{"id":67488,"date":"2017-08-16T22:27:31","date_gmt":"2017-08-16T14:27:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/when-it-comes-to-universal-broadband-who-should-pay\/"},"modified":"2017-08-16T22:27:31","modified_gmt":"2017-08-16T14:27:31","slug":"when-it-comes-to-universal-broadband-who-should-pay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/when-it-comes-to-universal-broadband-who-should-pay\/","title":{"rendered":"When It Comes to Universal Broadband, Who Should Pay?"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n<p>Do national governments carry the onus to provide universal broadband connectivity to its people? Or should we allow capitalism to take its course, and have industry figure out the most cost-efficient ways to connect the unconnected? At a technology seminar hosted by <strong>STS Global <\/strong>on Aug. 15, panelists sparred over whether it is the government\u2019s fiduciary \u2014 and perhaps moral \u2014 duty to ensure all of its citizens have access to the internet.<\/p>\n<p>Steve Yablonksi, Chief Technical Officer (CTO) at STS Global, put forth an argument that he admitted is somewhat \u201csocialist.\u201d According to Yablonski, a capitalist society will inherently develop technologies to only reach the people who can pay for service. From there, the service will \u201ccreep from the top down\u201d and perhaps eventually cover the entire population \u2014 or it might not, and leave pockets of unserved or underserved communities. If a government really wants to offer the same service to everyone, he said, it will have to be subsidized.<\/p>\n<p>Moreover, rather than \u201cthrowing out billion dollar funds\u201d to get entrepreneurs to come up with the most cost-effective schemes, Yablonski suggested countries instead consider lofting their own High-Throughput Satellites (HTS) to cover the land mass. \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s cost-prohibitive for a country to put up an HTS and just illuminate everybody \u2026 without thinking about who they are, where they are or what they\u2019re doing,\u201d he said. \u201cThat would be the fastest, cheapest way to provide everybody access.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Once that preliminary satellite bandwidth is in place, then the governments can \u201clet the entrepreneurs of the world take it away, where [connectivity] could be served more cost effectively by other technologies,\u201d Yablonski said.<\/p>\n<p>Moderator Louis Zacharilla, director of development at the <strong>Society of Satellite Professionals International<\/strong> (SSPI), drew an analogy between Yablonski\u2019s theory and the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, placing both \u201cin the context of infrastructure.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Nearly 140 years ago when the Brooklyn Bridge was first proposed, \u201cpeople fought it like hell,\u201d Zacharilla said. \u201cBut how much revenue and income has been generated by that one infrastructure that covered all people?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNobody asks anymore how much the Brooklyn Bridge costs,\u201d he noted, because its return has far outweighed its initial investment.<\/p>\n<p>However, earlier in the discussion, analyst Alan Rossi suggested that in some situations rushing toward broadband may not be the most ideal solution. He cited a 2009 <strong>World Bank<\/strong> study that found a 10 percent increase in access of basic services would increase a country\u2019s economic value by 1.1 percent. \u201cIf instead of increasing the penetration of basic access you did it with broadband, which is not only more capital intensive but also more difficult to obtain, the contribution to the economy was only slightly larger \u2014 1.25 percent rather than 1.1 percent,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s important to understand what\u2019s driving the demand and then look at specific environments to see whether we should go broadband or whether basic access is enough,\u201d he continued.<\/p>\n<p>According to Rossi, more than a third of total internet traffic will by pass core networks by 2021, motivated in part by the reduction in cost of data storage. Combining inexpensive local storage with basic access can deliver \u201cequivalent services that you would normally associate with broadband,\u201d he said. \u201cAlso, it\u2019s a more reliable service because you\u2019re not so dependent on the core.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Students he observed participating in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative in South America provide a good example, Rossi said, as they were unable to demonstrate some learning applications due to their limited broadband access. \u201cThis could have been solved very easily if [their computers] had stored a dictionary, a thesaurus, [and] an encyclopedia,\u201d Rossi said. \u201cIn Peru, the problem wasn\u2019t with the technology to establish this link, it was the lack of operation and maintenance. In low- and medium-sized income countries, usually the operation and maintenance is much tougher to get than the initial investment.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Overall, though, the panelists agreed that connectivity is a critical element of any nation\u2019s economy. Rossi also recommended prioritizing a return on investment to end users \u201cthat is commensurate or hopefully much greater than the cost associated with providing the service.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Do national governments carry the onus to provide universal broadband connectivity to its people? Or should we allow capitalism to take its course, and have industry figure out the most cost-efficient ways to connect the unconnected? At a technology seminar hosted by STS Global on Aug. 15, panelists sparred over whether it is the government\u2019s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":67489,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67488"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67488\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}