Delivering the Internet to Developing Countries

A recent Economist piece, Bringing the Poor Online, details the challenges of expanding Internet access in developing countries. The success of mobile phones in these countries, it notes, is difficult to repeat with Internet access due to a number of costs mobile-phone carriers don’t have to face.

To be sure, the equipment required for internet access is easliy accessible: PCs and mobile handsets that can send data, and routers and data-centres to receive and direct it. For the actual access points, poor countries are already teeming with (admittedly congested) mobile networks. Lots of small internet service providers (ISPs) ply their wares in poor countries, but they are basically reselling bandwidth from larger operators. To get online, those larger operators must hook onto the global internet backbone (that is, connect to Europe, America or a well-wired Asian country like China, Japan or Singapore—somewhere to route the traffic globally).

That is where the problem lies. For developing countries, this is difficult and costly. They lack — and therefore must build—optical-fibre lines. Using satellites is unrealistic: there is not enough capacity; the delay times are too long and it is even more expensive than land-based connections (around four times more expensive in the case of Nepal, for example).

With a private sector lacking financial motivation to lay fiber across the Serengeti, the article concludes, the solution could lie with governments. “The private sector alone seems unlikely to provide poor countries access to the global backbone at reasonable bandwidth and cost. State-funded programmes may be needed — precisely the sorts of inefficient ventures, ironically, that the mobile-phone revolution overturned.”

Given the growing momentum of the One Laptop Per Child project and other low-cost computer ventures, governments might have the motivation required to put in the necessary investment.

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