ICTlogy

The second edition of the World Information Society Report is out, bringing us a new calculation for the Digital Opportunity Index.

It’s a pity that the graphical representation of the Digital Opportunity Map has changed colors, as it makes it more difficult to compare among years. Nevertheless, here come both maps for 2006 and 2005 (remember that the report shows the DOI for the preceding year):

Digital Opportunity Index 2006. Source: World Information Society Report 2007
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Digital Opportunity Index 2005. Source: World Information Society Report 2006
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Major improvements — DOI increases above 20%, World Rank increases above 5 places (most of them are two digits increases) — are those of Antigua & Barbuda, Bangladesh, Barbados, Cambodia, Fiji, Guatemala, Lao P.D.R., Nicaragua, Palestine, Rwanda, St. Kitts & Nevis and Tanzania, reinforcing the trend of some Central America, Africa and Asia countries taking off and showing the path to other countries of the region with poor e-readiness results.

Getting worse — DOI decreases and loss of World Rank places —: Central African Republic, D.R. Congo, Madagascar, Turkmenistan and Zimbabwe, which as happened with the climbers, I think, sadly, does not surprise anyone.

Some other main conclusions are the huge strength of mobile telephony adoption in developing countries — in particular — and in the whole World — in general —, that makes coverage be almost universal and, thus, make the digital divide […] shrinking. We’ve talked about this statement several times here, and luckily, this time the report warns about the danger that those infrastructures make broadband adoption more difficult than fixed lines, hence the availability and affordability of broadband remain a cause for concern.

Actually, even if decreasing, inequality in digital development in the World (measured, for instance, through Internet usage) is still a major problem far to be solved and, if worst scenarios about broadband penetration come true, eager to get worse.

• World Information Society Report (main site)
• Full Report (13.4 Mb)
• Executive Summary (8.43 Kb)
• Map of Digital Opportunity Worldwide, 2005 (6.35 Mb)
• World Information Society Report 2006 and Digital Opportunity Index 2006

Robert Guerra kindly handed me three books back when we met in Sevilla. One of them was Internet Governance. Issues, Actors and Divides, by Jovan Kurbalija and Eduardo Gelbstein. As the authors themselves state, there are at least five dimensions to Internet issues: Infrastructure, Legal, Economic, Development, and Socio-cultural. Each one is discussed in the chapters that follow.

Personally, I find the book really interesting and, honestly, much broader in scope and depth than an initial understanding of governance might bring to one’s mind. Actually, I’d compare it to Chris Nicol’s ICT Policy: A Beginner ’s Handbook as they share most of the aim, being Internet Governance. Issues, Actors and Divides more recent, and, indeed, going some steps further than Nicol’s. Both books make, in my opinion, a perfect pair to have a good overview — and something — on what is the Internet and how it does affect me. In other words: they both represent perfect e-awareness raisers.

Taking the book as a toolkit, and quoting again:

The main purpose of such an Internet Governance Toolkit would be to:
• organise the tools currently used in the Internet Governance debate;
• create additional cognitive tools;
• facilitate the inclusive nature of the Internet Governance process by providing interested parties with the tools to understand the issues, positions, and developments.

The Internet Governance Toolkit consists of:
• patterns and approaches;
• guiding principles;
• analogies.

Perspectives associated with Internet Governance
[image taken from the book]

Concerning the part of development and the digital divide, this table is of special interest to me:

ICT does NOT facilitate development:
• The “network externalities” help firstcomers establish a dominant position. This favours American giants so that local firms in emerging economies would be effectively frozen out of ecommerce.
• The shift in power from seller to buyer (the Internet inevitably gives rise to “an alternative supplier is never more than a mouse-click away” scenario) will harm poorer countries. It will harm commodity producers mainly from developing countries.
• Higher interest in high-tech shares in rich economies will reduce investor interest in developing countries.

ICT facilitates development:
• ICT lowers labour costs; it is cheaper to invest in developing countries.
• Very fast diffusion of ICT across borders occurs, compared to earlier technologies. Previous technologies (railways and electricity) took decades to spread to developing countries, but
ICT is advancing in leaps and bounds.
• The opportunity to leapfrog old technologies by skipping intermediate stages such as copper wires and analogue telephones encourages development.
• ICT’s propensity to reduce the optimal size of a firm in most industries is much closer to the needs of developing countries.

While the list is not complete, it does give some good hints on what is happening on the developing countries arena.

More info

• Book page
• Downloadable version (2.22 Mb)

Working with Information Society / Digital Divide indicators is a tricky thing to do, as definitions (along with technology) change in short periods of time. Some months ago, Tim Kelly asked me what did I consider “broadband”, as it was one of the hottest issues that researchers, in general, and the ITU, specially, had to deal with. Let’s see an example.

Broadband is defined by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T), in their recommendation I.113, as transmission capacity that is faster than primary rate Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) at 1.5 or 2.0 Megabits per second (Mbits). On the other hand, the OECD gives its own definition of broadband stating that for a service to be considered broadband, [the threshold] in respect to downstream access [should be up] to 256 Kbps. The fact is that, as the OECD itself admits, Network operators widely advertise DSL and cable modem services to users starting at 256 Kbps as being
‘broadband’. Actually, the Core ICT Indicators, promoted by the Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development — partnered by the ITU — also defines broadband as technologies that provide speeds of at least 256 kbit/s, where this speed is the combined upstream and downstream capacity.

Summarizing, all of these are technical definitions, based on the fact of transmitting more than one data stream in the same wire by using different frequencies or channels. But for the not-technical user, broadband is strictly tied to “effective” speed, or, in other words, “subjective” speed: if your 1 Mbps is the slowest in town, it is no more broadband. This was Tim Kelly’s point last time we met.

Thus said — and leaving technical issues behind to focus in this “subjective” broadband perception — my proposal is to build a basket of tasks the way economists use to calculate changes in inflation based on a basket of products. Of course, this basket of tasks is also likely to evolve with time, but what is crystal clear is that the technical definition of broadband (the one about channels) is no more useful, and the decision to state that i.e. 256 Kbps is broadband should lean on objective basis more than “network operators advertisments”.

Proposal of a basket of tasks for a broadband definition

• Work in online, synchronous collaborative environments with rich media: VoIP, videoconference, screencasting, presentations/drawings…
• Work intensively/exclusively with online, asynchronous desktop/office applications: word processors, spreadsheets, math/scientific calculators…
• Usually access online applications with richest graphical content: SIGs and mapping tools, 2D and 3D simulators and environments
• Have online environments as primary communication and information channel: e-mail, instant messaging, browser and desktop widgets. It includes software downloads and updates.
• Manage a website: upload files, install applications, change configuration/setup. It does not include writing on a weblog/wiki and other low-tech “webmastering”
• Work with remote computers or in grid computing, including intensive use of P2P networks

This basket of tasks and the minimum speed required to perform them correctly/comfortably should help in setting the threshold of what we could call broadband. As those tasks will evolve dynamically along time, same will happen with the broadband threshold. As an example, some years ago you needed a then-so-called-broadband to check the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection when looking for geographical information, as most maps are some hundreds of Kb weight, being the heaviest up to some Mb. Nowadays, you would browse Google Maps, for which a today-so-called-broadband is required, maybe more than the “official” 256 Kbps to browse at ease.

Proposals, corrections, comments gratefully welcome.

Further reading

• Birth of Broadband – Frequently Asked Questions

Michael Trucano and Marco Zennaro respectively sent me two resources concerning ICT Infrastructures, both of them published by the World Bank.

The first one is the updating of the Quick guide to low-cost computing devices and initiatives for the developing world. The guide is a short inventory of known projects related to ‘low cost ICT devices for the developing world’ authored by Michael Trucano himself. While the list looks quite complete to me, I’d rely on the accuracy of a previous work of him, Knowledge Maps: ICTs in Education, to sincerely believe that the list is surely complete.

The second one is World Bank Working Paper no.27 Telecommunications Challenges in Developing Countries: Asymmetric Interconnection Charges for Rural Areas, by Andrew Dymond. Going against what tradition has dictated, Dymond states that the solution for the last mile problem should not be — as it usually happens — subsidies, but asymmetric (i.e. not the same for everyone) pricing, to adjust what end users pay to the cost of providing them with connectivity. Though the approach is quite unheard of and really defying, he provides examples on how this new scenario could be possible… and even desirable by the end users themselves — let aside the companies.

For those new to Dymond, he coauthored — with Sonja Oestmann — the handbook Rural ICT Toolkit For Africa, and — with Juan Navas-Sabater and Niina Juntunen — the well-know book Telecommunications and information services for the poor. Toward a Strategy for Universal Access.

By the way, infoDev’s ICT Regulation Toolkit has also been updated and should be almost complete by January 2007.

The “VoIP-4D Primer” is a free guide available in four major languages [Arabic, English, French and Spanish]. The work is an effort to disseminate the use of telephony over the Internet in developing regions.

The 40-page guide targets both technical and non-technical readers. The first part presents the essentials of telephony over the Internet. For those interested in the more technical details, hands-on guidelines and configuration files are included in the second part. The examples provide essential background to build your own low-cost telephony system.

The primer is authored by Alberto Escudero Pascual and Louise Berthilson — backed up by a team of translators, editors and reviewers — and describes in full detail all the hows and whys in setting up your own Voice over IP infrastructure.

More info:

• VoIP-4D Primer website
• VoIP-4D Primer. Building Voice Infrastructure in Developing Regions (1.87 Mb)

Prepared especially for ITU TELECOM World (December 4-8 2006 in Hong Kong), the 8th in the series of ITU Internet Reports, entitled digital.life, begins by examining the underlying technologies for new digital lifestyles, from network infrastructure to value creation at the edges. In studying how businesses are adapting to fast-paced digital innovation, the report looks at how they can derive value in an environment driven by convergence at multiple levels. Moreover, a great challenge lies in extending access to underserved areas of the world. In light of media convergence, a fresh approach to policy-making may be required, notably in areas such as content, competition policy, and spectrum management. And as our lives become increasingly mediated by digital technologies, digital identities (both abstract and practical) take on a new dimension. Concerns over privacy and data protection do not seem to be sufficiently addressed by today’s online environments. In this context, the report examines the changing digital individual, and outlines the need for improving the design of identity management mechanisms for a healthy and secure digital world.

Besides this general quotation, the one I really subscribe is the following one, as it deals with something often said in our pages:

the nature of the digital divide is shifting from a primarily quantitative phenomenon (some countries and some regions have more ICTs than others) to a qualitative one (users have access to better quality, more affordable ICTs in some countries and regions than in others). In this context, the narrowband/broadband divide is a key measure.

One of the musts in this report is, no doubt, box 3.3 about digital divide measuring, specially the Gini scores for 9 indicators of the Digital Opportunity Index (DOI). The previous statement about the mobile narrowband/broadband digital divide comes out perfectly clear with a Gini score of 0.96. But, on the other hand, the most curious thing is that mobile (coverage) becomes the most democratic (and egalitarian) technology of all, with a Gini score of 0.18. It thus makes sense, as practitioners have demonstrated again and again, to focus ICT4D projects on mobile technologies.

A very entertaining and pleasant reading.

More info:

• digital.life website
• ITU Internet Report 2006: digital.life (2.41 Mb)