global environment."

The passage of Obama's healthcare reforms Bill, which aims to ensure millions -- 32 million according to Congressional Budget Office estimate -- uninsured Americans get medical coverage may be US's most sweeping health-care legislation in four decades. But while it rewrites the rules governing the world's largest medical industry, America's healthcare sector predicts that it will have to struggle to overhaul its IT systems in order to be ready for the ensuing healthcare reforms.

What's more; while US's healthcare IT is gearing up for a long-drawn mission to tackle extensive and expensive solutions, the Indian IT sector is looking forward to a multibillion-dollar opportunity from the legislation, which is "historic" according to many.

The bill that expands coverage to Americans who were so far been unable to afford medical insurance, is expected to bring in major changes in the medical insurance sector forcing them to overhaul their systems.

The sector would have to throw money, people and technology in order to prepare for the changes, say sources. "Consequently, a huge opportunity has opened up for the Indian IT outsourcing sector that already plays a significant role providing IT services to the US healthcare industry," says a spokesperson of Infosys Technologies, the Nasdaq-listed Indian IT company, which is one of the largest IT outsourcing service provider. 

India's money-spinning IT outsourcing sector that earns close to $40 billion a year in providing IT outsourcing service to the US, reckons that Obama's plan would need at least $20 billion to be spent of healthcare IT alone. Most of this money is expected to be spent of creating Electronic Health Records (EHRs) for all Americans by 2014.

Traditionally the American healthcare IT has been relatively slow in adopting technology, which has often come as a problem in upgrading its healthcare systems. But the new Bill would require a lot of automation in the healthcare system which means that the sector would have to integrate systems and create cutting edge technology-driven healthcare applications.

It would also require solutions to assist the US healthcare industry to prevent leakages and reduce costs and waste.

"That means trickling down of opportunities to Indian IT companies in the form of long-term partnerships with the US healthcare industry," said another industry source.

Anticipating these opportunities it appears some Indian IT companies had started gearing up even while the Bill was being debated. For instance Wipro Technologies, another major Indian IT company, claims that besides EHR, it has already started working on related IT applications to provide remote managed services, interoperability testing, digitization of medical records, and integration of EHR and public health records.

Besides, a significant amount of business is anticipated from enrollments, claims processing and providing customer services with technology and tools.

The Bill is indeed set to change the face of healthcare delivery in the US. Besides focusing on extending healthcare to American citizens, it also aims at streamlining the entire administrative system to drastically cut the nation's healthcare cost.

Thus, services such as finance and accounting, research and analytics will be high in demand as well since these too help in reducing cost and increase efficiency, say experts.

Not to be bowed down by China's repression of free flow of information over the Internet, Google may be 99.9% sure -- as reported by the Financial Times three days ago -- that it will shut its Chinese operation. Yet, as the largest search engine company sets an example to the world for its fight against freedom of speech, defying even the largest Internet market, the fight for free access to information is being played out to an ever greater extent the world over.

The emerging general trend, according to the latest "Enemies of The Internet" report released by Reporters Without Borders on March 12, is that a growing number of countries are attempting to tighten their control of the Net. 

However, inventive netizens are also increasingly fighting the repression hard, and are using the power of the Internet to mobilize mutual solidarity. In authoritarian countries particularly, where the traditional media are state-controlled, the Internet is emerging as a powerful tool for information-sharing and an ever more important engine for protests.

A good example of this is the revolutionary website in Iran called, "The Change for Equality" www.we-change.org started by a feisty journalist, blogger and activist called Parvin Ardalan, and 19 other activist Iranian women.  According to Parvin, during its initial days of the website, its founders were put under considerable censorship pressure by the Iranian authorities. The alleged charges were that the website was being used for publicly criticizing the regime, undermining its national security and tarnishing the image of the country.

Still, "The website managed to gather 1 million signatures-since its inception in 2006- for a petition calling for change of laws that discriminate against women. It has become a forum for this campaign, relaying news about the mobilization and the women's demands," says Ardalan.

Although "The Change for Equality" may not have been able to bring any radical changes in Iran just yet in terms of women liberalization, the initiative did get Reporters Without Borders' (RWB) first "Netizen Prize". RWB, which is a global organization working to ensure freedom of speech, initiated the award this year along with Google's support.

The prize is a recognition of an Internet user's notable contribution to the defense of online freedom of expression, says RWB.

 

Like in Iran, the cyberspace is also emerging as a powerful platform for people to denounce the corruption and repression in Russia and Turkey, the two new countries in RWB's latest list.

For instance, despite Kremlin's tight-fisted control on most of Russia's media outlets, the Internet has become a space in which people can denounce the corruption of Russian officials, found the report.

Marina Litvinovitch, one of the leaders of the Civic United Front, an opposition party, posted on her blog an article objecting to the impunity enjoyed by a civil servant's daughter in the Irkutsk region. The appeal that Marina Litvinovitch launched through her blog succeeded in forcing the Russian courts to address the corruption charges that Marina made.

"In Turkey taboo topics dealing with army, the dignity of the nation and the issues of minority," says Lucie Morillon, Head, RWB, new media desk. "Under this excuse thousands of websites have been blocked including You Tube. Bloggers who dare speaking freely about these issues face traditional reprisals."

 

Yet, the blogosphere there has protested and managed to remove the blocking of YouTube, as well as launch mobilization campaigns against Tukey's legislation-backed censorship.

RWB has noted that taken aback by the proliferation of new technologies and even more by the emergence of a new form of public debate through the Web 2.0, authoritarian countries that control the traditional media, have started targeting Netizens with unprecedented vengeance.

"In 2009 some 60 countries were confronted with some form of censorship which is twice more than 2008. A record number of netizens are in jail; 120 as of today which is the highest figure since the creation of Internet," says Morillon.

The year 2009 also saw China, Vietnam and Iran acquiring the notoriety for being the world's largest prison for netizens, with China accounting for 72 detainees and launching a renewed wave of brutal attacks on websites in recent months.

Among the countries "under surveillance" are several democracies: Australia, because of the upcoming implementation of a highly developed Internet filtering system, and South Korea, where draconian laws are creating too many specific restrictions on Web users by challenging their anonymity and promoting self censorship.

Other countries, such as the United Arab Emirates, Belarus and Thailand are also maintaining their "under surveillance" status, but will need to make more progress to avoid getting transferred into the next "Enemies of the Internet" list. Thailand, because of abuses related to the crime of "lèse-majesté"; the Emirates, because they have bolstered their filtering system; Belarus because its president has just signed a liberticidal order that will regulate the Net, and which will enter into force this summer - just a few months before the elections.

"The World Wide Web is being progressively devoured by the implementation of national Intranets whose content is approved by the authorities," said the RWB report. [To many governments] "It does not matter if more and more Internet users are going to become victims of a digital segregation. Web 2.0 is colliding with Control 2.0."

That the global financial crisis has hardly dented the growth of use of ICT globally is a common knowledge by now. So is the fact that ICT prices have been crashing globally. But while crashing ICT prices have come as good news for global policy makers, the bad news is that despite hopes and even tall claims, broadband Internet still remains outside the reach of many in poor countries. 

Consequently, even as by the end of 2009, there were an estimated 4.6 billion mobile cellular subscriptions (corresponding to 67 per 100 inhabitants globally), and an estimated 26 percent of the world's population (or 1.7 billion people) were using the Internet, the overall digital divide still remained as it were before the financial crisis hit the world in 2008.

In fact, reveals the Measuring the Information Society 2010, ITU's latest ICT Development Index (called IDI) released on Tuesday, while falling prices have somewhat narrowed the divide between the rich (that ITU called the high group) and the not-so- rich countries (upper group) in the developed world. The divides between the upper group countries and the poor countries (low group) in the developing world have widened.

"Globally the price of telecommunication and Internet services is falling with cellular services having become the cheapest service in terms of per capita income and prices of fixed broadband services decreasing by as much as  42% over 2008," said Esperanza Magpantay, one of the authors of the report. "This reduction is remarkable. But despite this reduction, a notable aspect of ICT penetration in the post crisis period is that in some developing countries, prices are still very high that pose a barrier for people in such countries to subscribe to fixed broadband internet."

Although much of the world basks in the assurance that ICT is growing by leaps and bounds despite the many odds of the last two years, "there is still much room for improvement in ICT penetration," says Magpantay.

Indeed IDI 2010 is a revelation. While many governments (usually regulatory telecommunication/ ICT authorities) and several regional and international organizations, including the OECD and the World Bank, collect and publish price data for selected telecommunication services, these are usually limited to a country, a region or a single telecommunication service. The IDI Price Basket in the IDI, as claims ITU, was the first price index to track and benchmark the affordability of ICT services globally.

A key objective of the ICT Price Basket was to provide information on the cost and affordability of ICT services. It is a benchmarking tool to inform policy decisions, says ITU. 

The IDI 2010 has found that while the global average spend on ICT was about 13% of the per capita gross national income (GNI), owing to their far lower earnings levels, people in the developing countries paid as much as 17.5% of their average annual income for ICT in 2009. In comparison the developed world paid a mere 1.5% of their average annual income.

However, the real bad news lies in fixed broadband access, which is still the dominant route for broadband access globally. According to IDI 2010, fixed broadband is still the single most expensive and least ICT affordable service in the developing world. IDI has found that of the 159 countries surveyed, fixed broadband access costs about 7% of GNI in just about 44 countries, while a huge 71 developing countries pay up to 174 % of their GNI for what developed countries calls broadband access.

This extent of digital divide has important policy implications and suggests that countries with high fixed broadband prices need to put in place policies to reduce this price in order to bring more people online, says the IDI report.

 

"There are various reasons for this disparity," says Magpantay. "The price of ICT services is determined by a number of factors that include policy measures regulatory intervention, market competition and size, operators' cost, profit margins, etc. But largely, although recent evolution of ICT markets has shown that tariffs decreases with competition, the ICT Price Basket analysis of IDI has shown that in a number of countries, state subsidies and regulations continue to have an impact on prices."

Nevertheless, IDI said that several countries - including some developing countries - have shown strong improvements in their IDI score and ranking between 2007 and 2008. Notable examples include Bahrain, Cape Verde, Greece, Macedonia, Nigeria, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Vietnam. While some of these countries still rank low on the IDI (e.g., Nigeria or Vietnam), their improvements illustrate the progress these countries are making in information society developments.

Moreover, in terms of access, use and skills, IDI noted that between 2007 and 2008 an increasing number of countries are moving towards more intensive ICT usage.

Photo by Michel SAKR. CC Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic