Amdocs Voices Thoughts from the wider Amdocs team

BLOGGER: NAOMI WEISER

Think basic human rights and what probably spring to mind are the “usual” civil, economic, social  and political rights such as the right to vote, to free speech, to a fair trial, to be safe, free from discrimination, to privacy, education, housing, health and an adequate standard of living. Those are some of the ones that fortunately applied to me at the time I was born, but another, perhaps less obvious one has been added by the UN to the list since then – the right to be connected to the Internet.

Taking this further are the US Minority Media and Telecommunications Council (MMTC),  who view broadband access and adoption as the main civil rights issue in the digital age, because without it, they say, a person will be doomed to second-class citizenship.  However, in a NY times editorial last week,  Vint Cerf, widely regarded as one of the fathers of the Internet and now VP and chief Internet evangelist for Google, disagreed with the human rights definition, explaining: “technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things.”

Whichever point of view you support, with more than 30% of the world’s 7 billion population already using the Internet, nationwide connectivity is something that’s being driven by different governments around the world who see broadband as another fundamental utility.

In the US in 2009, Congress directed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to develop a National Broadband Plan to ensure that every American would have  “access to broadband capability’ and in his 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama called for a National Wireless Initiative to make high-speed wireless services available to at least 98 percent of Americans. One of the approaches being used is the release of 500 MHz of spectrum for broadband for sale over the next decade.

The Digital Agenda for Europe views the development of high-speed networks today as “having the same revolutionary impact as the development of electricity and transportation networks had a century ago” and as such, its objective is to bring “basic broadband” to all Europeans by 2013 and also to ensure that, by 2020, all Europeans have access to much higher Internet speeds of above 30 Mbit/s and 50% or more of European households subscribe to Internet connections above 100 Mbit/s.

Some countries have set up government-funded companies to ensure the rollout of a national broadband network (NBN) to ensure connectivity. For example, Australia’s NBN is charged with building and operating the fiber network that will “deliver open access broadband network to all Australians, regardless of where they live”,  and has paid existing service providers like Telstra to help support this with some of their infrastructure assets. And in Singapore, the NBN has already connected about three-quarters of the country’s buildings by December 2011.

This move to guaranteed or mandated connectivity will have many implications for the business models of existing service providers such as: how to compete against new players who have been given access to networks (or even support them by selling them BSS services); how to make money from being made to extend networks to areas that were not economically viable; how to plan new network capacity effectively; what type of rich new services can they create once they have superfast speeds at their disposal.

Regardless of the reasons behind the drive for national connectivity, the human rights issue is perhaps a moot point because being connected to each other is going to end up being a fact of life, regardless.