Adriana Labardini raises a very important question--how to get infrastructure and connectivity into rural areas. She poises the question of prices, but the real failure of old-line telcos is that they are wedded to a subscription model--the right business model (shared use, pre-paid in small units, local entreprenuers as resellers) would open up service in many places. Grameen Phone's village phone model, Vodacom's community phone shops, and others show this approach can be very profitable, and also provide affordable service where it is needed.
Leap-frogging though wireless technologies, evolving fast and inherently cheaper services for serving dispersed communities, is her other suggestion. But she points to the real barrier here--most developing countries have not made unlicensed spectrum freely available, because they don't understand that the entrepreneurial explosion would generate more economic activity and more tax revenue than they would get from license auctions--especially in poor, rural areas. Others have high import duties on the specialized radio equipment needed to do WiFi or its successors. So we need to make the business case to governments as well as to companies. There is a third possible model, and that is for infrastructure companies to build and manage the infrastructure for a variety of users--government agencies, banks, comsumer goods companies--that need to get to rural consumers/communities. A number of companies are now contemplating such strategies--both big companies and some entrepreneurial companies. So one question is, where would governments welcome such investment and help clear away regulatory barriers? Allen L. Hammond Vice President for Innovation & Special Projects World Resources Institute 10 G Street NE Washington, DC 20002 USA V (202) 729-7777 F (202) 729-7775 [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.wri.org www.digitaldividend.org ------------ This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by USAID's dot-ORG Cooperative Agreement with AED, in partnership with World Resources Institute's Digital Dividend Project, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org and http://www.digitaldividend.org provide more information. To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.dot-com-alliance.org/archive.html>
