The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> So we should start.
>> So we should start. I'm sorry for the little delay. One the speakers is speaking from Brazil, and we are just testing the camera, and also she will need us to go to the presentation because she's going to ‑‑ you know, show some PowerPoint and they're going to be doing from here, because she's not been able to access the link via her computer so we have to do it.
But anyway.
I will start. by introducing myself, I'm Raquel Renno, from Program 19 program officer, I'm responsible for connectivity issues and I work on infrastructure level and standard setting organisations. My work specifically is in the ITU, ITU‑R. And here I'm followed by Natalia Lobo who is online, and she's the director of the sectoral policy department of the ministry of communications of Brazil. Then Robert Pepper, the head of global connectivity policy and planning ex‑FCC, ex‑NTIA, and other regulators hasn't as a vast experience in spectrum manage.
And then Jane Coffin, also an expert with extensive experience in the technical community, private sector and public sector as well. She's currently a consultant and expert providing information on community networks, IXPs, interconnection, peering, and community development.
And Thomas Lohninger, is the executive director of the digital rights epicenter works in Vienna, Austria and works a lot on net neutrality issues, specifically in the European Union but not limited to European Union. This will be an open discussion. We will take questions and comments from people here in this room, but also online.
And the idea is to bring different views.
You can see that we have people from different backgrounds here: Basically, the idea is to update and bring different views on the connectivity issues. A lot has been said about how connectivity is important, how it's human rights enabled specifically after the pandemic. So even the right to health was something that was related to connectivity lately.
But we still face digital divide and we have new kinds of digital divide, and also some people say that we have many digital divides. And the SD Gs do frame access as a development issue and ‑‑ but then we are facing a human rights issue. So there are two different ideas and assessments of what the right to access the Internet, not as a human right, but also not just a commercial service, how it should be tackled, how it should be seen, how it should be framed. So we are here together with different ideas and also understand if any connectivities, good connectivities and what are the challenges and the opportunities that we might have nowadays.
We can start, please, Pepper, if you can start.
>> ROBERT PEPPER: There, I think that works better.
Thank you very much. And it's great to be here. Thank you for the invitation on the panel. So just maybe to start things off a little bit, one of the things that I've done at Meta with the economist intelligence unit, now called the economist impact, we started a study back in 2017, and it was a six‑year time series called "The Inclusive Internet Index."
And it looked at 54, 55 indicators for 100 countries and you have seen some of this. Brazil does quite well.
And we early on, you know, the issue on connectivity was coverage. People did not have available to them a broadband connection. Over the last six or seven years, we ‑‑ and about three years ago, we saw a shift from a coverage gap to a usage gap, and the latest data provided by the ITU and the UN broadband commission three weeks ago in New York at the annual meeting before the UN General Assembly met was that 95% of the world's population now has available to them a broadband connection. There's about 400 million people out of the 8 billion people that do not have a broadband connection available.
And that remaining 400 million will be served by satellite. And that was, you know, a general conclusion, not just by the broadband commission, but by GSMA, mobile operators, satellite operators who were there in the room. And that becomes extremely important.
On the other hand, there's about 2 billion, 2.1 billion people who could be online, who are not online. That is the usage gap. So there are about 2 billion people not connected and then there are people who are underconnected. And this goes to the question about what is ‑‑ you know, about meaningful connectivity.
And so the question is: Why are they not connected? So one of the other projects we did with the economist was, they surveyed people in Sub‑Saharan Africa who were not online, in 23, 24 countries. These are the people not online. The vast majority had a connection potentially available.
The number one reason was affordability of devices and affordable of monthly service. The second reason was the way it was framed, I don't know how to use the Internet or what to use it for. Digital literacy questions. The third major reason was the lack of local, relevant content which also goes to the question of why should somebody be on?
And then there's a separate issue with electricity, no electricity, you are not ‑‑ even if you have devices, you are not going to be able to charge them and so on. So we've seen this shift from a coverage gap to a usage gap, which is about adoption, but why is that important?
It's important because of the focus of the ‑‑ of the session. Being online and we especially learned this during the pandemic provides access to services that are directly related to fundamental human rights, education, the ability not just to receive information but also to speak and create information this is really fundamental when you take a at look at Article 19, not just the organisation, but Article 19.
One the things that the economist did as part of this project was to go into the field in each of those 100 ‑‑ actually, there were ‑‑ it was 98 countries because two countries do not permit surveys. So they couldn't go in the field for a survey in two of the countries, but 98 countries. They asked people, they called it the value of Internet survey. What do you use the Internet for? How do you value it? And what do you ‑‑ you know, how has it improved your life? And in the last two years of the pandemic, it was specifically focused on questions about well‑being.
And what was interesting is especially during the pandemic, the vast ‑‑ actually, it's been region. It's differences in some of the regions, but questions about education, the way people use the Internet for education for their children during the pandemic when things were shut down. And what was a little bit surprising was that people in Sub‑Saharan Africa felt that being online was more important than people in Europe for education for their children. Across the world, as part of that survey, on average, three‑quarters of people, 73% year‑over‑year, so more than one year, 73% of people said access and use of the Internet should be a human right.
And one the things about that, that's interesting is in emerging markets in particular, this was the case. In Sub‑Saharan Africa, it was 76%. Middle East, North Africa, 75%, Asia, 74%, Latin America, 71%. In Europe, it was only 69%, and North America 57%.
Because in Europe and North America, people take being online for granted. That's at least ‑‑ we don't know that that's a fact, that's my presumption, right, that's my hypothesis of why that's lower, because people think, oh, it's, like, turning the water on on the tap. But when you are in parts the world where you cannot take the Internet for granted, people see it as even more important as something that really should be a human right.
So I'll stop there and I'm happy to dive into any more of the data later. I wanted to set the scene with connectivity, why it's important for human rights, broadly, and how there are real data that reinforced that are from both people who are online and from people who are not yet online and then we can have a conversation about how do we get people online so that they can benefit from being online in ways that serve human rights. Thank you.
>> RAQUEL RENNO NUNES: Thank you.
>> JANE COFFIN: I will follow on with another economist story. This is from Liquid Telecom, they provide a lot of fiber. It's to focus on the importance of diversity of networks for access, of course, lowering prices and competition and bringing in more people to the global Internet. Liquid telecom has been providing fiber for years and years. It will change with the LEOs that's going up but that's a whole other cross‑border issue, and I would love to hear Pepper's opinion. It was how hard it was to take fiber from Zambia to South Africa.
The team had to get into a boat after about ‑‑ there were negotiations going on for over a year between the two countries, and part of the hang‑up was an historic bridge. So a cultural ministry was involved on both sides of the border. The telecom ministries were involved on both sides of the border. The regulators were ‑‑ you get the picture in the regulators were involved on both sides of the border.
So a year goes by and there's still no fiber deployed. If you are going into business and deploying fiber, your business model is not a year's wait. It's get the fiber out, get it deployed and you have the investment. Liquid does a lot of work with developing communities and we are not talking about a big corporate giant that doesn't think about working with communities that have been unconnected and underserved.
They finally put some people in a boat and the article in the "Economist" is from July 5th, 2014. Where they said the connectivity was nearly thwarted by a swarm of bees. They put the fellow in the boat. A bunch of bees started to attack the fellow. The CEO took off one of his shirts and wrapped it around his head. And they got in the boat and took the fiber across the river.
There are stories like this across the world, where you have border issues. This is more of a governments just not coming together and negotiating those agreements to quickly get connectivity deployed across those borders. Of course, with mobile networks it's a little different. Sometimes that a power level issue. I used to live in Armenia and there were all sorts of power level issues where people would blast the signal too much from one country to the other and you were picking up the signal from a different operator and paying a lot of money. The.
The point of the story is there are ways that connectivity can be deployed but it gets hung up. If you are advocating for connectivity from a grassroots perspective, you can help with governments. I've worked with Pepper and others here at this table, talking to governments. I was government years ago. It does tamaly stakeholder approach to make sure that governments understand whether it's from a corporate perspective or nonprofit perspective, that there are things that need to be done in order to speed up connectivity. The Liquid story is, of course, one about a company.
I helped to leave a movement here in Guadalajara when I was with the Internet Society, we brought about 40 different community network advocates together from all walks of life to talk about the importance of working together. And you can have more power if you are negotiating whether in an ITU meeting or here or talking to others.
When you are bringing certain concepts together, that are similar, and you can share those stories, and come up with talking points together, because if you are by yourself, sometimes you are not going to make that difference when you are negotiating, with folks that may have more power, quite frankly.
Community networks have come in from a diversification perspective to bring in last mile connectivity. When you talk about community networks, it's not in the manner at least what we were advocating at the Internet citing, what I advocate with a start‑up. We can provide different types of connectivity that some of the bigger providers may not be interested in producing because they don't get a return on investment in certain communities because time and distance equals money, right? If there's only a certain number of people in a certain place, some providers don't go in there because they can't good that return.
The smaller networks, some of these are fixed wireless, some of them are just WiFi, mesh networks are creating change and most recently, I was working with some folks in a place called East Carol Parish in Louisiana. They were tired after the pandemic because they were not connected. This is another story of where public/private partnerships where something called capital stacks which is a fancy term for putting a lot of different types of money together, whether it's concessional capital and/or philanthropic, which means foundations, Grants, banks coming together, companies to provide those loans as well and that's what the capital stacks mean. Blended finance is the other Fancy Pants term for this. It's lots of different things coming together. And you can do that in small towns and poorer communities.
This is what a group called Connect Humanity is doing. Other organisations are looking at this, even some of the folks in the UN, in the Giga project, I don't work with them, I work adjacent to them. You are finding more ways to bring in the PPPs that are very different from the huge infrastructure projects like the dams and roads we saw in the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, I suppose too. Infrastructure is expensive. You talk to anyone in the space who is building out that connectivity, it's billions of dollars to build networks, but it also can be supplanted with the Ms and the tens of thousands of dollars for the smaller networks.
So I'm just here to throw out that there are ways that different types of organisations can work together to achieve the same thing, which is connecting the unconnected and digital skills training. That's a whole separate issue. I won't get into, but I'm more on the infrastructure side, there are ways to work together and it's not as if the capital out there is something evil. You've got to look at capital in a very clinical way, when you are working at that grassroots level. Be as smart as the banks are. Be as smart as the people putting this infrastructure together.
>> THOMAS LOHNINGER: Thank you. My name is Thomas Lohninger. And I'm here with one of the least expertise on the ground when it comes to building community networks. I absolutely think that this is one of the key issues that should be in the focus of this IGF and digital rights debate in general.
And what I may be able to contribute in that regard is to point out how debates that we are having right now globally, but particularly in Europe, are actually working against achieving this goal of connecting the unconnected.
The first thing is that I really want to call out some of the PR campaigns that we have seen in from the telecom industries, the whole debate around 5G with all of the promise of what it should bring. Nothing of this is materialized and I think it would have been ‑‑ that money would have been far better spent actually bringing connectivity of normal, best effort end‑to‑end Internet to all corners of the world and doing it in an affordable manner because, satellite Internet is available everywhere, but it also needs to ‑‑ to come to the people in the form of advice that can be powered, that can be sustained, in the local circumstances.
Now we have debates around 6G, while we just see all of the promises of 5G just imploding on themselves. There's no killar app. There's no new technology that's just empowered by that. It is at best, be a little bit of a faster Internet connection. And what do we see in the countries where this already exists. People are actually not interested. If you have 100 megabit, or 300 Meg bit connection, there's very little reason as a consumer to upgrade. So I would really question the premise of a lot of international telecom debates, and we should ask the question if the energy that is focused and the money is well spent.
And I think we just simply have bigger problems.
And then there's the second big issue that I want to raise which also ties into this whole issue of connecting everyone on the globe together. And that is the issue of network fees. It's also dubbed fair share or fair contribution. This idea which currently is making the round because ETNO, was successful of lobbying a former CEO to adopt this idea. It is a very old idea. We know it from the telephony era. It's basically you want to reach my customers, you have to pay me opinion. This idea of the telephony era is forced upon the interconnection world. So whenever autonomous networks connect with each other, the so‑called interconnection sphere, according to the fair share network fee proposal, there needs to be a lot of money exchanged before that connection can be made.
And if you just think that through, you will see many problems and one particular is that smaller networks will suffer. We already have many small ISPs saying that they are actually afraid of their ability to compete, of their ability to connect to other networks. If such a proposal were to really become law of the land. Because when you are right now looking at the interconnection world, this is not an area to make profit. This is usually nerds connecting networks to each other. It's where we see that some connection is congested and that we have a packet loss. Okay, let's just put another cable there and maybe this cabling connection will cost is the price that you have to pay.
But it's not a way to make money. We see some telecom operators already abusing interconnection as a tool to maximize their profits, and if this were to be the law of the land, if every interconnection would have to follow this principle, then I think we would see many more problems in the global Internet, in terms of right now you can connect to every other point of the internet, which is what we call end‑to‑end. This could be a concept of the past, and maybe we will wake up in a splintered Internet or a fragmented Internet where a few big telecom companies are able to really be reachable globally but all the others might actually have far lower chance of connecting. And that would certainly deteriorate the ability of particularly global majority countries to connect to privacy, frankly alternatives to let's say Googlea or Meta.
And then the last thing that I also want to mention because there's very interesting court case going on and constitutional court of Colombia is the issue of zero rating. So the price differentiation. If you make certain data packages for expensive or cheaper than others. And in many global majority countries, that is a very common way of connecting. So when you buy a SIM card you have free WhatsApp or free Facebook or other services that are given you to no matter if you have gigabytes in your SIM card or not. And that gives an unfair advantage to those are the only one reachable for those would otherwise only have a telephone number and not be able to access the whole Internet.
I think prebasis is a concept that needs to be discussed. It's my hope that the Colombian court follows the Canadian courts with the zero rating. If he with want to bring true connectivity, it needs to encompass the whole Internet and not just a world garden a handful of selected services.
>> RAQUEL RENNO NUNES: Thank you.
Now, we're going to have Nathalia, that is going to be online?
>> NATHALIA LOBO: Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for waiting for me. I had some trouble getting in. Let me try to share my ‑‑ can you all see it there?
No?
>> ROBERT PEPPER: Yes, we can see it, but can you put it in show mode?
>> NATHALIA LOBO: Yep. There you go.
>> ROBERT PEPPER: Great. Thank you.
>> NATHALIA LOBO: So I'm going to talk about a little bit what we have been doing in Brazil on connectivity. So it talks a ‑‑ it talks a lot with what you all have said, mostly Jane and Pepper. Let me tell you what is Brazil, okay, and what ‑‑ what is our challenge.
So Brazil is the fifth largest country in geographical area. We have 2,203,000,000 people, and we have the largest city in Latin America with 12.3 million people, and over 5,500 municipalities and more than actually 40,000 localities.
The largest economy in Latin America and look at our size. Well, there's lots of Europe there. We have parts of Africa. So you can see the size of our challenge. Connecting all the people that are in our Brazillian territory is a challenge, especially when you've got mainly people that you cannot make ‑‑ you can't give for granted think type of technology. You need to have them all working together so that we can get everyone inside the Internet.
So one of our ‑‑ basically, all the policies that we do have in Brazil regarding connectivity have been facing the supply side. So how do we get networks to the people? Today, we manage to get over 90% of our households with connectivity. And how do we achieve the rest of the 10%? That's the deal. So in our 5G auction that we held in November of '21, we had the 5G obligations that over 90% of all economic value into coverage commitments.
Let me talk to you that over $9 billion were in revenue of this spectrum auction, and 90% of it converted to obligations. Most of the difference was paid over reserve price and converted into commitments and these commitments maintained investments until 2030, and they go through 4G obligations and localities. We have over 7500 localities that are going to have 4G mobile broadband that had no service at all.
We're going to have 5G obligations in all 5,570 municipalities and we have also the north ‑‑ the connected north.
This ‑‑ this one is our very dearest project as we have ‑‑ we're going to a region in the north, to the Amazonnic region that connectivity is still poor in terms of quality in terms of resilience and price. So we are deploying 12,000 kilometers of fiber optic cables into the river, the Amazon River beds and making sure that this is ‑‑ the cap ex is public, but what does the maintenance and the operation of these cables afterwards?
Our consortium of 12 different operators that will explore this and do all the maintenance. It's not easy, maintain the cable, these fiber cable ‑‑ this optic fiber, along river beds, as it's you have many type of anchors in the river from the boats that can do ‑‑ that can rip off the fiber optic cables. We have many issues regarding ‑‑ regarding logs on the rivers. There are many issues that make it quite expensive. And this is turning it possible, and so the public/private partnership is making it real in this sense.
Why is this so important for enabling human rights? Well, this is what we are doing there in the Amazon. So this is all of our ‑‑ what our boats are doing, deploying the fiber, the optic fiber cables.
And why is it so important? Well, it's transforming lives in this region. So we have regions that have no Internet and hospitals have no ‑‑ had no way to put their protocols and inside and they had the post office ticking off the information on the patients. And now they can have access to a simple system where they can put all the information inside and now they have access to more resources, may there be medication, into amount of money that it gets to it tend to their patients and telemeds with the best hospitals in Sao Paulo for the people that live there. So there you go, and cools.
The 5G option, we also have a budget for connecting schools. It's a little less than $1 billion, but we are seeking to do the full connectivity there, not only the speed getting into the schools but also all the WiFi and what we ‑‑ what the schools are going to do with this pedagogical use.
So that's a bit how we used the 5G option to bring in some other perspectives that it's not only the private perspective, but public policy.
So we also have the universal fund that we need. So we have many projects to do with this funding, and especially for public points and doing transportation. So we have many financing lines with subsidized revenue.
And so here we go. We have ‑‑ we have these commitments and we have funds to make private investments viable, and we are also talking about now going into public policies in the demand side about usage, about wanting to make tangible benefits into people's lives.
I thank you. That's all for now.
>> RAQUEL RENNO NUNES: Thank you Nathalia. Is this ‑‑ yes.
Do we have questions or ‑‑ because I think ‑‑ I see people here that ‑‑ ah.
>> ROBERT PEPPER: So Nathalia, you point out something that's actually really, really important. One the biggest barriers to getting people connected is less in the access, the backhaul and the middle mile is absolutely one of the barriers.
So the project by laying the fiber in the river, the Amazon to bring broadband connectivity to those regions right, that is essential. And another example of that is something that we did partnering with Airtel and a small company called BCS in Uganda back in 2017, 2018. Airtel had a 4G network across the Kampala, the urban areas in Uganda, but it did not have 4G ‑‑ it had cell sites across Uganda and covered 90% of the population but in the rural northwest part of Uganda, it was 2G. It was GSM, 2G, SMS, they couldn't dot Internet. The reason was they couldn't get backhaul to the tower sites. They only had microwave. They couldn't get broadband.
One the projects we did was build a wholesale backhaul 770 piles northwest Uganda, where there were no roads across the Nile. It was open cable and there was capacity for all the operators. It enables Airtel to convert from 2G to 4G and so this is very analogous to the project in Brazil, which is like, really, really important.
I would like to respond, the zero rating is very, very important, Thomas. I think there was an evolution from Free Basics which was limited to a less than perfect but much, much better and actual little net neutral called Discovery so it used a proxy server so any application or website is available, as opposed to having the selecton on the old Free Basics which is an 8 to 10‑year‑old project.
What is interesting is the way people use it, actually benefits people. It's not a ‑‑ a degraded Internet. A lot of people are using it one of two ways an introduction to being online and then people actually want to be online ‑‑ one of the evolving uses of it is extraordinarily pro consumer and that is especially in emerging markets and dozens of countries, people would rely on prepaid data packs, data plans. What happens is in the past when they ran out of their data plan and they could not afford to top up, they were disconnected.
But what is happening in many, manies in many countries is that when people finish, fill up ‑‑ they run out of their data plan, they ‑‑ using the zero rating version of the narrow band connection, stay connected so they have something and then when they can top up, they go back to their full plan. And so it actually helps both of consumer and the operator in that there's no transaction of having to be reconnected or redo plans or anything else.
Again, it's not perfect but it has a very, very positive social and consumer benefit but the idea is eventually ‑‑ I mean, everybody will want to be on the fully accessible Internet with all the applications. And that's, I think, everybody's goal, but ‑‑ and by the way, when the FCC had its, you know, net neutrality rules which were very stringent under the Wheeler Commission, they found that this was nothing inherently anti‑net neutrality related to zero rating. There were some zero rating services that they found anticompetitive and violated net neutrality. There were others that were net neutral and that were pro consumer.
And so it was nothing inherent in zero rating that was anticompetitive. And, in fact, it was before some of these other developments. Its no the black and white. I think it's also a good example of where we're extremely aligned on some things and not others which is sleight fine. I didn't know how familiar you were with discover or the way people are now using it especially in emerging markets to bridge top ups so they can stay connected at least a basic level and then they can top up and have the full Internet experience.
>> THOMAS LOHNINGER: Maybe if we can go into that point.
>> RAQUEL RENNO NUNES: Mm‑hmm.
>> THOMAS LOHNINGER: So the problem with zero rating is really what ‑‑ what we have seen in the market, and it's worth looking at those concrete options and how they are priced. When you go to the wiki Edie article for net neutrality, you will find that article, it's the infamous smart net from the Portuguese provider. And it was 54 times cheaper than normal Internet gigabytes. So we have a drastic difference in affordability of certain services over others. And this Internet Al a carte, where certain things are bought is the worst thing, we can all agree.
There's certainly been a evolution to class‑based zero base. They were considered in Canada and they said that's not a viable option. In Europe, that was the reading of regulators how it could be admissible from 2016 to 2021 and in '21, the European court of justice found that, no, it's contrary to equal treatment of traffic if you price differently.
And why did the court find that? It's actually an additional effort on the side of the telecom company to calculate packages differently to have not just your monthly allowance for this service, this service and the rest of the Internet. So it is, I think ‑‑ it's hard to make a case from the perspective of a telecom operator why it should be easier and cheaper to roll out these zero rating offers instead of as you just said the goal ‑‑ and I think we agree on that ‑‑ is an be application agnostic form of access. And that could be a low bandwidth. That could be something that's tailored for maybe low energy devices or other particular needs where you simply will not be able to stream 4K video. That's totally fine.
The thing we want to avoid is once the monthly data cap is left off, you are left with nothing or you are only left with WhatsApp and if the coverage is that. I haven't looked into it. I think we have to understand the rights from lower‑income households have the freedom to choose all the things the Internet.
I mean, it's also the freedom to innovate which is most at stake with the zero rating office. When Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, he did so because he had a full fledged Internet connection in his dormitory and wasn't limited to consumer‑only Internet.
>> ROBERT PEPPER: Yeah, and that's why the newer versions of that ‑‑ so the ‑‑ first the FCC found that there were some zero rating services where there was discriminatory pricing for some video versus other video as provided by the telecom. All right?
In terms of the ways zero rating was imy elemented. On the other hand, if you think about ‑‑ implemented. On the other hando if you think about Discovery, a low bandwidth. It's not streaming video. It's a low bandwidth version, but it's not just WhatsApp it's not a separate WhatsApp service versus being online, it's a zero rated service that is essentially everything but at a very low speed rate until you top up. And again, it's not black and white. I'm happy to take it offline to have that conversation. It's an important difference and distinction and using it as a bridging access for everything, but at a very low data rate until they top up. I don't think it's black or white or either or.
I think the more important point going back to the earlier part of the conversation is some of the, you know, ways in which telcos want to have network fees and they call it fair share, which is based upon the architecture and the economics of telecom termination monopoly.
So the reality is you can have a lot of choice on the originating end, so I may have four or five operators that want my business. And then so there's a lot of competition.
Once I select my operator right, your network, if we want to talk to each other, if you want to send me messages or videos or whatever, the termination is a monopoly, because there's only ‑‑ once I pick my network, your network must terminate. There's no choice.
And that's why ‑‑ and a lot of this is purely accidental in Europe there was a development of calling party pays or sender network pays, and that created and reinforced the termination monopoly.
In the US, just the different model, we had a bill and keep arrangement. So I pay for my air time, whether I'm originating, sending or receiving. That eliminated the termination monopoly. As a result, the choice of the network connection is where it should be, on the originating end.
Now, what does that mean? It means that if the telecom networks want to use termination monopoly on interconnection, they want to use termination monopoly to raise fees, they want to use termination monopoly to extract rents, because they have that if they interconnect to me, it's a monopoly.
In fact, the European Commission in looking at mobile roaming, defined termination as a separate market with significant market power. And that's ‑‑ at the core, the crux, of the ‑‑ a lot of the ‑‑ what we are hearing from the telcos on the fair share and network fee issue.
>> RAQUEL RENNO NUNES: There's one person waiting.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: My name is Gerald James. I have a lot of questions. I'm hearing a lot about capitalization of bandwidth and how people would need to spend more money to get access to be able to stream, you know, if their data packages are running out and topping off and allowing subsidies to top off into these communities. I think it's really interesting to focus maybe on the fact that that premise is really locked into the traditional way of dealing with data which is coming from a western community.
I think where we are counting minutes and data packages is long gone for many people in the west. When we look at an Internet in the future where streaming platforms will have higher quality videos that will require more ban width and we are trying to do these mitigations. Isn't valuable to take the high bandwidth that people are regularly looking for as this gentleman over here in the green tie was speaking in his session a few days ago, I don't even think he knows I'm referencing him. A lot of people do bricklayers as a regular thing that's Googled and that's advancing their year. Why do they have to Google it several times? Many members in their community have that.
This is where I'm curious about we are potentially looking at the ways that telcos are gamifying and they are to the doing very obvious movements to ensure that while they are able to mine the transaction of data for communication purposes between people, they can say, hey, yeah, we can provide you with communication access. Does that really mean that every resource that is beneficial to that person's life which objectively is a lot of educational resources should be reliant on that ability to create monetary value and give it to teleco companies so they can learn skills and achieve a greater life.
It seems like a catch‑22 and it seems premised that we are expecting other companies to pay up and use data packages like we have done it. These some of the questions I have.
>> THOMAS LOHNINGER: That's an interesting question. I mean, we ‑‑ there is a debate in this direction over the years.
It reminds me about Wikipedia zero which was a project from the Wikipedia Foundation to zero rate access to local Wikipedia and they did partnership with some telecom companies and disclosure, they were criticized by many people, including me, and the foundation decided to sunset this project in 2017. Something around that line.
And one of the reasons why they sunset it is it didn't work. The access numbers tore the zero rated service were ridiculously low. And we didn't get an answer of why ‑‑ like the concept sounds, of course, very good and we had similar fears in the pandemic, that suddenly everything went online. And that means low‑income households have potentially only caps on the data they could use.
And in your question, this was a call to think outside of the box, and here it's maybe interesting to look at Finland. In Finland, you cannot find a data plan that has a data cap. They differentiate by a speed. It's always a flat rate. This is a much fairer business model. The data volume is negligible. It's expensive to build the network and connect it, but then afterwards whether there's data, you might have congestion if there's too many people at the same time.
But then a bandwidth‑based system is helping you to allocate those resources much better than if you give everyone 5G connection with 3 gigabytes which can be used like in one concert if you are streaming it.
And, yeah.
So I think these hard questions need to be asked.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: When they were sunsetting that process, was it access numbers in communities where they ‑‑ I work with ‑‑ I would extensively with populations that have been shut down from the Internet and overwhelmingly the information that is looked up and is searched for is oftentimes health‑related. Because health facilities are destroyed inside of conflicts and there's a lot of this questions around the access numbers. How much was done in communities that had zero connectivity to the greater world as a resiliency measure it seems more valuable to revisit those connection questions and access points.
>> THOMAS LOHNINGER: Good question. I can give you that answer, but there's a Wikipedia Foundation booth around the corner.
>> ROBERT PEPPER: Thomas to your point and very related. A lot of the data plans and the name of network management are total data consumption not related to congestion, right?
So two gigabytes, right, I'm in downloading that or off peak this' no impact on the network right?
Now if everybody is trying to access and network at the same time, you end up with congestion, but the reality is, right, that are the legacy telco, their network architecture, their business model, and the regulation was all based upon some fundamental principles.
The metric was the minute. Because it was about voice.
The longer the distance, the higher the cost. The longer the duration you were on, higher the cost. When you have a flat IP network. Once we got to 4G, it was a flat IP network. Once you are connected, how much you use that network does not vary until you hit the limit. That's where the congestion comes in. If you use it only a little bit or a lot, as long as you are under that technical architecture, the cost is not variable.
And yet, you still have legacy models based upon minute of use and distance and time which are no longer relevant using the flat IP architectures of today's data networks whether they are wireless, or fixed. And that goes to your point, Thomas, which is really important because a lot of these plans are premise upon total data consumed and that may have no relationship whatsoever to network congestion. Right? And, you know ‑‑ go ahead. I mean ‑‑
>> THOMAS LOHNINGER: Just to put a finer point on this, like ‑‑ or to put it bluntly, if you are operating a mobile network in a country where connectivity is an issue, and it's late night hours, where the network is idle, it's the only reason it's not a flat rate because it's wasted resources. The bandwidth is there. It costs them nothing, it's just corporate greed and their business model reasons for not opening the floodgates and let people use it.
(Off microphone comment).
>> JANE COFFIN: One of the things that was mentioned in the description of the paneel was innovative models for connectivity. There's a model that is not new, but it's new to the United Statessish. It's called structural separation networks where someone might build and manage the network but other networks can run on top of it, and this is a way to also cut down on costs. This is on the cap ex side and op ex. The municipalities are asking for more accountability from the companies providing connectivity, suggesting that they not run, because I want to be really clear that governments probably aren't the best at running networks. There's a reason for that. Anyway, companies some companies are better at running the networks at a cost that can help people. They allow different networks to provide services over the top of the network so you could have a $10 email only network and this is, of course, prices that make sense in that economy but it won't be the same in an emerging environment.
Another company could come in and run their services over that network as well. It could be full‑on video streaming who knows but there are different models being explored. I think it's important that for many people who are here that are interested in what could be done, there are lots of other people that you can network with. You can talk to some of the community networks that are also coming into play that are actually solid networks. They are not flaky. When people hear the term "community network" they're like, oh, a bunch of crazy people running a network. You're like, no. No: These are smart technologists and know how to run network and it's not fly‑by‑night in that sense.
But knowing your business plan, I do want to put this out there and I hope I don't sound too business‑y but you have to think about how you continue to run your network. You can't just build the network and hope, that you know, people are going to come and buy the services you you've got to have a plan and those plans have to last longer than a year and subsidization, and a lot of of the community networks are zero return. They can continue to supply the network but they are not taking a lot off the top.
>> ROBERT PEPPER: Nathalia, did you have anything to say in it's difficult to ‑‑
>> NATHALIA LOBO: Hello, do you hear me?
>> ROBERT PEPPER: Yes.
>> NATHALIA LOBO: Well, I believe that the madel that structured today has been able to achieve a great amount of people to get inside and that maintenance is fundamental. If you have no incentives for people to stay ‑‑ to maintain their networks, maybe you get some problems on making people go why they don't have the interest to go. So we need to create these incentives.
In Brazil, we have a great. ‑‑ we have had a great help from full ISPs. Today more than 52% of our fixed networks in fiber is done by small ISPs. And it's not that the big operators have lost market. No, that's not it. It's just a different model that they accept different returns and they have different business plans. For them, it is very good structure. They sometimes ‑‑ we did have to do some regulatory adoption like making authorization for these fixed networks easier, helping, providing some different ‑‑ some different issues for when they are small IS Ps than large regulators.
But these have enabled these new business models and making Internet viable in this great, great amount of localities. If today we have 90% of the households with the Internet, it's because of these models. I believe that it's a sustainable model that makes things viable if you have no incentives for corporations to maintain that, then you won't have them actually doing and then you have the result that people have no Internet.
So idea here is we need ‑‑ people need incentives.
Everyone does.
We are driven by incentives. So what is the incentive that you are going to make if your network doesn't receive any ‑‑ your investment and all the labor that you put in it is not paid up? Then you just don't expand anymore. You don't have new localities being connected. So maybe these models where you have subsidies and financing and some different models where we can take ‑‑ take by the hand and see that, okay, what do you need? And what are the facility ‑‑ what can we do to facilitate you to operate and make these costs a little bit lower so that they can come in?
>> JANE COFFIN: Nathalia, it's Jane. Can we ask you about universal service in Brazil.
>> NATHALIA LOBO: Of course.
>> JANE COFFIN: Are you looking at using Universal Service Funds or universal service access funds sometimes known as USFs or USAFs, are you using that to help all types of networks, the smaller ones, like the community networks or the municipal networks, as well as just the traditional telconets and mobile networks? I'm curious because we have a panel tomorrow, Senko and I, who is one of my colleagues and we are talking about universal service funding but this strikes me this might be a good topic to make folks in the room aware of, some of them are quite aware of. Brazil has been so innovative in what they are doing in the space. I would be curious no know if you are reaching out past the traditional telcos to provide U. SF funding to?
>> NATHALIA LOBO: So USF is ‑‑ was modernized, in 2021 and we are building it up from zero. It was never used before because it was all dedicated to fixed network to telephony, fixed telephony, and we have the need for the usage was close to zero and difficult to use. We had it modernized and with we can do broadband and connectivity issues, right? Like from ICTs to digital transformation. It's based on three basic models, set cost projects financing and guarantees. Brazil, these small IS Ps have many problems to access to ‑‑ to financing because of these guarantees that they need to offer. So the financing lines are almost all dedicated to ISPs, not the traditional operators with subsidized funding. The project costs ‑‑ the, we are structuring them, but basically the idea is to give services out and have the best price. So we're talking about school connectivity. We have 138,000 schools that we need to connect with WiFi by 2026, okay?
So we're just taking would does it for less? That's the idea. I don't want to know would is doing it. I just want the service to be done, well done and who gives me the best price so I can do more schools. That's the idea.
Okay?
>> ROBERT PEPPER: A follow‑up to that, Nathalia goes to ‑‑ again, I want to go back to the shift from a coverage gap, to affordable of usage and devices and just as an example, in the six or receive seven year time series, it's actually quite interesting, among the highest income countries, the usage gap 2017 was about 15%, and then that declined by 2022 to about 9.5%. In other words, so all but 9.5% of people who could get online, because they had mobile ‑‑ or they had broadband fixture. In the lowest income countries, mostly Sub‑Saharan Africa, but not exclusively, the usage gap in 2017 was 76%. In other words, 76% of people who could not ‑‑ who could be online were not. That only declined in 2022 to 78%. So the digital divide had grown between the highest income countries and the low environment income countries and it was not because of the, they was not available. It was because of these other variables, particularly affordability of devices and service.
So one of the recommendations that was made, including by the most recently broadband commission was to repurpose some ‑‑ at least some of Universal Service Funds to target subsidies for devices since we no longer need as much subsidy on the network side. And there are programmes that provide subsidies to low‑income people, right, and then let them choose who they want their network operator to be, and so it introduces competition, going back to your point about incentives. So if people have money to buy things it gives the network operators incentives to serve them, right, and do so competitively. So a question would be for your session tomorrow, and also Nathalia, which in terms of the 2021 reform of universal service in Brazil, which was huge. It was a huge step forward, whether those funds can be used today to subsidize devices or if there are any funds going directly to low‑income people to empower them to buy competitively from operators.
>> NATHALIA LOBO: So our fund, actually, one the programs that we do have already established, yes, we can give subsidies to small, little income families. We do have structured also project that is called Brazil which is giving neutral SIM cards, distributing them, and then we can do best ‑‑ best offers for some and then give access to already the best price and cost availability, actually of service for those people that have very low income, because even that in some places is a little bit complicated. For them to buy. The idea is that we have these SIMs and then you can do the ‑‑ the government ‑‑ the government can do those procurements and offer the ‑‑ so when someone has a better offer, then you can change it without having to change the SIMs and things like that.
So, yes, it is something that is structured. There's always a discussion on should we voucher telecom or should we just give the families the income so they can choose whether they use it on telecom or they use it by need. That's the ‑‑ that's the last thing, but yes we do have that.
We still have an issue that we are trying to understand better, which is what you were commenting. It's not only about access. It's about making it meaningful. So we still have the devices which we don't have alternatives yet. How can we get better prices here? When are the ‑‑ would we adopt some models to get some subsidized financing? How would that be? This is something that is still to be designed. That's why we are working on this digital ‑‑ this meaningful plan which we try to understand better which are these limits and affordability goes in that sense that I already told you but devices are still here but then we have too also, the people that have access okay, but they opt not to. And how do we bring them into the net? And that's the meaningful connectivity part where it's the usage and making it ‑‑ transforming connection into tangible benefits that make the difference in their lives and so that really happened in the pandemic. We got many people inside the net because they needed to get ‑‑ to caulk to their relatives. They needed to get information online and they needed to have all of these ‑‑ these vaccination information. They needed to have access to public health system so that was really a driver, but we still have many people outside and most of them have ‑‑ has to do with this lack of interest to use which is really ‑‑ I don't know how to use it.
>> ROBERT PEPPER: And that's very consistent. I don't know whether you were very connected at the very beginning. He know you were having difficulties. It was one ‑‑ I know you were having difficulties. It was one the things I discussed with the Economist Intelligence Unit and it was affordability, back of the ‑‑ people would say I don't know how to get on why I should, right? And this is relevance of local applications egov and education which tend to be, you know, many countries most countries government functions are actually huge drivers because it actually creates a reason that people will be on and want to use and benefit from being online and then there's the digital literacy and how do I get on safely and how do I feel comfortable being online. Those are the readiness issues of getting online. It sounds like ‑‑ and, you know, I know because of working with colleagues in Brazil. Brazil is one of the leaders in actually having a broader plan to do that, but more generally, these are the issues more on the demand side than the supply side. When you think of all the components and the declaration of human rights, the ability to not just get information but to be a speaker, or provide information about, you know, your lively hood, health care being healthy and owl of those things that are related are on the application side. Those are extremely important. And those are things that actually drive demand and by the way the telcos should be interested in that in a positive way because more people get on, they actually are customers.
And they generate revenue. But sometimes as Thomas pointed out, they do things that are contrary to getting people online, which I don't understand.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi, everyone, my name is Natan, I'm from Brazil, I have work with Data Privacy data. I have a question for Nathalia. Recently the telecommunication agency created a network on Internet communication networks and ministry of communication has a seat on it and I would like to hear a little bit more about what you are doing there what are you planning with this Working Group, considering tag community networks in Brazil doesn't have any specific regulation and struggles with a lot of barriers to build themselves in Brazil. So if you could comment on that a little bit, I would appreciate it. Thank you.
>> NATHALIA LOBO: Yeah, I'm the one that's in the Working Group. So pleasure.
Well, the group is discussing how do we build something for community networks. As I said before, we have had very ISPs have done a lost work that many, many times are done by community networks. And the idea of this Working Group is to better understand how this community networks actually operate in Brazil and what are their needs? How can we structure something because each one is very specific in their models, in their ‑‑ in the ways of working in community. So we have to understand how that ‑‑ how can we make specific directives so that we can make specific policies.
We don't ‑‑ it's kind of ‑‑ you can't do something on the specific case that's very difficult. So how can we manage to make these communities viable, first? What are their needs and how can we as a public policy also help these projects go on ‑‑ go ‑‑ happen ‑‑ actually happen. How do we know that this is a good community network and that that's not a good way of going for community networks that not everyone is exactly the same.
So this Working Group is going to have some study results and in that sense, from then on, we can do ‑‑ we can start operating something that works for them.
That's the idea. Understand.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi, everyone. I'm Carlos Vaka, I'm from Mexico. I work in an organisation, a community network and we help other communities to get connected through this model.
So I just went to Brazil in July to see what happened with the national school of community there, and I saw a very similar situation with other communities, you know? That it is ‑‑ that the communities have very expensive prices. Really, really expensive, no?
In Chihuahua in Mexico where we work, we have people ‑‑ people need to have at least $3 or $4 a day to be connected.
So what the young people are doing now to be connected to Facebook, to YouTube, to WhatsApp, et cetera, et cetera is involve in the narco, the crime, the organized crime, you know, the drugs, the drug sellers, no, they are now part of it, because in ‑‑ you know in the northern Mexico, with have this problem very much. And so we are seeing that the people spend a lot of money to be connected. There is a lot of ‑‑ so very, very, very community they have one point but it's very bad connection, you know? And sometimes people spend a lot of money to increase this and this infrastructure for the WISP and then they need to pay for insurance. It's a big problem that we are seeing because we think that they are doing this job that we just need to do.
So I'm not saying that we don't need to work with the WISP. We work a lot with them in Mexico, for example, but we need to establish some conditions to better understand what is happening really in the communities, not only what they are, you know, reporting obviously, and what they are doing.
So I think this is one of the things I wanted to address.
And another one is that as they say in Oaxaca, and this is a question for Nathalia, there is a lot of fiber, you know, and in a lot of ways and very near from the communities but the government doesn't have the access for the fiber networks for the communities. So ‑‑ they have a lot of expectation about this project, no, is what I found but they are also thinking, what ‑‑ why can't they connect to this fiber network? I think it's important to reach that and finally, the last question, I think it's very, very difficult to try to define what is a community network and you know say that this is good and this is a bad community network. And we need to to in understand better that maybe it is the main characteristic is that the people in the community it handle in the different ways the infrastructure and the services they have. So if you think the community networks in Africa, they are more like little business models that is very different from one community network in Colombia or Mexico where there's a lot of political organisation.
So we need to escape things, as Jane said, we have to ‑‑ now we have very good examples of how it's working in the communities and the same as the community radios as 10 or 20 years, we need to escape through all the imagination and ‑‑ with these thoughts that to say that there are not so good services but ‑‑ but things, no? There are ‑‑ they don't have quality, et cetera, et cetera. We need also to think in this panel. It's a complex issue and trying to understand what exists around the community networks.
>> RAQUEL RENNO NUNES: It's okay. They are going to disconnect her in two minutes.
>> NATHALIA LOBO: Okay. Well, I was very surprised about the $2 or $3 a day for connection.
Well, the idea of the north connected is that when this is all installed you have new 12 companies at least working on the region and some of them are just for capacity. They are just transport operators. So actually, you are dealing much more offer and competition in the region so that these big prices don't happen anymore.
That's why we built we had the why the to build the north connected so better quality services get there. That's one point.
That's one point. The second point is that what I said about the bad community networks is that how do I not finance ‑‑ there's some people that may fake a community network so they get some public financing and how do I as a public servant know that that one is going into those good ‑‑ those important networks that community networks do work well?
It's not the question if communicate networks are necessary or not. It's just how do I just take away the ‑‑ the bad ‑‑ the bad stuff, the non‑ ‑‑ the nonlegal stuff from the ‑‑ from the ‑‑ from all this groups.
So that's the idea to better understand that.
And there's always something that community networks do that others don't. ISPs don't do, which is making the connectivity meaningful. So this appropriation of technology, of information, and making the learning among that community and distributing information on how to better work on that virtual world. So that's something that we don't know how to do it, but the government is still tackling in Brazil. We are still tackling how do deal with that next phase.
So I believe that we have all the synergies to make that happen. We need to studdity a little bit more so we can structure something that we can go forward with.
Did I answer everything?
>> RAQUEL RENNO NUNES: Thank you. Thank you, everyone. It was ‑‑