Affordable Internet : Connecting Unconnected

Every year 20^th June is celebrated as World WiFi Day. On this day, I just want to reiterate that  cheaper or free access to WiFi in rural and remote areas in developing/under-developed countries is key to Connect the Unconnected.  Further, the  cheap internet enabled mobile handset together with affordable access to internet can bring the underprivileged to the mainstream of development in faster way.

In this connection, good news recently came from Mumbai, India. Mumbai based Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) started a pilot project to connect thousands of rural villages across India through it’s  Gram Marg project. One of their techniques is to leverage unutilized television spectrums to transmit low-cost, wide-range Internet connectivity, so-called frugal 5G. According to Professor Abhay Karandikar, leader of Gram Marg Project , the team is focusing on solutions that address energy efficiency, affordability and high throughput. Gram Marg has already equipped 25 villages in the Palghar district of Maharashtra with this innovation.

Another hope came from South Africa. Project Isizwe, a  non-profit, deploys free, fast Wi-Fi across low-income communities through a variety of financial models: access can be subsidized by municipal governments or unlocked by engaging with a sponsor’s content. In one community, Wi-Fi vouchers are earned by recycling household litter. Project Isizwe’s founder, Alan Knott-Craig, believes that the  approach can be scaled across the African continent.  He also believes that Wi-Fi is the most affordable technology in the world  to lower the cost of Internet access in rural areas.

Greater internet access corelates directly to health care, education, gender equality, economic development, and lots of other goals well-financed non-profit struggle to achieve. Boosting a poor country’s mobile internet use by 10% corelates with an average 3 percentage point  increase in GDP, and electronic channels have proved capable of making governments more responsive to civic complaints. By contrast, women and people living in rural areas lag behind in online use, which limits their access to government services, banking, and job opportunities.

Nowhere is that clearer than in Africa, which has the world’s lowest share of people using the internet, under 25%. The cohort of 800 million offline people spread across the continent’s 54 countries is younger and growing faster than most, but incomes are lower and a larger share of residents live in rural areas that are tough to wire for internet access or for that matter, electricity. Now, however, a handful of phone purveyors are trying in greater earnest to nudge internet -ready upgrades into African markets, with models designed with an eye towards rural priorities, first those of rural India, where they are already hits, rather than battered third hand flip phones from the hey-day of Spice Girls.

Cheaper Handset with Internet is the Key

Two of the biggest mobile operators in Africa viz, MTN of South Africa and Orange of France, this year started selling quasi smartphone for as little as $20. Previously the floor had been around $40. These devices which has brain in the body of 1990s candy bar phones, are powered by software from KaiOS Technologies Ltd,  a three year old spin-off of a Chinese electronics giant that picked up the pieces from a failed effort to produce cheap internet devices.

While most of other companies are trying to make internet connected devices ever more powerful and capable, on the other hand companies like KaiOS went other way.  They thought of keeping the essential capabilities of smartphones but strip out costs and preserve battery life for people who likely have spotty access to electricity. MTN feels that its KaiOS phones are designed to pull down barriers to internet’s benefits.

So the body of such phones  has no  touchscreen, which  is the priciest component of smart phone and battery hog. To save the cost further, KaiOS shrank the memory to about a quarter.

That does not mean that these scaled down phones are not capable. All the cut corners aimed that the device uses so little power, it can last five days without recharging. So there is a giant button in the middle of  the phone that activates a version of Google Assistant adapted for local markets. Not surprising Google spent $22 million in KaiOS last year.

In ways both high tech and low tech, internet providers are putting in the efforts to access online feasible in conditions that tend to beat up the silicon giants. Nairobi’s BRCK Inc. builds cheap off-the-shelf parts to beam out connectivity from solar-powered rural cell towers and to serve as Wi-Fi hotspots on informal computer buses called matatus.

Cheaper Mobile Data is Important for Rural Mass

One problem the carriers have not solved so far is the high price of mobile data. Every gigabyte costs the average African a relatively massive slice of monthly income-about 9%, compared to less than 0.5% in USA. An organization called Alliance for Affordable Internet  has developed special software for mobile carriers that is giving away in a bid to tower cost to consume content.

It is expected that sales of cheap phones powered by KaiOS to jump 50% this year, to 105 million devices. Most of the growth likely to come from India where Reliance JIO extensively subsidized the phone for its network customers.

Like energy and transportation, internet access is an essential component of infrastructure, economic development and social empowerment, so much so  that authoritarian governments in part of continent have tried to block access to it completely. The growing sweep of KaiOS offers a reminder that most of the innovations are not always the driverless cars, the pilotless planes, or the sailorless boats.