Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook spoke to the United Nations this past week and talked about the need to bring Internet access to the five billion people on the planet that do not have it. He says that bringing Internet access to people is the most immediate way to help lift people out of abject poverty.
And one has to think he is right. Even very basic Internet access, which is what he and those other companies are trying to supply, will bring those billions into contact with the rest of the world. It’s hard to imagine how much untapped human talent resides in those many billions and access to the Internet can let the brightest of them contribute to the betterment of their communities and of mankind.
But on a more basic level, Internet access brings basic needs to poor communities. It opens up ecommerce and ebanking and other fundamental ways for people to become engaged in ways of making a living beyond a scratch existence. It opens up communities to educational opportunities, often for the first time. There are numerous stories already of rural communities around the world that have been transformed by access to the Internet.
One has to remember that the kind of access Zuckerberg is talking about is not the same as what we have in the developed countries. Here we are racing towards gigabit networks on fiber, while in these new places the connections are likely to be slow connections almost entirely via cheap smartphones. But you have to start somewhere.
Of course, there is also a bit of entrepreneurial competition going on here since each of these large corporations wants to be the face of the Internet for all of these new billions of potential customers. And so we see each of them taking different tactics and using different technologies to bring broadband to remote places.
Ultimately, the early broadband solutions brought to these new places will have to be replaced with some real infrastructure. As any population accepts Internet access they will quickly exhaust any limited broadband connection from a balloon, airplane, or satellite. And so there will come a clamor over time for the governments around the world to start building backbone fiber networks to get real broadband into the country and the region. I’ve talked to consultants who work with African nations and it is the lack of this basic fiber infrastructure that is one of the biggest limitations on getting adequate broadband to remote parts of the world.
And so hopefully this early work to bring some connectivity to remote places will be followed up with a program to bring more permanent broadband infrastructure to the places that need it. It’s possible that the need for broadband is going to soon be ranked right after food, water, and shelter as a necessity for a community. I would expect the people of the world to expect, and to then push their governments into making broadband a priority. I don’t even know how well we’ll do to get fiber to each region of our own country, and so the poorer parts of the world face a monumental task over the coming decades to satisfy the desire for connectivity. But when people want something badly enough they generally find a way to get what they want, and so I think we are only a few years away from a time when most of the people on the planet will be clamoring for good Internet access.