Getting Connected

Jan 11, 2010 Editorial

For years now we have been hearing about the infinite possibilities that information and communications technologies (ICT”s) held for our national development. Especially over the last decade, the politicians kept making grandiose promises of “IT” (Information Technology) being the platform that would leapfrog us into the ranks of the “tiger economies”. But the first decade of the new millennium came and went and we are still stuck with our centuries-old mainstays of sugar and rice that keep our heads above water – barely.

Analysts have been pointing out that IT cannot take root in a country in a very significant and meaningful way unless the necessary infrastructure was in place. We violated the observed truism: countries that first establish an information infrastructure and develop applications will enjoy enormous competitive advantage.

To put the matter very simply, IT was not simply the matter of, for instance, being able to process data in computers but that this data (and data generated from any other source such as video), had to be transported between locations very efficiently. And this was where we had our bottleneck. While huge swathes of the world had installed the infrastructure to transmit data locally and internationally at extraordinarily fast speeds, we were stuck at rates that made us look like the fabled turtle. And without the reliability of the turtle, to boot.

Take for instance, call centres. With our English speaking capabilities, fairly literate population and our location in South America, it was long expected that we would have been able to employ thousands of our high school graduates in this fast growing but fairly low level niche of IT. The constraint was connectivity.

Then from another angle there were great hopes that we could have used IT such as video conferencing techniques to deliver a more consistently high quality educational products to the various institutions in that sector. We remained stuck at the level of placing computers in classrooms where they more or less gathered dust – or became glorified slates for recording information. This was not IT.

The bottleneck arose because the company that was responsible for securing the communications network (GT&T) choose to stick for too long with an older technology (the Americas II) cable that connected us to the rest of the world at a veritable snail’s pace – to use another metaphor. It was not coincidental at all that GT&T had a monopoly over the use of the technology and made untold billions in for the duration. The alternate available satellite linkages that could have provided faster speeds of connectivity were too expensive for the mass usage that would have pushed us up the development curve.

Well all of that will hopefully soon be behind us. As we all know by now, GT&T has now finally landed a new fibre-optic cable that we are told will provide 3,000 times the bandwidth (a measure of the capacity to transmit data) that we were stuck with up to now. What are the challenges ahead to get us up to speed with the rest of the faster developing world?

Two authors from the World Bank propose three areas for governmental action: formulating policy; using IT, and compensating for market deficiencies. In addition, they suggest the following five actions: increasing the government’s own efficiency; fixing fair game rules; catalysing infrastructure projects; pushing the educational agenda and jump-starting the private sector.

The need for a comprehensive government policy over the area is crucial: we cannot afford to have any of the old dog-in-the-manger type of attitude holding up progress any longer. There needs to be an overarching vision of what we want to do with the new technology for the widest possible national development.

We can begin with our very low “IT density”. While our telephone density has shot up, most of this has been due to the competition engendered in the mobile phone area. And while internet access is available in these mobile phones, the real benefits will only come from increased access over landlines. This means that the number of lines will have to be increased exponentially while the costs head in the opposite direction.

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