Is ‘Wi-Fi’ Good for Developing Nations?

LONDON: The wireless web holds much promise for developing nations but technology analyst Bill Thompson is concerned about the politics of wi-fi.

Campaigning for Internet access in developing countries can seem a bit of a distraction -- the sort of thing that only the technologically obsessed would ever care about.

After all, millions of people need clean water, enough food and adequate shelter. They are not really going to miss the opportunity to send e-mails or surf the web.

But as the global economy comes to depend more and more on the Internet the digital divide is seen as a serious barrier to economic development.

There are also many examples of ways in which net access can help people living in poverty, from getting access to weather forecasts to enable fishing boats to avoid storms, through to monitoring prices to decide when to harvest a crop.

Groups like the G8's Digital Opportunities Task Force, set up in 2000, have promoted a wide range of projects, and there are a vast number of local initiatives, some of which have featured on Go Digital, the World Service programme.

Despite the attention and the growing number of projects, there is still a lot to be done. Wi-fi is the latest cool thing and a growing number of companies and market analysts have started touting it as the next big thing.

Throughout large parts of Africa, South America and Asia net access is expensive, complicated and rare, and even the most optimistic estimates of the world's total net-using population put it at around one in 10.

At the moment a lot of attention is focused on the use of wireless networks, and in particular wi-fi, as a relatively low-cost way of getting fast network access to rural areas and less-developed countries, and this week the United Nations hosted a conference organised jointly with the industry-funded Wireless Internet Institute.

Wi-fi is not the only wireless networking technology, of course. Packet radio, microwave links and even 3G phone networks could all do a similar job.

But wi-fi is the latest cool thing and - not entirely coincidentally - a growing number of companies and market analysts have started touting it as the next big thing, the focus for a second-generation internet-style boom.

As a result, big hitters like Pat Gelsinger, Intel's chief technology officer, came along to the UN to discuss the best way to get wi-fi to the developing world. Along with many other wi-fi advocates, Mr Gelsinger argued that the main barrier was not the cost of the technology which his company makes and sells, but government regulation.

Advocates of wi-fi, in both developed and developing countries, argue that they need to have unregulated, unlicensed and uncontrolled access to the radio spectrum so that they can be innovative and make money.

They believe that the existing model, where governments issue licenses to radio and TV stations or to other users of radio spectrum, partly to ensure that services do not interfere with each other and partly to make some money out of a natural resource, is wrong and out-dated.

It is, of course, an unproven claim, but one that fits well with a pro-market, anti-government ideology that has been around for a long time and is especially prevalent in the US.

It also demonstrates optimism about the potential of technology to deliver long-term social benefits that those of us who remember the internet boom of the late 1990s might consider somewhat unfounded.

The advocates of free spectrum are loud and getting louder. They speak out on weblogs, they lobby politicians and they have the ear of the United Nations.

There is, therefore, a real danger that they will drive a model of development, in this case based around wi-fi hotspots and unlicensed radio spectrum, that fits their own commercial interests and ideological position, instead of being what developing countries really need.

We saw it happen in the 1960s when subsistence farmers were offered tractors which they could not repair, cash crops which did not actually feed them and fertilisers which they could not afford.

We are seeing it happen again with GM foods and patented plants. And if Intel and the other companies making wi-fi hardware and software have their way, we could see the same thing happen with network access.