The communications revolution -- the internet for short -- is still so new that discussing it entails telling stories: history in second draft.

When the internet reached wide public notice -- in Britain, as long ago as 1993 -- it was discussed as a communication medium. Much was made of its startling new features, and its possible impacts on our cultures. Possibly the feature which gained most attention was its anonymity -- or, in the words of the now-notorious New Yorker cartoon, "On the internet, no-one knows you're a dog".

The more interesting features of this new medium, to this author, are these:

• This is, above all, inherently a many-to-many medium. It is thus, potentially, as different from the culture of the Book -- of few-to-many communication -- as that is from the oral tradition of few-to-few.
• Everyone who is on the internet is in the same place. There is very little difference in cost and convenience between internet communication with someone on the other side of the city and that with someone on the other side of the world. Communities of communication can therefore be expected to form around common interests, and not around common physical location: "ideography" replaces geography. (Holderness1994a)

From the notions of anonymous communication, from the relative ease of "publishing", and with a certain amount of support from the above more fundamental features, there arose a rhetoric of the internet as an eraser of difference. In the brave (perhaps brave) new (truly new) world, "the native home of Mind", (Barlow 1993) all intelligent entities would be free to communicate without restriction of gender, colour or tribe.

And then the Men in Suits hit the net, and the picture, or the discourse, changed. The continued growth of the network required investment; investment required ways of making money out of a network which had thus far been financed invisibly from education and research budgets, mostly in the USA. (Holderness 1994b) The emphasis changed from talk to trade:

Telecommunications has made it possible to develop global markets for goods, services, money and information. The rise of the global information economy in turn is transforming human life, nationally, regionally, locally, and within the family. Today, everything is changing because of telecommunications -- the nature of work, relationships with people, media, messages, and patterns of political life. The talk is of information superhighways and global information infrastructures, with the potential to improve the `human capital' -- the health, education and skills of everyone.

• Dr. Pekka Tarjanne, Secretary-General, International Telecommunication Union (Tarjanne 1995)

A minor discourse had already developed about the possible effect of exclusion from this new world of communication and learning. While the internet was almost entirely a phenomenon of academia, it was clear that places which did not have access to the internet were going to fall behind in the research and education stakes. (Holderness 1993b)

Assume, for the moment, that you can type, in English. Assume that you have access to the necessary equipment. Assume that you're able and prepared to learn the sometimes baroque commands needed to access the system. Assume that you're tolerant of the fact that when you make a mistake, as you will, the system may fail to notify you at all, or may throw screeds of gobbledegook at you.

For these assumptions to be true, you're quite likely either to be a member of an academic institution in a Western industrialised country, or very well-to-do in world terms. You're also likely to be male. And the public area of the news system bears this out. An high proportion of messages -- over 90% in an unrepresentative sample of discussions of physics -- comes from the USA. An even higher proportion (of those with identifiable senders) comes from men.

• (Holderness 1993a)

Such questioning of the universality of the internet was met with hostility from insiders, for example:

The [above] article is to be commended for pointing out some of the new uses for the net, but somehow, just like in a conversation with a religious zealot, the feminist dogma just had to surface... This attempt to view and understand the nature of the net through the refractive, narrowly focused theology of a fringe group flaws the article very badly...

• (Landwehr 1993)

Four years later, it remains the case that the sharpest, most clearly enumerable divides in cyberspace are those based on where one lives and how much money one has.

As increasing amounts of trade move into cyberspace -- whether trade in the information of facts and entertainment whose true home may be said to be the network, or trade in material goods mediated through promotion, contacts, contracts and payments in cyberspace -- we face a growing risk that these divides become self-reinforcing. We face another depressing vicious cycle of increasing relative poverty: not only "information poverty", but relative material poverty, the absence of what others come to regard as material necessities. It not difficult to construct scenarios in which absence of access to communications leads to local increases in absolute poverty.

In an increasingly knowledge-based economy, information is becoming at least as important as land and physical capital. In the future, the distinction between developed and non-developed countries will be joined by distinctions between fast countries and slow countries, networked nations and isolated ones.

• (Baranshamaje 1995: 2)

In order to assess the depth of this divide, Section 1 examines the measures of the spread of "internet access" among the world's people, and Section 2 considers the very different levels of "internet access" available in different places. The situation is changing extremely rapidly. Section 3 examines as an example the spread of internet access in Africa.

What does it matter? Those who do have access to the new communication technologies, of course, gain access to new sources of information and, probably, to new forms of cultural expression; and those who do not are thus relatively deprived. But this is not all. Section 4 describes ways in which inadequate access to communications may affect people's material well-being.

These sections indicate that the market, left to itself, will not address the inequality of people's access to communications. Positive political intervention will be required. Section 5 concludes by briefly examining some of the directions this should take if it is to bridge rather than exacerbate the divide.

1: How widely is the Net cast?

In September 1969, four computers on the West Coast of the United States were connected together as part of an Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) experiment. (Hobbes 1994) This was the first physical manifestation of the internet.

Since then, statistics have been maintained on the numbers of computers connected to the internet and, since the first international connections were made (to the UK and Norway) in 1973, of the states and territories in which the network is accessible.

These record an impressive case of continuing exponential growth. Especially when presented in graphical form, they give an impression of the internet inexorably spreading across the globe. Larry Landweber's maps, distributed by the Internet Society, categorise territories as having full internet access, Bitnet but not the internet proper, electronic mail only through UUCP or FIDOnet links (see Glossary) or no connectivity.

Landweber's latest map (Landweber 1996) suggests an almost-complete project. (There were by 1996 no countries in the "Bitnet but not internet" category.)

Almost the whole world, it seems from a casual inspection of this map, has turned internet-coloured. The sun never sets on the internet; it appears to reach everywhere except some war-torn corners of the world.

Consider, however, that only in North America, Japan, Europe, and Australia is there a genuine national communications infrastructure. There may be a full internet connection at the University in Ulan Bator, but ten kilometres away there are no telephones.

As a first approximation at a realistic map, the author has faded the colours of non-metropolitan areas outside the OECD countries. In addition, in an attempt to correct the perceptual distortion inherent in the map projection used, the author has "greyed out" major tundras, icefields and deserts:

The picture is rather different; and it is not dissimilar to a map of per-capita income -- or, for that matter, one of where the white folks are.

This map, it should be noted, is an approximate freehand adjustment for illustrative purposes.

Table 1 shows the availability of telephones and PCs in the top 40 world economies. It demonstrates the wide disparities even within this severely limited range of countries. It does not deal with disparities within the countries in question. The author has not found any data on this; but, given the clear correlation with cash income, it is scarcely credible that the balance is not overwhelmingly in favour of urban men.

The availability of communication capacity is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for individuals to join the communications revolution.

Consider what an individual needs in order to send and receive electronic mail:

• a computer (a 1990 "antique" will do nicely for sending messages);
• a modem (to convert computer files to and from a code of squawks which can be sent over the phone);
• a functioning phone line (of relatively high quality by Southern standards);
• a reliable supply of electricity; and
• an "account" for their modem to dial up (that is, permission to use facilities on a computer which itself has a link to the rest of the internet).

A new computer with a modem costs about one year's unemployment benefit in the UK; or about the annual income of three schoolteachers in Calcutta; or about 50 times development economists' estimate of a bare subsistence income in Calcutta (Rs6 a day).

2: Rich net or poor net?

In order to understand the full nature of the divide, it is necessary to delve a little into the technology. Not all internet connections are created equal.

Our Mission is to provide a Information footpath within the country interconnecting Universities, Schools, Government societies, R&D organisations and research laboratories throughout the Nation.

• Ernet (India's Education and Research Network) home page: emphasis added Ernet (1997)

The author connects to the internet over a normal UK telephone line at a speed of 28,800 to 40,000 bits per second (see Glossary). To fetch the text of this chapter at that speed takes about 10 seconds; each of the (rather low-fi) maps above takes 20 to 30 seconds.

Until Spring 1997, the whole of India's Education and Research Network (Ernet) relied on a link to the outside world with a capacity of 64,000 bits per second -- which is to say that the author and two friends had, between them, more internet communication capacity as all the students and researchers in India put together. The author alone has three times the "bandwidth" of the entire University of Madras.

Ernet had by April 1997 trebled its international bandwidth; its "information footpath" was now equivalent to the connectivity of a whole half dozen individuals in the North. The result is to produce a severe bottleneck in interactive electronic communication between India and the rest of the world: the quotation above arrived from Ernet's Web site in India at a rate of approximately 30 bits per second, which indicates that it was at that moment competing for bandwidth with up to 4000 other requests to transfer Web documents in or out of India.

The newer technology of the World-Wide Web places much more strenuous demands on communications links -- because users demand "real-time" responses rather than being prepared to wait an hour or ten -- than does electronic mail. Consider a situation where two suppliers are competing for purchasers' attention as they browse the Web for products: one, in the USA, can respond within seconds and the other, in India, takes hours.

Meanwhile, internet technology is not sufficient for the multimedia entertainment and "infotainment" applications envisaged for relatively wealthy consumers in the North. As some Southern countries are expanding their entire internet connectivity from an intermittent 9600 or 14,400 bits per second to a whole 1 megabit per second... "virtual reality" applications which require more than 1 megabit per second per household are being dreamed up. (Holderness 1996b) Revised internet "protocols" to deal with greater need for security, and a massively expanded demand for "addresses", are under development (Castineyra 1992) This is already being transformed into a subset (Malis 1995) of ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode). (ATM Forum 1997)

Possible interim solutions to the problem of basic public connectivity include, in urban areas, fixed-location cellular phones, which are often cheaper than putting a lot of copper into the ground. However, the amount of digital information which these systems can transport is not likely to be sufficient for more demanding applications than electronic mail. Installing cellular base stations in rural areas with few potential subscribers is not a profitable activity, though in some cases it may offer a cheaper means of installing subsidised telephones than copper wire.

There are a number of proposals for Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites which would provide telephone service to a hand-held receiver anywhere on the surface of the planet. The Iridium scheme, (Lockheed 1993) led by Motorola, (Motorola 1995) proposes hand-held mobile phones with 9600-bit- per-second data connections for $2000 (Holderness 1993c).

The similar TeleDesic scheme (Teledesic 1995), proposed by Bill Gates of Microsoft fame and another billionaire, Craig McCaw, promises higher bandwidth. As with Iridium, TeleDesic's coverage for the South is a side-effect of Newton's laws of gravity: it is simply not possible, as a result of Newton's laws, to put satellites into orbits which cover only the US or only the industrialised North. To cover the plum markets using low-orbit satellites, in other words, entails covering the entire world.

Iridium was in 1993 promising service in 1998, and TeleDesic in 1995 was promising to go into service in 2000. It is not unreasonable to guess that the recent lack of announcements from either party is related to difficult investment decisions: the projected cost of TeleDesic is US$9 billion. It is rumoured that Iridium managers have declared their target market to be the "one million people who pay first-class air-fare from their own pockets".

All these systems, based on radio transmissions, suffer from the problem that "bandwidth" in the radio spectrum is a limited resource. (One can no more create new spectrum than one can insert a brand-new colour between green and blue.) Massive use in urban areas would rapidly exhaust it. "Bandwidth" in fibre-optic cables, however, is limited only by the number of cables one can lay and connect; and a single fibre can theoretically provide as much bandwidth as the entire radio spectrum.

Africa One, (AT&T 1996) proposed by AT&T, is a grand-scale solution to Africa's backwardness in telecommunications. The proposal is to spend US$2.65 billion laying fibre-optic cables around the shore of the continent. The total bandwidth would be 40 giga-bits per second. (See Glossary.) The financial decisions on the scheme were due to be made in late 1996. No news on implementation was, however, forthcoming by March 1997. If the telecommunication authorities of (initially) the coastal African countries pre-buy enough capacity, it may still go ahead. Connecting land-locked countries presents interesting questions of political trust and stability.

3: Who's wiring Africa?

The first steps towards wiring Africa were taken by intrepid activists with a mission to communicate, fanning out across the continent with rucksacks full of modems. (The French did their bit in a rather more elegant way.)

By January 1996, it was possible to use electronic mail at least in the capital cities of most African countries. The breakdown of technologies was as follows (excluding South Africa):

Table 2: Email hosts in Africa, January 1996

 internet & BitNet:	 7* 

 GreenNet/gnfido	21

 other FIDO		 3

 ORSTOM UUCP     	14** 

 other UUCP		 8

 Total:			53

 From an internet information posting 
 maintained by Randy Bush 

 *	(Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Zambia) 

 **	(Dakar has IP-over-X.25 too)

 Note that version 15 of Landweber's
 map (Section 1) shows an increase in
 full internet access since this 
 table was issued.

The major player in this phase, as Randy Bush's table shows, was GreenNet in London. GreenNet is a charitable organisation depending on subscription income from Northern individuals, activists and NGOs, with minor amounts of funding from development organisations. It is affiliated to APC, the Association for Progressive Communications (APC 1996).

Most of the remainder of Africa's connectivity passed through the French government development research organisation ORSTOM (Orstom 1996) in Montpellier.

Between mid-1993 and the end of 1995 GreenNet forwarded 2.2 million messages between the developed and less-developed worlds, at a total cost of US$80,000: an average of US$0.036 per message. (Banks 1996) It did this mostly using the lowest technology applicable to the internet, direct-dial FIDOnet connections. FIDOnet was developed by computer hobbyists starting in 1983, following the spread of relatively affordable personal computers from the early 1980s. (Hardy 1993) The computers which form FIDOnet store messages, usually until night-time, and then dial a neighbouring computer to exchange "what's new" through their modems. Selected computers dial "hosts" with full internet connections to exchange messages between FIDOnet and the internet.

FIDO users can exchange messages -- delayed by up to 24 hours -- with anyone on the internet. They can extract information from some databases and parts of the World-Wide Web by sending carefully formatted email to "servers", which interpret their requests and return the results by email. They can participate in some international discussion fora -- but they cannot do anything which requires a continuous, "real-time" connection.

Dutch journalist Michiel Hegener calculates that to move a 2000-word message between the Netherlands and Ghana costs US$34 if you make a voice call from Amsterdam and read it out; $7.00 if you send it as a closely-typed fax; and $0.20 to $0.40 if you send it as email. If you put it in the post, it may or may not arrive. (Hegener 1995)

This kind of low-tech electronic mail is thus the only kind of inter-continental communication that many Southern organisations can afford. It is not surprising the the major impetus for connectivity in Africa came from development organisations and Non-Governmental Organisations, which had and have an urgent need for rapid international communication but do not have the resources to set up, for example, private satellite uplinks. Such low-tech electronic connectivity, however, is available only where there are telephone lines.

Over the past ten years about 200 million new main telephone lines have been installed world-wide, bringing the total to some 575 million. The proportion of lines in lower income countries increased from 20 per cent to 30 per cent over the same period. Progress in the right direction certainly. But the lower income countries contain 85 per cent of the world's population -- there is a long way to go.

The grossly uneven distribution between population and access to telephone lines is frequently illustrated in terms of teledensity -- the number of main telephone lines per 100 inhabitants. Average teledensity in high income countries is now 49, increasing from 38 ten years ago. Over the same period the average teledensity in the rest of the world rose from just 2.0 to 3.5, some countries even experiencing a drop in teledensity as the installation of main lines failed to keep up with population growth....

In most high income countries about 10 per cent of the population live in the capital city, which is served by about 10 per cent of the telephone lines in the country. The situation is dramatically different in many low income countries with a predominantly rural economy. Here only 4 per cent of the population is concentrated in the capital city, but they benefit from nearly a third of the telephone lines. Rural areas suffer from really severe telecommunications blight.

• (Sharrock 1995)

In Ghana, for example, in Spring 1995 the country's total network connectivity was ten 14,400 bit-per-second leased lines to Cambridge, England, costing $7500 a month each. (Hegener 1995) One was used by the SWIFT inter-bank clearance system, and another by the air-traffic control network SITA -- which reaches parts of the world which no other network touches and plans to offer internet services wherever governments allow competition with the state telephone company.

By early 1996, the private Network Computer Systems internet host in Ghana's capital had 140 subscribers paying US$1300 a year each. Martin Mulligan of the Financial Times points out that this is the entire annual income of a Ghanaian journalist. (Mulligan 1995) "Our customers are expats, large companies, and a few Ghanaian researchers," Network Computer Systems Deputy Director William Tevie told Hegener. (Hegener 1995)

To compile an exhaustive list of commercial projects in Africa would be exhausting. It seems reasonable to predict, however, that within the next three years, if not sooner, most capital cities which are not in the thick of armed conflict are likely to have a satellite connection.

The Gondwana project, based in Belgium and Zimbabwe and dedicated to improving connectivity worldwide, has identified at least 40 agencies and NGOs which have internet-related projects in Africa. (Gondwana 1996) One, for example, the US-based Leland initiative, has $15 million to spend in 20 countries. It was launched in January 1996 after US Vice-President Al Gore had invited the USAID agency to lead a U.S. effort to "bring the Global Information Infrastructure to Africa". By the end of January 1997 it had signed Memorandums of Understanding with the governments of Mali, Madagascar, Rwanda, Mozambique, Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, Benin and Guinea-Bissau. In February 1997 it commenced a programme of technical training for African institutions and individuals. (Leland 1997)

In March 1995 a World Bank report noted that, using Very Small Aperture Terminal satellite dishes, "full Internet nodes could be established in the 47 sub-Saharan African countries currently lacking this level of service for approximately $30 million, including the first year's operating cost and exclusive of local labor costs." (Baranshamaje 1995: 14)

We should be aware that the geography of communication capacity is much more complicated than a North-South divide. The author lives in a largely Bangladeshi-populated area of London, ten minutes' brisk walk from the Bank of England. That walk crosses the route of a British Telecom tunnel which has presumably carried huge quantities of fibre-optic bandwidth for the City financial institutions since the technology was available. (The existence of this tunnel was Officially Secret before UK telecomms privatisation.) But cable television -- which can be used as a low-cost, high-speed internet connection -- was only just arriving in pocket of the city at the time of writing. (It must be understood that the author wants cable television only for the side-effect of fast internet access, not for any frivolous reason.)

Nevertheless, the disparities in the South are enormously greater. The disparities between urban and rural areas in the South are great and some current development policies will increase them. The Action Plan from the first International Telecommunications Union World Telecommunications Development Conference, held in Buenos Aires in March 1994, set these goals:

Special assistance to the least developed countries is given top priority. And for the LDCs specific targets were set for the year 2000:

Fully meeting the demand for telecommunication services in urban areas. This means virtually eliminating the waiting list for services by that year, which translates into an average urban main line density of five per 100 population

Achieving a rural main line density of one main line per 10,000 inhabitants.

• "The Missing Link" (Sharrock 1995)

The FIDO systems and other low-tech solutions cannot be expected to meet the entire long-term communications needs of the populations they serve. But they do have a mission to extend communication to as wide a range of their societies as possible, and to offer support and training.

Many of the small-scale projects are concerned that the income upon which they depend for their training and outreach work is jeopardised by the arrival of commercial ISPs, creaming off their heaviest users. Those users cannot be blamed for preferring a fully-interactive connection to the delays of store-and-forward technology. In January 1996 StarCom arrived in Kampala, with the backing of US Sprint and the Norwegian phone company Telenor. It provides 1 Mbit/second of full internet capacity in Kampala through a "VSAT" satellite dish. (Banks 1996)

But Mike Jensen, who was in at the beginning of WorkNet, a GreenNet affiliate in South, and now manages to combine street-level assistance to community groups with high-level telecommunications conferences, stresses that the people on the ground are more pragmatic. (Jensen 1996) Charles Musisi in Uganda has negotiated with StarCom for Mukla to use its bandwidth -- part of that set aside, under the agreement with Norway, for free use by universities.

Commercial ISPs must start by wiring the richest sectors of the population. Under the market, bandwidth is distributed by ability to pay. Since increased bandwidth will increase ability to pay, there is a serious risk of starting another vicious circle of increasing economic inequality.

High-quality connectivity is also at present being made available only in the cities. It can be argued that a major reason why people migrate from the countryside to towns, and from small towns to cities, is "bandwidth": the higher communication capacity of a crowded place, of a factory compared to a rural workshop. It is not entirely fanciful to suggest that current trends in telecommunications will exacerbate the problems of urban migration -- when, in theory and leaving aside the economics -- they ought to do the opposite by dissociating communication from physical proximity.

This is enough cause for concern. The same communication technology, used in broadcast mode, ensures that almost all citizens of the planet are informed of the conditions of life of the most privileged.

Watching street children in Calcutta watching "Dallas" and MTV on satellite television raises a number of interesting philosophical questions about the nature of poverty. It must raise, too, immediate political questions. What will be the effects on the aspirations of this generation?

One immediate and clearly apparent result of the massively increased visibility of relative poverty in the past decade is massive resentment among the younger generation. Some of this may be channelled into backlash and fundamentalist rejection: the author suspects that the burning down of a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise in Bangalore in February 1996 may turn out to be a kind of iconic event -- but whether its historical equivalent turns out to be a church in Dresden in 1986, or a beer-cellar in Munich in 1923, remains to be seen.

4: What is at stake?

Imagine, for a moment, a future in which the only multinationals are AT&T and UPS.

In a fully wired world, there is no reason why all economic transactions cannot be negotiated directly between those who have the goods and those who have the needs.

If you want mangoes, and you want them now, why not browse the producers' offers, select an exquisite variety from a farmers' co-operative in East Timor, place and pay for an order, and have them delivered to your door?

AT&T conveys the "bits" of contract and funds; United Parcels Service delivers the "atoms" of physical trade. The bits/atoms distinction was, of course, popularised by Nicholas Negroponte in his Being Digital (Negroponte 1994)

In principle, considering trade in the abstract, all other goods and services -- from crude oil supply and tanker-leases to cigarette papers and horoscopes -- could be traded in a continuous global "farm-gate" auction. (Holderness 1996c)

This is no more than some current management shibboleths -- downsizing, just-in-time delivery, delayering and autonomous divisions -- taken to a logical conclusion. And there are signs that something like it is happening.

Air freight is now so cheap to make the shipment of humble vegetables economic and computers enable Hilbre [a farm an hour's drive west of Harare in Zimbabwe] and its customers to make, track and record orders all the way from field to dining room table.... If you are buying baby corn from Marks and Spencer tomorrow, it may have been picked in Zimbabwe yesterday.

• (Prest and Bowen 1996)

Hilbre owner Ian Gordon also exports to mainland Europe, Australasia and the Far East.

In any case, an increasing proportion of trade in and with the developed world is trade in pure "bits" of information. The imminent advent of electronic cash (Chaum 1990-) is likely to create a parallel economy, largely divorced from the "real world". (Holderness 1996a)

In 1994 the European Union's Directorate-General XIII projected that nearly half the new jobs created in the EU before 2010 would be information-related (Wilkinson 1995) The major area of uncertainty in that projection is whether those jobs will be created in the EU -- or in the few high-literacy, highly-connected, relatively-low-wage areas of the South. The low-literacy, poorly-connected areas can be projected to slide to an even lower rung on the wage economy ladder. (Holderness 1995)

The possible implications are quite startling. For the past two millennia, for example, the terms of trade between Africa and the rest of the world have been set by the middle-men -- whether they be Phoenicians, or the Swahili-speakers who traded with the Romans, or British imperialists. Eliminating the trader, the wholesaler and the ship-owner holds out the prospect of, at long last, achieving fair terms of trade.

Ultimately, if someone can sew shirts at home and make $4 each, selling them to shops, or even directly to consumers, for maybe $15 including shipping -- why go to a factory and sew them for $0.05 each when they sell for $40?

One risk which development organisations can and must address is that inequality of access to communications may promote increases in absolute poverty. The scenario above, in which control of (for example) textile export markets is concentrated and wage levels in the remaining home-market sector are depressed, is a risk to be taken seriously.

Africa needs to seize this opportunity, quickly. If African countries cannot take advantage of the information revolution and surf this great wave of technological change, they may be crushed by it. In that case, they are likely to be even more marginalized and economically stagnant in the future than they are today. Catching the wave will require visionary leadership in Africa. The World Bank, other international agencies, bilaterals, and NGOs can all help.

• (Baranshamaje 1995: 2)

It is not clear how any of this will affect the very poorest -- who have only heard gossip about telephones, perhaps -- but it is all too often unclear what any kind of infrastructural development has to do with these people.

The consequences go beyond the economic sphere. Political power in these days rests to a significant extent on access to information and the means to disseminate information. This, too, is being concentrated in the hands of urban elites.

5: Back to community

Albert Gore, Vice President of the United States, was quoted by the World Bank in 1995 that:

The liberating effects of these technologies have been clear around the world. Satellite stations brought medical advice to those tending to the suffering in Rwanda. Radio and TV broadcasts in South Africa promoted the role of voting in a democracy. Wireless technologies are allowing emerging nations to leap-frog the expensive stages of wiring a communication network -- for example, in Thailand, where the ratio of cellular telephone users to the population is twice that of the US.

• (Gore 1995)

A report from the Rand Corporation -- hardly a hotbed of aid lobbying -- noted that:

With greater than 99.9 percent certainty... one can reject the null hypothesis that there is no relationship between democracy and interconnectivity. Furthermore, the coefficient on interconnectivity is large. A single point increase on the interconnectivity scale corresponds to an increase of 5 points in democracy rating....

Governments that try to squelch the new information technologies to protect their monopoly on power do so essentially at the peril of economic growth. This is... precisely what leading analysts have been predicting: "For nations to be economically competitive, they must allow individual citizens access to information networks and computer technology. In doing so, they cede significant control over economic, cultural, and eventually political events in their countries" (Builder, 1993: 160).

Almost everyone who comes to use the new communication technologies can see liberatory potentials -- often, different potentials according to their fields of interest and activity.

If one focuses on women achieving equal participation in society and the economy, then it is easy to see that these technologies for communication-at-a-distance are relatively gender-neutral. (But development like video-conferencing may, within 15 years in the North, challenge this assumption of gender-neutrality.)

If one focuses on universal access to education, then probably no better technology than the internet can be imagined. Anyone, anywhere, can already explore for themselves a huge body of knowledge, and stands some chance of being able to consult leading experts in many fields. (For "anywhere", of course, read "anywhere with phone lines and computers".)

If one focuses on political self-organisation, then enormous potential is apparent for people who have mobilised in geographical communities to build global networks of mutual support. Fishing villages on India's West Coast could make their concerns heard in European Union debates on fishing policy; and communities in Vietnam could offer their experience and support directly to mine-clearance programmes in Bosnia. This does presuppose a common language; and at present the internet handles Serbo-Croat poorly and Vietnamese not at all.

In those countries in the South with reasonable political stability, commercial enterprise is likely to provide connectivity, to the capital city at least, in the very near future. Initially this may happen through entrepreneurs -- with overseas backing, which may include logistical support by aid agencies -- installing satellite dishes.

In the longer term, projects of the scale of Africa One -- the proposed high-capacity fibre-optic communication ring around Africa, described in Section 1 -- are likely to mature to meet growing demand. It is also possible that projects to provide global satellite connectivity, such as Iridium and/or TeleDesic and/or one of their competitors will render physical location practically irrelevant, for those who can afford the receiver equipment. Direct satellite links such as those promised by Iridium and TeleDesic offer a solution only for an absolutely wealthy minority.

In this sense, the problem for development agencies and economists is not now one of connecting countries, but of connecting people.

Development organisations should form relationships with commercial ISPs where they exist, as with the Norwegian support for StarCom mentioned above. They should use these relationships, and their influence with governments, to promote telecommunications regulation regimes which promote community access.

One possibility is to lobby countries to impose "Universal Service Requirements", with timetables for compliance, as a condition of licenses to new ISPs. A telephone company operating under a Universal Service Requirement is legally bound to provide service to anyone who asks for it, wherever they are in the relevant territory; the extra charges which the company may make for remote connections are regulated. This, however, runs counter to a very powerful "de-regulatory" current in world-wide telecommunications policy. It may be practicable, however, to require operators to provide low-cost connections to schools and community facilities as capacity is installed in their areas.

Commercial enterprises may well resist even such mild regulatory initiatives. There appears to be an illogical prejudice that all regulation should be resisted. It is illogical because efforts of any kind to promote widespread access to communication, beyond the very small elite markets which exist now, are building a potentially huge market for such services in the near future. Commercial enterprises should be reminded at every opportunity that the large market for private internet connectivity in the United States was built entirely on university students being given access free at the point of use -- and then looking around for ways to stay connected when they finished their courses.

The primary focus of financial aid for communications should be shifted immediately from the country-level infrastructure programmes to the village level -- with the exception of International Telecommunications Union-level support for programmes such as Africa One. This reverses the priorities set out by the Buenos Aires Conference and listed in Section 8.

The greatest effects have over the last decade been achieved by the programmes with the lowest budgets, such as GreenNet's. There is scope -- and funding can in principle be redirected to -- for hundreds or thousands of such outreach projects to work at local level throughout the South. The major restriction on the emergence of such projects may be the supply of individuals having enough personal commitment to the concept to go through the organisational hoops required to obtain funding.

It is unrealistic to expect economic development to progress at such a rate as to enable large numbers of individuals to take advantage of the connectivity thus provided. Communal access seems an obvious alternative.

Andriette Esterhuysen, director of SANGOnet (the renamed WorkNet), reports for example "a lot of discussion about community access in South Africa -- for example through multi-purpose community centres. But there's not a lot of clear direction or commitment from the centre." (Esterhuysen 1996) At present, the onus for providing that sense of direction almost certainly rests with SANGOnet.

Provision of connectivity through community centres of various kinds does seem to be the main route to providing access for civil society. In particular, in most of the world connectivity provided to commercial enterprises will reach only locally-rich men. Collective or communal access points seem to be the only way to extend access to women, children and male employees.

It might be objected that large areas of the world have no libraries and poor schools: why worry about modems for people who have no books? But is there a reason why aid agencies should not assist these areas to leap directly to remote-learning capability -- in other words, for development aid financed on the back of interest in communications to create "virtual" libraries and schools where there are now no "real" ones?

Such projects stand the highest chance of avoiding the "rusting tractor" outcome of failed development projects. Maintenance of computers and internet connections in the South is difficult; it is likely to be achieved only where there is a close connection between indigenous organisations with the need, and outside facilitators with the means.

Such organisations also need to shift their focus from the country level to the village level. They may find that their work becomes less "glamorous": eventually it will integrate completely with health and education aid work. Eventually, in other words, telecommunications should disappear as a separate concern, and become an integral part of human capacity-building work.

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This preprint is © copyright 1997 Mike Holderness; moral rights are asserted.

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Comments are very welcome.

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The sections:

Introduction

1: How widely is the Net cast?

2: Rich net or poor net?

3: Who's wiring Africa?

4: What is at stake?

5: Back to community

Table 1: Multimedia access: top 40 territories compared

Table 2: Connectivity in Africa

Biblography and links

Glossary