Philip Auerswald recently took advantage of arch-villain Syndrome (from the Pixar movie The Incredibles) to paint a tongue-in-cheek picture of his relationship with Bill Easterly. Entertained and emboldened by this, I was reminded of my own insight from watching (more than once I’m afraid) The Incredibles with my sons. Mine was not a Buddy Pine moment but it did share a moment of sympathy with Syndrome. In the clip below Syndrome explains how, having invented technology that gives him the equivalent of super power, he plans to sell that technology so that “when everyone’s super, no one will be“.
For me, Syndrome’s monologue highlighted how important it is to have not just access but affordable access in Africa. Perhaps this seems obscure but stay with me.
Communications infrastructure has the potential for impact in two different dimensions. The first is efficiency and we have seen a abundant evidence of that at both micro and macro economic level. Communication infrastructure makes everything easier. It can turn an individual into an enterprise and it can drive down the incidence of mortality from malaria. Amazing. But that is just half of the story. The other half is innovation. The kind of innovation that gave birth to Google, Facebook, Twitter, et al. Innovation that is enabled by having low to non-existent penalties for failure.
When access is expensive, the lesson from failure is a painful one. Clay Shirky put this best in an interview a few months ago. He said,
You need a very low cost of experimentation, right? If things are expensive to try people will hold back from trying them and they’ll spend all their time trying not to fail. If the cost of experimentation falls though, and I mean falls precipitously, then people will spend a lot of time experimenting, and instead of not failing, the goal becomes to fail informatively to learn something from the things you tried.
In the rich world, where few think twice about bandwidth caps or how many mobile phone calls or text messages they can afford to send in a day, innovation is rife. The rich world is busy generating new ideas and business models faster than people can digest them. Lots of them are complete nonsense but that is kind of the point. Instead of predicting the future like the mobile operators in Africa are trying to do with specialised products and services, the future is emerging in the rich world through an evolutionary explosion of new ideas and businesses.
So here is my Syndrome message: Low cost of access can turn a country into a super-power by enabling everyone to be an innovator, allowing everyone to explore the adjacent possible. This explosion of innovation is non-linear. Increasingly, any country without very low cost access is like a child left on the platform as the train of the knowledge economy pulls out. Africa has a billion resilient, amazing, creative people in it. A very tiny percentage of them have the kind of wealth that would give them freedom to innovate without fear of failure. It’s great that mobiles have created more efficiencies on the continent and some innovation. Driving down the cost of access will give African countries super innovation powers… and when everyone’s super….
If you read my Fair Mobile post, you may remember that I chose to map how many minutes of mobile use and how many text messages one could send for a day’s labour at minimum wage in different African countries. I used an ILO database of minimum wage information and scraped the call/SMS charges from operator websites. As way of dealing with the myriad call plans available, in each country I chose prime-time, cross-network pricing from the dominant mobile operator. Obviously this doesn’t take into account special offers or on-net discounts but it does offer a reasonable market snapshot.
The weakness in my approach has been the minimum wage data. To begin with it was only available for 22 African countries and I was really looking for something more comprehensive. Worse than that though, was the realisation the there can be several “minimum wage” standards in a given country. Minimum wage for an urban worker is not the same as minimum wage for an urban worker which is often different again for a domestic worker. If anyone knows of a good source of minimum wage data for Africa, I would really love to know about it.
So how have the DIRSI researchers gone about their work? First they decided to go with a fixed amount of mobile usage. They used an OECD standard for low mobile phone usage over a year, which is 360 calls and 396 text messages. This averages out to one call and one text message per day. Using the OECD standard gives them the advantage of being able to compare their price basket, once calculated, with OECD country information.
To be able to compare the above costs with income, they took income data from the Socio-Economic Database for Latin America and the Caribbean which maintains income data broken down into deciles of income for all countries in the region. Sadly, as far as I am able to determine, this sort of data doesn’t exist in any sort of comprehensive source for African countries.
Having obtained the income data, they made the following assumptions:
They chose the third decile of income as a proxy threshold for earners at the bottom of the pyramid
They determined that the bar for affordability in mobile spending was spending less than 5% of total income on mobile services
Monthly spend based on OECD low-usage basket
I assume they chose 5% for their bar because expenditure on telecommunications in developed countries is around 2-3% percent of income.
This provides some interesting results. You can see from bar charts like the one below that there is a huge variance in affordability. This is consistent with my findings across African countries.
Monthly cost in R$ for OECD low-usage basket mapped against deciles of income.
More interesting though is the country charts that they are able to generate which illustrates affordability across income brackets. In this chart at the right you can see that in Brazil, communication is deemed affordable for about 10% of the population. The whole report is worth the read and can downloaded from the DIRSI website. It is only available in Spanish at the moment but a translation is planned and Google Translates actually does a very passable job with it.
I think an interesting avenue to pursue with Fair Mobile would be to explore links between mobile costs and other indicators, perhaps corruption indicators or GINI coefficients. Stand by for more. Suggestions welcome.
Anyone living in Africa and interested in the future of affordable access will have spent some time trying to make sense of the complex evolving web of technology, regulatory policy, cultural issues, literacy, affordability etc that make up the ecology of communication infrastructure. Fortunately the market has sorted out a big chunk of that out for us. The future is mobile. Even your mother knows that the future is mobile. And mobile phones are evolving at a pace that no one dreamt of.
But other wireless technologies are evolving at an equally rapid rate. In the little over 10 years of its existence, WiFi has gone from 1mb/s to over 300 mb/s in performance and while performance has gone up, price has gone down. Nowadays, you find WiFi in an astounding array of devices from mobile phones to laptops to music devices to printers and projectors. Access to WiFi networks has also exploded. Nowadays a corporate building, public institution, airport, or even a cafe without WiFi is becoming a bit of an anomaly. But WiFi is not a mobile technology.
So how do those important but seemingly divergent technologies fit into the evolving technological landscape on the continent? Especially in the context of concerns that 3G operators simply will not be able to cope with the exploding demand for broadband access. In the U.S. the data demands of iPhone users has at times overwhelmed AT&T’s network. AT&T has experienced a 5000 percent growth in data traffic in the last three years. They have noticeably struggled to upgrade fast enough to cope with the demand, although things appear to have improved recently.
Lately motile operators have begun to hedge their bets in North America and Europe with the introduction of technologies like Femtocells to off-load network traffic . Femtocells are consumer devices which establish a micro mobile base station in your home and use your broadband Internet connection to backhaul your mobile voice and data to the operator’s core network. This takes the load off the mobile network for the operators and, in theory, saves the consumer money. It is also a good solution for homes in areas with poor 3G coverage. Unfortunately, this technology is unlikely to spread very far in Africa because it is designed mostly for people with high-speed adsl or cable Internet connectivity.
WiFi, however, is another possibility. WiFi is nearly ubiquitous on the recent generations of smartphones. WiFi networks can offer complementary access for mobile users. Technically, this is already true. You can connect to a WiFi network with your smartphone in cafes and airports although authentication can be a pain and Skype over mobile IP is a pretty variable experience, from blocked to patchy to hey I remember it worked once somewhere.
So what would it take to have a seamless mobile / WiFi experience where you didn’t actually have to pay attention to what kind of wireless network you were on? Well, as William Gibson says, the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. In the middle of 2009, Cherry Mobile, a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) in Belgium, launched a converged mobile phone service which didn’t care whether your phone was connected via WiFi or GSM. In fact, the phone would work without a SIM card as long as there was a WiFi network. (Wouldn’t that just drive the RICA folk mad). The downside is that this is a custom app that only runs on new generation Symbian phones. Still pretty amazing though.
Will networks like Cherry make a difference in Africa? Maybe but not as they currently exist I think as the solution is not generic enough. Happily, the IEEE have been hard at work developing standards for making devices work over heterogeneous networks. An excellent article by one of the smartest people thinking about the future of the Internet, Bill St. Arnaud, highlighted two emerging standards:
802.21 – The 802.21 working group is developing standards to enable handover and interoperability between heterogeneous network types including both 802 and non-802 networks. This means that an 802.21 compliant device would be able to detect all available networks that it supports e.g. GSM + WiFi and would make the transition from one kind of network to another seamless. 802.11u – 802.11u is an emerging standard for internetwork roaming and authentication. This would enable not previously authorised roaming on networks within a structured authentication and services framework.
If network and handset manufacturers start manufacturing devices compliant with these standards, things could get interesting. While the obvious impact of these standards could be to reduce bandwidth demand on mobile networks, a secondary but possibly more significant impact would be to increase competition in mobile markets. It would potentially allow for the development of bottom-up WiFi-based telephone infrastructure that could extend mobile networks or even provide alternatives.
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