MuniWireless

As I sit here at the United Nations attending a U.N. sponsored event entitled United Nations Meets Web 2.0 and ICT Entrepreneurs, I am reminded of the movie Groundhog Day where Bill Murray’s character, Phil Connors, is given innumerable days to put all the pieces together to ultimately win the affection of his co-anchor. I am a speaker at this event where I explain the role that broadband wireless can play in the development of an emerging country. Everyone in the audience “gets it” mostly because the room is full of people working in development.

My Groundhog Day experience is that, as I speak about how to broadband wireless can make a huge difference in the developing world, I know that broadband penetration rates in many countries are surpassing those of the United States. I keep hoping, after attending such events as this one, that something will change in the US, that it will understand the link between broadband penetration and development. As soon as that thought enters my mind, I wake up to Sonny and Cher singing “I Got You Babe” and, like Phil Connors, I realize that I have to relive the day again and try to do what I can to change the status quo.

The recent sale of the biggest swath of bandwidth in the history of the US further illustrates my frustration with the American model for the deployment of broadband services where two companies — Verizon and AT&T — dominate the market. The duopoly assures that low-cost high bandwidth solutions will be the exception rather than the trend. This is opposite to what is happening in Europe and Asia.

There will continue to be a lack of broadband services in rural and semi-rural areas throughout the US because there is no quick return on investment. There needs to be a recognition in the United States about how investment now will pay off later as people in rural and semi-rural locations gain access to broadband services. At the U.N. I talk about how the dominant carrier in many of the countries I work in have a pattern of charging too much for too little bandwidth and how eventually this changes once the government understands the role that access to the Internet can play in the economic growth of its country. We need only look at countries like Estonia, Slovenia, Korea and Sweden to see how bandwidth is growing and the prices are dropping. The same cannot be said of the U.S, where prices are increasing but bandwidth is still limited.

Broadband service must be understood as more than a utility to serve high-density population locations in the US. Yes, the United States is a HUGE country. While it is not part of Verizon’s business plan to extend DSL or fiber to “Hicksville” because of the lack of return on its investment, Verizon manages to provide services to the wealthiest far-flung spots in America like Aspen, Palm Springs and Sun Valley. At every forum where I speak in the US, people invariably come up to me and ask me whether USAID would ever invest in US-based projects, and once again I hear Sonny and Cher singing “I Got You Babe.”

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About the author

Glenn Strachan is overseeing a nation-wide broadband wireless project in the Republic of Montenegro. He also provides consulting services to municipal wireless projects. Mr. Strachan has served as project director overseeing the Macedonia Connects Project (www.mkconnects.org) which created nationwide broadband wireless connectivity using 460 primary and secondary schools as well as select universities and NGOs as the anchor tenant. His work has been highlighted in publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Christian Science Monitor and the BBC show “Click Online.”