World Dialogue on Regulation

"Wireless networks have become the technology of choice for increasing access to phone and Internet services in developing countries. They are not only cheaper, easier and faster to deploy than traditional landline alternatives, but also make possible business and service delivery models better adapted to rural, low income communities."

- from the executive summary of the paper A New Model for Rural Connectivity prepared by Al Hammond and John Paul for the World Resouces Institute.

This paper provides a good summary of the potential to create community level networks offered by new low-cost technologies - it demonstrates clearly that we are on the brink of a new and much cheaper technology.

But it avoids a key issue and the real potential. Will most of the benefit of these new low cost network go to existing mobile and other commercial operators, as they rapidly build these and grab new customers in poorer communities? Or will the huge empowering potential for communities, to build and run their own networks, be gained and all the development potential that goes with it?

These really are radically different outcomes.

If we let commercial companies, even nationally-owned ones, claim this new 'market', then - granted - we should see some falling prices and more widely available services. But in the long run, we see major profits sucked out, prices higher than they need be, services and tariffs not tailored to local development needs, and ultimately the consolidation of such 'local' companies into large conglomerates just as remote as existing GSM/CDMA operators.

On the other hand, if we can develop a dynamic towards locally and democratically (cooperatively) owned networks, anchored into local communities and existing solely to serve them, then we will see the profits going back into the community, services and tariffs tailored to  local needs, and most important the entire dynamic of these enterprises feeding into local empowerment and wider development activities.

This is exactly the experience of cooperative networks in Poland described in the case study Rural Telephony Cooperatives in Poland: WIST and Tyczyn in the book Bruce Girard and I did, Community-based Networks and Innovative Technologies: New models to serve and empower the poor.