How To Make The Digital Dividend Pay Out In Africa

Current television spectrum allocation

Digital Divide, Digital Dividend, Digital Yadi-yadah. You would be forgiven if the term Digital Dividend didn’t immediately resonate with you given the proliferation of all things “Digital” in recent years. A quick reminder then. The Digital Dividend refers to the spectrum that is freed up in the conversion from analogue television broadcasting to digital broadcasting, also referred to as the Digital Switch-over (DSO), a change that has largely already taken place in the industrialised world and is slowly gathering pace in Africa. This involves deploying digital transmitters to replace the analogue ones and either new digital televisions or digital Set Top Boxes (STBs) for existing televisions. But the fact that more channels may become available or that you can receive television channels optionally in high-definition is less exciting to me than what can be done with the spectrum that is freed up. How much spectrum is being freed up? There is over 400MHz of television spectrum.

Digital broadcasting uses a fraction of the spectrum that analogue broadcasting does and in Africa, there are few enough analogue terrestrial television channels per country to begin with. What is more, it turns out that television spectrum exists within a very attractive range of the frequencies. What makes a frequency attractive? Propagation or the ability of a radio wave to go through obstacles. The lower down you go down the spectrum, the longer the radio waves and the less they are inclined to bounce off solid objects. That means that you can cover a larger area with a single transmitter and that means that the cost of building a communication network drops significantly. There are trade-offs however. Longer waves carry less information so you can’t pack as much data into the same channel but that is a very reasonable trade-off when it comes to planning rural networks where the cost of network deployment may be a bigger issue than ensuring >20MB/s download speeds. So the Digital Dividend spectrum is extremely appealing from an infrastructure cost-of-ownership perspective. It is unfortunate then that most of the debate around the Digital Dividend has largely been held within the broadcast community. Not that digital broadcasting isn’t important but the Digital Dividend is an extremely valuable resource that needs to be considered holistically in terms of its national strategic value.

At the World Radio Congress (WRC-12) last year, there was confirmation of 790-862MHz (popularly known as the 800MHz band) as a global IMT (mobile) band. There was also a move by some African countries to have the 694-790MHz band (popularly known as the 700MHz band) made available in Region 1 (Africa and Europe) on an accelerated basis, probably because there are lots of CDMA players already in the 800MHz band. 700MHz is likely to be confirmed as an IMT band for Region 1 at the WRC in 2015. So that’s good news for mobile operators except that the release of the 700MHz and 800MHz bands is being treated as contingent on the completion of the DSO. Given the delays that have plagued the DSO on the continent, this seems like a dangerous strategy. Why can’t one or both of these two new IMT bands be cleared for use while the DSO is going on in the lower end of the television spectrum? At the very least, preparatory work for release of this spectrum ought to be going on now.

What a future allocation of spectrum might look like.

But the situation is worse than just a disconnect between the broadcaster and mobile operators. There is also the prospect of missing out on an alternative access technology that could make a real difference for rural access. Television White Spaces technology has the potential to create a vibrant rural access industry in Africa.

Television white spaces refers to the guard bands left between analogue television broadcast channels in order to prevent interference. TV White Spaces technology is capable of serendipitously re-using that empty spectrum without interfering with existing television broadcast. The initial vision was that through spectrum sensing, the devices would automatically use whatever empty spectrum was available, as a secondary user. That means if a television signal suddenly turn on in a frequency being used by a TV White Spaces device, it would automatically cease using that frequency and find another empty frequency to use. The broadcast and wireless microphone industry in the U.S. were not satisfied with this solution and the concept of an geo-located authentication database was introduced whereby TV White Spaces devices would need to authenticate against a spectrum database to see what spectrum was available for use in the area it was being used. Very low power TV White Spaces devices are still allowed to use just spectrum sensing. In general TV White Spaces regulation in the US has been the victim of massive lobbying and the result is some extremely hamstrung regulation.

The UK has largely followed the US regulation with one significant improvement. The power output level of the devices is not fixed but can be dictated by the settings in the authentication database. This means that higher power output levels could be assigned in sparsely populated rural areas versus areas where there are many other spectrum users.

What is exciting about this technology?

No spectrum license required or at least a very nominal one. This means new opportunities for small entrepreneurs to provide alternative access.
Great propagation. A typical TV White Spaces link can go 8-10km without any effort and is not obstructed by trees, buildings, etc.
Innovation. WiFi has gone from a niche spectrum for experiments to an industry that is expected to be worth over 6 billion dollars in 2015. ~70% of smartphone data traffic in the rich world goes over WiFi. This is what open spectrum offers. TV White Spaces has the potential to be another such industry because of the low barrier to entry.
No spectrum re-farming required. Because TV White Spaces technology is designed for secondary use of spectrum, there is no need to move the primary spectrum holder. This is a quick and easy win. Conflicts can be easily resolved by the regulator thanks to the authentication database.

TV White Spaces are finally gaining traction however. Google is sponsoring a pilot in South Africa and in Kenya, Microsoft are supporting a pilot in partnership with the Kenyan government and a satellite operator there. Those are good signs but in general the discussion of the Digital Dividend has been trapped in bureaucratic silos. There needs to be a broader acknowledgement of the strategic value of the Digital Dividend and a strategy that addresses it holistically.

Corporate Narratives, ICTs, and Development

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original image courtesy Once upon a time, a very long time ago, before even Google or mobile phones and long before Facebook, there was just the Internet. And folk who created the Internet and its early users were filled with wonder at its potential. They foresaw a day when there would be true equality of opportunity because everyone would have access to knowledge, access to markets, and true democracy would reign as everyone had a voice in governance.

For those working in the complex world of International Development trying to bring about more equality in the world, through means misguided or otherwise, information and communication technologies (ICTs) seemed to offer tremendous potential to accelerate positive change in the world. And so new aid programs were born that attempted to catalyse development activities through the use of ICTs.

As the Internet optimists had foreseen, ICTs turned out to be very useful for everyone, even and most especially the poor. But where there is utility, there is money and the communication infrastructure business soon became a multi-billion dollar industry. Technology companies rapidly outpaced development efforts and soon mobile phone infrastructure had spread across the developing world.

Slightly embarrassed by their own efforts, development agencies leapt on board with mobile and Internet companies to partner in bringing access to the developing world. A beautiful public private partnership was born. Sounds great doesn’t it? Everyone go to Davos.

What is missing from this picture is the fact that large technology companies are not in the business of saving the world. They are in the business of serving their shareholders. And that means that the story they tell the world about their involvement in the developing world, is one that serves their shareholders. What do I mean by “story they tell”? Narrative is the basic unit of human thought and everything we do is constructed in the context of a story that we tell ourselves and that we tell others about what is happening in the world and what our role is in it. Some years ago I was introduced to a beautiful quotation from Alasdair Macintyre (thank you Steve Denning) that has stuck with me:

“unless we have the critical tools to understand in which story we stand, our praxis runs the risk of prolonging not only the problem but the problem story. Often a problem will be solved only by dissolving the story”

In other words, if you don’t know whether your Hamlet or Rosencrantz or in King Lear or The Comedy of Errors, there is little chance of you successfully changing your role or the outcome of the story.

Corporations have been known to occasionally deviate from the very strictest truth in the stories they tell in order to serve their corporate interests. An energy company might de-emphasise the danger of certain kinds of energy sources because of the vast profits to be made from them. A mining company might obscure the provenance of minerals sourced from a conflict zone. Otherwise upright corporations pay bribes where there is a lot of money to be made and an opportunity to do so without getting caught. Where there is a lot of money on the table, corporations tend to act first in the interest of their bottom line.

And there is a lot of money in the world of telecommunications and the Internet. Carlos Slim didn’t get to be the richest man in the world by baking cakes. This turns out to be a problem because communication networks, thanks to the magic of network effects, naturally tend toward monopolies or at least oligopolies. This makes it much easier for communications corporations to extract more than their fair share of revenue from the average customer. Why do they do this? Because they can, because it is what they exist to do, to maximise profits for their shareholders.

This is not about the developing world in particular. It is true in the U.S. and Canada. For an insight into the U.S. watch this chilling talk by Susan Crawford about the state of broadband infrastructure. Communication companies have the chips stacked in their favour and absolutely require regulation in order to counter-balance the natural tendency toward monopoly.

When it comes to the developing world however there is an amazing dearth of critical discussion about the narrative put forward by communication companies. Development agencies treat these corporations as if they were their friends. They are not your friends. They may have temporarily aligned interests but they are not your friends. They may be staffed by excellent and well-meaning people but their collective interest, nay their responsibility, is to their bottom line and it is frankly amazing that development agencies have managed to maintain an apparent state of willful naivete for such a long time.

This obliviousness leads to pretty dubious activities like the funding of “mobile apps for development”. Oh sweet saffron, how the mobile operators must have chuckled when they heard that one. Honestly, they don’t need your help. Curiously there is little funding going into supporting good policy and regulation of telecom and Internet markets in the developing world, to ensuring real competition and fair pricing. There are some stand-out exceptions but they are just that, exceptions.

So when the ITU develops a global next generation broadband strategy and it fails to mention WiFi, do you think it might be because mobile corporations have an interest in promoting their own infrastructure rather? Do you think that when Google launches a campaign to Save the Internet that it is altruism or self-interest? When Facebook offers free access on mobile phones, is that because they care about the poor? Please don’t get me wrong, I am not some whining lefty moaning about how corporations are evil. Corporations are lovely. Google, in particular, in serving its corporate interest of having more bits consumed globally is in a position to do some very useful disruptive things in both the rich and poor worlds. Disruptive corporations in particular are lovely as they pry out the roots that monopolistic corporations dig in the ground. However, they are still not your friend. They need to be watched and called to account when they behave badly, especially when a big fat pile of money is on the table. And this is what the international development community is signally failing to do.

So what’s the tl;dr? Fewer apps and more support for ICT policy and regulation, please. It’s not sexy, it takes a long time, and often it fails to succeed against the massive advantage that huge communication corporations have. But it is where a more ICTD support should be going. Naturally I speak with a degree of self-interest. Simply making WiFi and VoIP legal everywhere would be a big leg-up for Village Telco. Where would I be without my own little corporate narrative? :-)

Original image courtesy Philip Martin.

Four Perspective-Changing Books From 2012

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This is about four books that changed the way I see the world in 2012. Two were published this year and two are a little older.

Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman
Published: Oct 2011

My reaction on reading this book is that it ought to be required reading for entry into adulthood. Kahneman draws on a career of research to reveal how profoundly biased our thinking is even when we are confident of being unbiased. He suggests that the mind is made up of two different thinking systems: System 1 which is quick and dependent on intuition and the emotions; and, System 2 which is slower and uses reasoning and logic. Both systems have their flaws and he does a masterful job of illustrating the many ways in which we can be misled.

It is perhaps not a surprise that, given his experience of human bias, Kahneman is a fan of algorithms. He argues that in many cases an algorithm will make more consistent decisions on average than humans will. He presents some compelling evidence for this across a range of fields. This is at odds with the work of Gary Klein whose research on the power of intuition was popularised by Malcolm Gladwell. Instead of belittling and undermining the work of Klein, he embraces their differences and embarks on a research collaboration with him that is detailed in Chapter 22: Expert Intuition: When Can We Trust It. In the end they recognise that their different conclusions were influenced by researching people in very different professional roles e.g. parole board members versus firefighters. It is a beautiful example of collegial respect leading to deeper insight.

This is a very sobering book. It wasn’t completely new territory. Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational was a great introduction to behavioural economics but the wealth of evidence presented in Thinking Fast and Slow is almost overwhelming. The notion of System 1 versus System 2 thinking is also a very interesting and a more nuanced understanding of thinking than simply logic versus emotion.

The Righteous Mind – Jonathan Haidt
Published: Mar 2012
I found Haidt’s multi-dimensional view of morality in The Righteous Mind very appealing. Intuitively the notion that morals might be more like a sense of taste with more than one axe of exploration e.g bitter, sweet, salty, sour, etc. rather than simply binary e.g. good vs. evil, is quite a compelling one. It was particularly timely published in the run-up to the U.S. elections where it was possible to see morality battles every day in the news. He suggests that the dimensions of morality fall along the following axes:

Care/harm for others, protecting them from harm.
Fairness/cheating, Justice, treating others in proportion to their actions, giving them their “just desserts”.
Liberty/oppression, characterizes judgements in terms of whether subjects are tyrannized.
Loyalty/betrayal to your group, family, nation. (He has also referred to this dimension as Ingroup.)
Authority/subversion for tradition and legitimate authority. (He has also connected this foundation to a notion of Respect.)
Sanctity/degradation, avoiding disgusting things, foods, actions. (He has also referred to this as Purity.)
Source: Wikipedia

Interestingly, Haidt comes to the same conclusion as Kahneman regarding the existence of two different thinking systems in the brain. He refers to them as ”seeing-that” and “reasoning-why” systems which is perhaps a little more intuitive than System 1 and System 2.

Haidt has attracted his share of critics but, right or wrong, I have found the notion of a moral matrix to be a very useful tool for looking at problems in a new light. Take, for example, Open Source software. There is a very interesting analysis of Open Source that can be made looking at the motivations for contributing to Open Source through the lens of Haidt’s moral matrix.

Further, this book also introduced me to the concept of group selection in evolutionary theory which in turn gave me new insights into the Beinhocker’s Origin of Wealth. Once again looking at Open Source software, it is easy to understand the success of Open Source approaches through an evolutionary group selection lens.

Since reading it I have found that, once you start looking, you can start to see the morality matrix at play everywhere. It’s not the only way of looking at an issue but I have found it often offers a perspective I would not have thought of otherwise.

Why Nations Fail - Daron Acemoğlu & James Robinson
Published: Mar 2012
Why Nations Fail is another book that has provoked some controversy. It could hardly fail to given the epic sweep of history that it covers and the retrospective coherence with which the authors fit historical narrative to their theory.

Once again, right or wrong, their theory is a very interesting one that has shed new light for me on challenges within the world of international development. They argue that a country’s political and economic institutions need to be analysed together and that they can be broken down into two types. There are “extractive” institutions in which a “small” group of individuals do their best to exploit their political and economic environment for maximum gain and to inhibit the sharing of wealth; and there are “inclusive” institutions which are broadly open and encourage participation. They argue that inclusive states become wealthier over time and that extractive states, though they may experience short term growth, ultimately make countries poorer.

Given that their theory operates over generations, even hundreds of years, it is very hard to assess the validity of their theory as its predictive power will take some time to asses and even then political/economic systems are complex and, I think, resistant to this sort of sweeping analysis.

However, that doesn’t it make it any less fascinating a work. Most interesting for me was the notion of trust and how important it was in an “inclusive” state to create the conditions where individuals do fear to invest their time and money in enterprises. Land rights feature as a particular issue in the book and it made me think about the world of communication infrastructure and the digital domain in general. I think there is an interesting analysis to be made of “inclusive” versus “extractive” digital infrastructures. As another way of looking at the problem, I think the notion of “digital land rights”, being able to afford digital land, being confident that you can keep it, being sure of rights of way, etc is a metaphor worth exploring further.

Mindset - Carol Dweck
Published: Feb 2006

This is a slightly older book but I only discovered it in 2012. It is another book where the author divides the world into two categories: in this case the author divides people into those with a “fixed mindset” or a “growth mindset”. To quote Dweck directly:

“In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that’s that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don’t necessarily think everyone’s the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it.”

I cannot emphasise enough how profound this book has been for me both as a professional and as a parent. Her thesis is not especially complex and seems obvious in retrospect but then so many brilliant things do. It has everything to do with how you understand failure. If you see failure as a personal commentary on your abilities then it can be destructive and disabling. By contrast, if you see failure as containing the ingredients for learning and growth, then failure can be an enabler.

Intellectually this is obvious but I have never really taken on board in a personal way until I read this book. Her narrative style and many many examples from a variety of fields helped the idea to sink in. It has helped me professionally. As an entrepreneur, I am confronted with failure on a regular basis. I have never liked rejection. Who does? MindSet helped me make a fairly profound internal shift to not judge myself every time an investor or customer said the dreaded word…. “No”.

Interestingly it has been just as useful as a parent. As my kids struggle with developing mastery in a variety of domains from academics to sports, they run smack into the failure demon. Mindset helped me help my boys think constructively about failure as a breadcrumb trail to success. And with that I leave you with this profound piece of wisdom from the children’s classic, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Happy 2013.

If I Had 50 Million Dollars

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Money Tree If I had any poetic talent, I would have done this in rhyming couplets set to the music of the Barenaked Ladies but sadly today you are left with my prose. Hum along with me anyway.

If you work in the area of Open Government, Open Data, Transparency, or even just ICTs and Development in general, you have probably heard of the Making All Voices Count (MAVC) initiative. MAVC is a Grand Challenge for Development which brings together the UK Department for International Development (DFID/UKAID), U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Omidyar Network (ON), and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) to create a $50 million fund to “support innovation, scaling-up, and research that will deepen existing innovations and help harness new technologies to enable citizen engagement and government responsiveness.”

On Saturday, in response to an increasing number of interactions around MAVC that I’ve had over the last few weeks, I tweeted the following:

Boy oh boy.Seems like everyone’s got their hat out ready to catch money falling from the “Making All Voices Count” sky.

— Steve Song (@stevesong) December 15, 2012

which garnered a few reactions. Most interestingly @wayanvota issued a challenge to speak up and say just what was wrong with MAVC. I was a little surprised by his reaction as I thought there were some fairly self-evident problems, mostly related to what happens when there is a large pot of money on the table. It then occurred to me that perhaps this was perhaps not self-evident to all or perhaps even that I was simply jaded and cynical. My first thought was to blog about the challenges that I think MAVC will face. But frankly it’s easy to be a critic and anyone engaged in the field of philanthropy knows that it is hard, very hard indeed to do well. If I had the time, I could pick holes in development initiatives all day. Like shooting fish in a barrel but not as much fun.

So, perhaps more challenging, more constructive, and more fun would be to say, well *what would I do*. That is to say if someone said, here take this bag of 50 million dollars and go forth to create more open governance in the South. A challenging prospect. Achieving impact through the giving away of money is much more difficult than achieving impact in the private sector. Philanthropy lacks that marvellous feedback loop called the market which provides plenty of data for self-correction. This doesn’t, as some suggest, make philanthropy bad. It just makes it more challenging. So herewith my suggestion as to how to most effectively spend 50 million dollars on Open Government in the South.

My recipe is very simple. I would pick 10 universities, one each in 10 countries in the South. I would endow a chair for Cyber Law and Governance in each university for 10 years giving each university 5 million dollars. That’s it. Maybe I’d keep a million or two back to fund and facilitate networking among the universities but that’s it. Here is my rationale:

Open Governance, if it happens at all, has to be home-grown. The power imbalance in development assistance hasn’t gone away. Putting southern researchers in control of the agenda is a start towards mitigating that problem.
Open Governance is still in its infancy. There is no significant body of evidence of it making a difference in the South. Granted MAVC plans to fund research, as do others, but what is really needed is sustained dialogue in the south between informed civil society and government. Think of the role that someone like Michael Geist plays in Canada or Rufus Pollock in the UK. Universities were and are the critical enablers for them. We need more of that in the South, that is to say dialogue not solutions. Solutions emerge naturally from constructive dialogue.
Open Government is complex. There is a kind of naive optimism around Open Government which comes from the forty thousand foot view that many donors have. Kenya, the poster child for Open Government in Africa, has experienced its own challenges with Open Government. There are vested interests, entrenched centres of power, contradictory priorities (protection of privacy, cyber security, etc), lack of capacity and many other issues, all of which take time and engagement to deal with. This calls more for sustained local dialogue, engagement, and capacity building than for entrepreneurs building open data apps.
Most countries in the South have a critical lack of institutions that can engage on cyber governance issues. It is not just Open Government but digital privacy, surveillance, cyber security, Internet governance and a host of other issues that demand a generation of researchers and policy-makers with the interest and capacity to lead their countries and probably the world to better decision-making on these issues. Invest in those institutions and you will get Southern leadership on these issues and make it easier for future funders to find the right places to engage.
Policy work is a long game. Institutions need to know they can commit beyond a few years. This would allow them the time and resources needed to bring about real change.

My 2 cents or 50 million dollars as the case may be.

Unpacking Our Mobile Broadband Future ITU Y U NO LIKE WIFI?

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The future is mobile. We all know that. We read it everywhere. In the UN Broadband Commission‘s recently published report entitled, The State of Broadband 2012: Achieving Digital Inclusion For All, ITU analysts boldly announce their belief that:

“mobile broadband could prove the platform for achieving the boost needed to get progress back on track – at end 2011, there were already almost twice as many mobile broadband subscriptions as fixed broadband connections.”

But what does it actually mean and is it really true? When talking about our mobile broadband future, it is essential to distinguish between devices and networks. The two things are not necessarily the same thing.

The Future is Mobile Devices

This future I believe in. Small, low-power wireless devices whether phones or tablets are taking over the way we interact with each other and with content. New markets and services are being created every day for mobile devices. The world of app and apps stores are creating new opportunities for innovation and adding value.

The Future is Mobile Networks

This is the future mobile operators would like you to believe in but the evidence is increasingly not in their favour. Here are some statistics that may change your perspective of our mobile broadband future.

Global Smartphone-originated Data Traffic
January 2012 – Source: Mobidia

A recent study by Mobidia revealed that about 70% of smartphone data traffic travelled via WiFi and not mobile networks. Keep in mind that this research was not done in Africa, it was done in the industrialised world. What we are seeing overwhelmingly is WiFi become the default form of data access and cellular access being relegated to those times when WiFi is not available, an increasingly rare phenomenon in the rich world.

The figures are even higher for tablet traffic. And while we’re at it, since when are tablets “mobile” devices? Of the fifty million tablets sold in the United States, only 8% have mobile capacity. The tablet is not a mobile device, it is a WiFi device. Google’s Nexus7 tablet is WiFi-only. Both Microsoft’s new Surface tablet and Apple’s new iPad Mini are likely to launch as WiFi-only devices. Why would Apple and Microsoft do that? Well, one reason might be to avoid the painful process of negotiating mobile carrier agreements. Imagine if computer manufacturers had to negotiate ISP agreements to connect a computer to the net. The latest tablet is also a whole lot cheaper than a smartphone. Compare a $200 Nexus7 tablet with an $800 Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone.

So what’s my point here? My point is that the UN Broadband Commission’s recently published report on Achieving Digital Inclusion mentions WiFi exactly twice, both times parenthetically. Mobile operators would like you to believe that the future of mobile broadband lies in the LTE networks that they are building. And certainly that is partly true but only partly. If the Mobidia stats are to be believed, about 30% true.

Mobile operators have no interest in WiFi because they currently have no control over WiFi networks although that is beginning to change in the U.S. And we get reports like the one from the UN Broadband Commission because the dialogue at the ITU is dominated by operators. The Broadband Commission itself is chaired by Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world. The irony of putting the richest man in the world in charge of a commission to connect the poor appears to be lost on the UN.

In any discussion about the mobile broadband future of Africa, WiFi is simply not part of the discussion. Yet the evidence is before our eyes of the strategic importance of WiFi to our “mobile” devices. It’s cheap and fast and grew to solve the problem of affordable access by chance not by design. It happened because WiFi is an open space for technology developers to innovate. No carrier agreements required.

Also not mentioned in the UN Broadband Commission’s report is the potential of Television White Spaces spectrum, a space for with the potential for massive innovation in rural access. Another area not controlled by mobile operators.

The benefits of WiFi go beyond just cheaper access. They also create the opportunity to eliminate the weakness of a single point of failure that mobile networks create. WiFi infrastructure can make it harder to wilfully shutdown communication in a given geographic region. The key to resilient networks is plurality of access and WiFi is already embedded in every smart device you can think of.

It would be nice to see WiFi recognised for the powerful role that it is already playing in mobile broadband and to see it figure in national strategic broadband plans for the future.

Many Possibilities

In the beginner's mind there are…