Universal access for the rural areas

Dr. William Torres (President, Moscom Internet)

Over these past few years, the telecommunications industry struggled to bring telephony to the countryside to beef up a nationwide communication system. With the breaking of PLDT’s monopoly, more players came to fore to partake of what appears to be a profitable venture.

To this day, telecom companies continue to lay down lines and look for profitable service areas. Still, the percentage of subscribers who avail themselves of these lines remains roughly at 40 percent national average.

Why? The country has undergone its own transformation because of the popularity of information technology. Now people are looking at more than telephone equipment to connect them to the world. They are also wise enough to scout for services that give them satisfaction 10 times more than what they pay for. This is especially true in the rural areas, where the citizens can rarely afford the luxuries of urban life.

It may be safe to assume that telecommunications, after all, is a service profitable only in the urban areas. Thus, in a bill filed recently by Sen. Vicente Sotto III, which seeks to impose a service area scheme on Internet service providers (ISPs), we need to review the state of things in the context of a Filipino community.

Senate Bill 2084, known as the "Internet Universal Access and Liberalization Act of 2000," requires ISPs to provide connectivity in far-flung provinces in exchange for a license to set up their own broadband infrastructure.

My first concern here is the nature of the ISP. ISP, from the perspective of this bill, is treated like a telco. Telecom companies only offer transport services for voice and/or data, but mainly voice.

On the other hand, an ISP is a value-added service provider. Value-added service providers can offer anything, not jut access – from content development to Web hosting to data centers. Our lawmakers might be thinking that ISPs are providers of a homogenous commodity. It’s not equivalent to having a phone line.

In the urban areas, you can offer dial-up, cellphones, communication services to individuals. The rural areas cannot afford these services or equipment on an individual basis. They have to think of sharing the commodity. It will be expensive for the provider, but because many will share the cost, it becomes affordable for the individual.

Just like tricycles. If you bring motorcycles into the rural areas, the people there cannot afford to buy them. So you invest a little more by adding a sidecar and accommodate passengers.

Another thing, we sometimes measure progress by the number of phone lines per 100 people, or telephone density.

Since 60 percent of potential subscribers in a service area do not avail themselves of the telecom offerings, probably it’s not the phone line they want, but some form of shared value-added service like Internet cafés. Perhaps we should formulate other measures of density that is more appropriate for this new requirement.

My point here is that we have to ask ourselves: How can we become creative in providing technology where more people can benefit?

I recently had a discussion on "universal access." Some people think universal access means increasing bandwidth so that you can offer different services like telephone, data, television; perhaps we ought to interpret universal access to actually mean access for everyone.

The Sotto bill seems to be directed at universal access, to allow ISPs to do what carriers cannot, as carriers do not go to areas that don’t promise that many subscribers. ISPs can go into these areas with a different approach, they can offer affordable services but in a shared manner, such as a neighborhood Internet café.

For example, the barangay captain can be convinced to put in a certain portion of the government fund to a phone line subscription in a designated place in the barangay. The more affluent residents can donate computers and other hardware (they are fond of donating hardwood pews in churches anyway, and wood is more expensive), while the entire community can contribute a little to organizing an Internet café of their own. It has to be a community effort.

What the government can probably do is undertake a campaign geared toward this direction, without necessarily assigning ISPs to certain areas. It can encourage the ISPs to go beyond where they are and to offer value-added services that will benefit more and more residents in the long term. It can push telecom carriers into working out a plan of investing, say five percent of their lines into Internet cafés for the communities.

It achieves the purpose of the Sotto bill, but in a different way, not in a telco way.