Broadband: A wasted policy opportunity?

By M H Ahssan

The government decision to auction spectrum for broadband, also called 3/4G, WiMAX or LTE and treat it at par with mobile telephony may just be another case of a wasted policy opportunity for citizen services. It has a myopic objective of only revenue mobilisation. This is when broadband can be made to mean much more, given our huge inadequacy of infrastructure and citizen services. In fact, an innovative policy can make the government net far more. But that merits unconventional and aggregative thinking in policymaking.

The broadband technologies offer a rare and limitless opportunity to service the aam aadmi, capable of meeting all his unmet needs. Therefore, policy aspirations need actually focus on a new viable telecom paradigm that brings citizen services within the reach of the common man. The world is, in fact, proactively pursuing this paradigm.

So how can broadband serve the society?

As a background, two examples deserve a mention, going back to the narrow-band telecom days two decades ago, for background. The French government was the first in the world to actually invest over $3,000 per household for “computer-phones” for access to even private services like laundry, groceries, etc. Singapore saw telephony as the recipe for respite from traffic by encouraging people to talk. In a visionary policy then, it made local calling free — a policy it even embraces to date.

Now broadband has had the whole world excited far more. President Barack Obama’s focus is to use broadband to correct delivery of education with a stimulus of $7.2 billion to be disbursed by September. Prime Minister Gordon Brown thinks broadband is the only way to keep Britain competitive and wants taxpayers’ money to spur the country’s slow roll out with healthcare as priority. The Australian government has just concluded a $31 billion public-private-partnership for ushering in a nation-wide network. Even countries like Jordan, Bahrain and UAE want broadband to be the backbone of their initiatives for quality education — Jordan Education Initiative is now a famous one.

But various governments are still groping to find ways to stimulate broadband infrastructure investments, given the serious questions on its viability for mass penetration. In our case, going wireless with citizen services is an opportunity to fast forward broadband. Hence to treat the broadband spectrum like the one for mobile telephony seems like an easy choice.

Unlike voice telephony with universal revenue models, a services-based approach is unique to each society and ordains a services mindset of the operators. Hence the wireless broadband needs to be treated differently from mobile telephony.

So how can an unconventional policy on broadband become an epicentre of citizen services and sustainable value proposition for the industry? The state
of our citizen-centric services is deplorable, be it at the municipality level like local registrations and approvals, ration card or at the state level like education, healthcare, state taxes, or at the country level like passport, tax assessments, voter ID, etc. Both access and provision of citizen services are inadequate. Media seems happy reporting millions of students travelling distances and queuing in sweltering heat for admissions. There is a long way to go in initiatives of rural health insurance, rural employment guarantee and mandatory public ID. We burn expensive fuel on non-motorable and congested roads for just about everything. Our expressways are still a distant dream.

So here is the chance to give the citizens the convenient and low cost citizen-centric services on a wireless highway. A visionary policy can take an aggregative view of connectivity and services and shift the onus for provision of services to the broadband service providers. Revenues from citizen services will boost broadband viability, affording low access costs. Broadband technologies will bring in far cheaper voice charges and render the concept of local long distance irrelevant. That also makes a case for encouraging new players in wireless broadband. Even Bangladesh exhibited some of this thinking by seeking entirely new players.

But this requires a major change, a national perspective, on the issue of services. The key ministries like rural development, education, health, home and public distribution and indeed IT and telecom need to have a shared vision on broadband. None other than the Prime Minister’s Office or an empowered group would need to oversee this initiative to make it happen. This will not only save huge independent budgets but bring about a meaningful succour to the aam aadmi.

Therefore, the bidding tenders for the next generation spectrum should ask potential bidders not to quote for spectrum but commit minimal user tariffs and charge for services. In fact, the first cellular tenders in the nineties asked the bidders to commit minimum monthly rentals and those who bid zero rentals actually won.

Even if broadband spectrum is mandated on provision of specified services under e-governance plan in the licence, the government will save a few billions in its $10 billion e-governance budgets, even assuming an optimistic $5-6 billion in auctions. The government should further commit the Universal Service Obligation Fund which has so far collected around $5 billion, for faster and quality broadband roll outs in semi-urban and rural areas.

Both the departments of telecommunication and IT in one ministry would need to be in sync and combine their forces at the top for this national possibility. Much of the national e-governance plan, for both core projects like state-wide area networks, data centres, etc., and 30 mission mode projects can be made part of the licence mandate. Once a services-based broadband paradigm is in place, projects like state-wide area networks (SWANs) and the Common Services Centres — centrally sponsored e-governance project with allocation of around $3.5 billion — may appear redundant.