Development-in-a-Box(tm) is about direct connections

ARTICLE: "Africa, Offline: Waiting for the Web," by Ron Nixon, New York Times, 22 July 2007, p. BU1.

I think I already glancingly blogged this one.

The story is one of a failed joint venture between an American company and the government of Rwanda, which dreams of becoming a cyber hub of East Africa, a laudable goal for a continent where only 4% have any access to the Net and most traffic (75%) gets routed through the UK or the US, "increasing expenses and deliver times."

No surprise on long pole in tent: African countries haven't done much on the connecting infrastructure. Too many competing issues gobble up time, attention and money, and so the connectivity infrastructure seems like a luxury not worth prioritizing. Better to double their aid, we are told by those who know better.

But here is the scary part, a la Collier's bottom billion: the more the digital divide grows, the harder it becomes for any catch-up strategy to work.

Even on the catch-up we have disagreements: push cell phones or cheap laptops first? Me? I would go with cellphones, since more and more of my web use is through my phone anyway, so it's hard to imagine a future built around laptops per se, especially in austere environments. I mean, I only used my Mac in Africa to watch movies.

My point here is the same one we make about ports (as Enterra looks beyond our pioneering work on port security in Philadelphia): Africa needs direct connections. It can't be running all its Internet through just the UK and the US and it can't have all its sea traffic to the U.S. going through Europe for repackaging according to security standards they've yet to meet in their own ports. We need to connect Africa directly to opportunities and make that rule-set exporting our primarily focus on aid and investment.

Comments

[Vinay Gupta]

I think the key question on cellphones or laptops first is actually which radio standard you use. If they both run on the same wireless standards then it does not matter, but if the choice is Wifi or 3G, I think I'm on the side of 3G.

The form factors are all mutable and convergent. A Folio turns a cell phone into a laptop. A bluetooth keyboard does much the same thing. A VOIP client turns a laptop into a phone. It's all about the network - the devices come and go and blur into each other as fast as industrial designers can make them unlike the megadollar towers which are stubborn, persistent and expensive.

[Sean Meade]

so, what we need is the standards to merge, or at least interoperate seamlessly. that'll be a good development.