If you read this blog, you know that Dabba are an amazing, innovative start-up offering [...]]]>

So, I’ve moved on from righteous indignation yesterday to outright disbelief today.  News this week that the South African communications regulator (ICASA) have sent their enforcers  in to confiscate Dabba’s WiFi equipment in Orange Farm makes me angry enough to spit.

If you read this blog, you know that Dabba are an amazing, innovative start-up offering low-cost voice and data access in South African townships using inexpensive off-the-shelf WiFi equipment.  Innovative enough to be profiled in the Economist and to attract the attention of international venture capitalists Hasso-Plattner.

Yet, apparently innovation and affordable access for those who can least afford access are simply not a priority for the South African communications regulator.  If you want innovation, you must consult the Department of Science and Technology, whose headline today ironically reads:

Home page for Department of Science and Technology South Africa

Apparently in South Africa the answer to the above is Don’t Bother! because whatever help you manage to get, bureaucracies like ICASA will find a way to shut you down.

And for affordable access, I suggest you consult the Universal Service and Access Agency of South Africa (USAASA) whose performance in improving access in South Africa would be laughable if it were not so tragic.

ICASA, it seems, are too busy fulfilling their role as the enforcer of Telkom’s ever more desperate attempts to maintain their stranglehold on the South African telecoms market.  Yes, it was Telkom that filed a complaint with ICASA that Dabba’s network was interfering with their own in Orange Farm.  Now for a a start, what is Telkom doing using WiFi spectrum for their infrastructure?  Don’t they have access to enough spectrum of their own that they have to come and squeeze people out of the ISM bands?   Yet, as it turns out, Dabba have been aware of Telkom’s use of WiFi spectrum in Orange Farm and had, or so they thought, come to an arrangement.  Telkom uses Channel 6 and Dabba agreed to keep that and surrounding channels free on their network.

Apparently this was not good enough for Telkom who used their influence to ensure that ICASA went and completely shut Dabba down.  Their rationale for shutting Dabba down was that some of their equipment was not “type approved”.  Anyone who has worked with WiFi equipment before knows that it is all pretty bog-standard and if you wanted to do something illicit like increase the power of the transmitter, it is as easy to do with “type-approved” equipment as any other.  This is obviously just a convenient technicality for ICASA.

In shutting them down and removing their wireless access points, they managed to close down access for a skills development centre and an aids orphanage.  In an interview last week, renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs makes the point that connectivity “will be enormously beneficial for Africa’s overall development and for its capacity as a partner in providing global public goods”.  It would appear that the bigger picture is lost on ICASA, nevermind Telkom.

Recently in the U.S. prominent activist and lawyer Lawrence Lessig called for the the U.S. communications regulator (the FCC) to be disbanded.  While I think that position may be a little extreme for the U.S., I think that the newly elected government of South Africa in April 2009 could do a lot worse than to consider whether the slate should not be wiped clean with ICASA.

So today when you connected to the network, you connected to MSN’s custom portal which showed you all the sites that [...]]]>

Imagine an alternative history.  Imagine that in 1995, when Microsoft launched their walled-garden MSN service, which they fully expected would, for all intents and purposes, put the Internet out of business, imagine that they succeeded.

So today when you connected to the network, you connected to MSN’s custom portal which showed you all the sites that were part of the MSN network and fed you advertising from MSN’s premium advertising partners.  There would be a modest charge for sending email but it would be more expensive to send emails to your friends who signed up to the one or two competitors to MSN.  Let’s say Yahoo and Compuserve maintain their own walled garden portals too.  Big vendors would host their resources on all three portals but most would host their resources on one portal and if it wasn’t your provider, you’d would have to gateway through to the site on another portal and of course the standards would not be completely compatible so it would look like crap and possibly not work.

Web browsers would evolve into custom browsers that would lock you into using your subscribed network.  If you wanted to use another network, you’d have to purchase another browser (yes, they would not be free) or pay some software hacker to unlock your browser from your current network.

Don’t get me wrong, these networks would still have some pretty amazing content on them and we might marvel at how these custom portals were “changing the world”.  The Economist might even write an article about how MSN was making a difference in the developing world.  But it wouldn’t be anywhere near as cool as the Internet.  You would  have email and websites because that’s what you had when MSN took over the Internet, but that would be about it.

How do you measure the cost of lost opportunity?  How do you value the incredible might-have-been.  Certainly we can look at the Internet now and breathe a sigh of relief that Open Standards and Open Source protocols proved vastly more popular than the Microsoft vision of the Internet back then.

It is a little harder to measure when you’re living in that alternate history.  And that is exactly where we are with mobile phone networks in almost every country in the world, rich or poor.  We pay network interconnect fees that are frankly just silly.  We pay charges for SMSes which are sent on a signalling channel which was never intended to be a revenue generator for the operators.  As an MTN subscriber, I can only access services from MTN.  This is all nuts but we eat it up like it was what ought to happen.

Why? Sadly it is human nature.  Thanks to a cognitive bias built into all of us called anchoring, we “anchor” as a fair price what we have previously paid for an item or service.  To put it crudely, if you swallowed it once, you’ll swallow it again.  That must be the only reason that we would allow ourselves to pay for services on mobile networks that we wouldn’t dream of paying for on the Internet.  I think it’s time to bring a little Internet “anchoring” to mobile networks.

So, in spite of the remarkable things that have been achieved by mobile networks in developing countries, we really need to turn up the heat on mobile operators to offer more realistic pricing to consumers.  There are a few ways to do this.

1. Lobby your government for effective regulation.  A strong and independent regulator can sharply curtail rent-seeking by mobile operators.  Nigeria is a great example of how this can happen.  South Africa is not.
2. Introduce more competition into the market.  Sadly, this is not as easy as it should be.  Partly because regulators are often not very speedy in allowing new competitors into the market but also because new market entrants are often more interested in getting on the gravy train than in driving down costs.

The world is changing though.  Ten years ago, we would have laughed if we heard the news that Google was going to build the largest, fastest, and most reliable data centres in the world using commodity PCs and a free operating system.  Yet that is exactly what has happened.  At the time, there was the dominant mentality that computers had to be huge and expensive in order to be powerful and reliable.  The same logic exists today for telephone networks.  And the same reality of cheap hardware and free software exists for the deployment of the telephone infrastructure.  Wireless mesh voice networks can be rolled out at a tiny fraction of the cost of traditional telephone networks.  That’s where we are going with the Village Telco.  Stand by for more news in the next few months. 

My previous experience has led me to believe that tinkerable technologies like Linksys WRT routers running open firmware [...]]]>

In my last post I wrote a bit about what kinds of information and communication technologies are needed by the poor.  I have also written about the importance of tinkering and tinkerable technologies as a catalyst for innovation.

My previous experience has led me to believe that tinkerable technologies like Linksys WRT routers running open firmware like OpenWRT can play an important role in spurring the development and deployment of appropriate connectivity solutions in developing countries.

The Linksys WRT54G and its successors are remarkable in that they surprisingly rugged and difficult to “brick“.  They can run on anything from 5 to 20 volts and have a surprising amount of processing power for a simple access point.  People have adapted these routers to become, among other things, small PBXes, firewalls, and traffic shaping tools.  With a little bit of effort these devices can be tuned to draw less power making them more suitable for use with solar power energy sources.

So for the last few years I have been quite taken with the idea of finding and re-purposing commodity information and communication technologies developed for wealthy, consumer markets and adapting them as appropriate communication infrastructure.  Now, however, my point of view has changed somewhat, partly as a result of meeting David Rowe and in particular in conversations with him and others at the Village Telco workshop. David pointed out that wonderful as the Linksys routers are, we put up with numerous constraints e.g. limited memory space, limited interfaces, higher than desired power consumption, lack of surge protection on some interfaces, non-ruggedised housings, etc. where perhaps we don’t have to.

This took a little mental digestion on my part and, at the time, I was reluctant to give up the beloved Linksys.  However as things turned out the workshop led us to look at other technologies such as the Ubiquiti Nanostation and even to the point of coming up with plans to design our own hardware, the Mesh Potato.

Until I met David, I would have said that designing and putting customised hardware into production was a beautiful idea but not very practical.  Indeed, at first glance the OLPC appears to be a direct cautionary tale about the dangers of trying to do just that.  However, David has already done it successfully on a small scale.  He has designed and put into production an embedded Asterisk IP PBX.  One of the things that is most interesting about his project is that, as a result of publishing the hardware design and schematics under an open license on the Internet, manufacturers in Shenzen found David, not the other way round!

I think we are at the confluence of a number of trends:

• the trend towards standardisation in manufacture and chip design;
• the increasing integration of functions into single chips;
• the move toward placing more and more hardware functionality in the ’soft’ firmware of devices;  and,
• the increasing commoditisation of design tools.

In addition, because Open Source firmware is becoming increasingly common and the community of developers is growing, this means that a lone developer such as David Rowe can develop a fully functional hardware PBX whereas in 1978 it would have taken 20 or more engineers.

I believe this means that it is conceivable for appropriate, useful communication hardware for poor communities to be designed and put into production on a small but sustainable scale by small groups of experts but not necessarily experts employed by Nokia, Intel, etc.  I think this opens the potential for innovation of new technologies for markets not currently served by large corporations.  Ideally, these innovations would then be picked up and improved upon by large corporations, a bit like what has happened with the OLPC.

With one significant difference.  The OLPC chose to patent the new technology it developed and use the revenue gained from licensing those patents to fund further development.  There is a case to be made for this strategy.  However, it does not appear to have helped them make friends with the likes of Intel, Microsoft, and others.  One cannot help but wonder whether a focus on core innovations needed in a developing country context and an Open Hardware approach might not have helped them partner more successfully.

It is interesting to note that Pixel Qi, the company spun off by former OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen, are also basing their success on standardisation of manufacture.  This from their products page:

“Pixel Qi is a fabless ASIC company that specializes in screens.  The screen is just a big ASIC chip – we work closely with the large LCD factories.  The trick – we use their standard processes and materials and can produce new screens with radical new performance in about a year.  We are not a demo in a year,  but rather we can get all the way to high volume mass production in a year.”

Pixel Qi are licensing OLPC’s patents.  I wonder how many “Pixel Qi”s might exist if designs for that technology were published under an open license, open to contribution from universities and companies around the world interested in developing technology for the poor?  I’d sure like to find out.  Stand by for news of the Mesh Potato.

An ongoing conversation with a large foundation has inspired me to think more directly about what specific technologies stand the best chance of benefiting the poor.  Early on in the conversation, I made the point that “connectedness” alone actually counts for a lot.  Most people involved in information technologies over [...]]]>

Nokia 1100 - Courtesy Wikipedia

An ongoing conversation with a large foundation has inspired me to think more directly about what specific technologies stand the best chance of benefiting the poor.  Early on in the conversation, I made the point that “connectedness” alone actually counts for a lot.  Most people involved in information technologies over the last 10-15 years, whether in the developed or developing world, have at one time or another learned the hard lesson that “build it and they will come” is more the exception than the rule.  Yet mobile phones have proven a pretty reliable exception with the result that Africa, one of the poorest regions in the world,  is the fastest growing mobile market in the world.  A testament to the importance of being connected and to the power of simple voice communication.  So, I am prepared to say that simply driving down the cost of access and increasing ubiquity of access to voice communication is a worthwhile goal in development.  Mobile phones improve lives and livelihoods.  We know this.

We also know that in Africa access to voice telephony is overpriced and scarcest where people are poorest.  What can be done to drive down the cost of access?  Nokia and other handset manufacturers have made a point of trying to develop phones that are developing country friendly.  The Nokia 1100 handset was designed for developing countries.  After selling over 200 million units, it has become the best selling handset in the world.  As Ken Banks of Kiwanja.net points out in a recent PC World article, “they’re sturdy with a sealed keypad, have good battery life, the user interface is easy, and they’re cheap (originally selling for around $40 new, for example, but now available for easily half of that in second-hand markets)”.  Hard to beat.  Unfortunately that is just one link in the chain.

Cheap phones do not equal cheap access.

The real cost of access lies in the usage charges.  Granted, this is mitigated somewhat by the caller-pays system which is standard in the developing world and which often allows communications costs to be subsidized by those who can most afford the communication charges.  Yet this is not the solution.  The solution lies in increasing competition in the provision of access.  Improving policy and regulatory frameworks to allow more competition is essential to driving down the cost of access.  Equally important is driving down the cost of network infrastructure so that the cost of market entry opens up to more entrepreneurs.  This is more or less what the Village Telco is aimed at.  Solutions that support vendor lock-in and perpetuate the supply-chain of incumbent mobile networks are not going to solve the problem.

Voice is no longer enough

As Ken points out in his article, the Nokia 1100 and phones like them designed for the developing world have “no GPRS, no browser, no Java, no camera, no color screen — the very technologies that form the linchpin of our plans to promote the mobile phone as the tool to help close the digital divide.”   He goes on to make a plea to divert “international development funding toward providing a subsidized, fully Internet-ready handset for developing markets.”  I think this is a brilliant idea except for the word “subsidy”.  When donors provide subsidies to the private sector, somehow this doesn’t always turn into real benefits for the poor.  Underserviced area licenses are a great example of subsidy failure.

I can think of at two other ways of achieving this that I think stand a better chance of succeeding:

1. Announce an X-prize or something similar for cheap, rugged, Internet-ready handsets.  Give the market a direct incentive to build something to serve the poor.
2. Open up the design of such a device.  Sponsor an Open Hardware project to design cheap phones that support GSM, GPRS, and WiFi.  Design bounties could be offered in this case as well.  Initiatives like OpenMoko already have a headstart in this area.

Don’t Try to Figure Out What People Will Do With It

Jan Chipchase - Ted Talk

Some people will find this idea hard to digest and it does verge on the “build it and they will come” mantra but we know that people will come for voice and text services.  Let’s start by driving down the networks costs and then by adding building-block functionality for other services in order to allow innovation to happen.  As Nokia resarcher Jan Chipchase says in his excellent Ted Talk:

“However, we design this stuff, carefully design this stuff, the street will take it and will figure out ways to innovate.  As long as it meets base needs, the ability to transcend space and time for example.   It will innovate in ways we cannot anticipate in ways that despite our resources, they can do it better than us.  That’s my feeling.”

The more hackable a technology is, the more opportunity there is to tinker with it, to shape it to meet the needs of the user, the more innovation we are going to see in ICTs and development and the greater impact these technologies will have.