Technologies bringing Internet to the poor that every development leader must know

American sensors recently detected Russian submarine activity near undersea cables that transmit huge amounts of data between continents. Military and intelligence officials are on edge. Every day, these fiber optic cables carry $10 trillion in global business and more than 95 percent of global communications. Fiber optic cable offers the highest capacity, lowest cost and fastest Internet speeds, and developing countries have benefited from efforts to extend connectivity to their shores. But bridging the digital divide is not as simple as laying cables between continents, and the race to connect the next billion people to the Internet has given rise to a wide variety of solutions. Devex spoke with a range of experts to hear more about some of the most promising examples. Building infrastructure While undersea cables provide access to international bandwidth, additional infrastructure is needed to connect areas far from the coast. Efforts like Google’s Project Link use shared infrastructure to connect landlocked Internet service providers and mobile network operators to long-distance fiber lines. In Uganda, Project Link installed 700 kilometers of fiber, enabling 13 mobile network operators and Internet service providers to deliver faster connectivity speeds and offer 4G LTE services. There is a lack of competition among African ISPs and MNOs due to a range of factors, including the high costs of deploying fiber, poor infrastructure and governments unwilling to lease bandwidth to private companies. Google is one of many actors working to encourage open competition to drive down prices and increase access, according to Rick Needham, Google’s director of sustainability and energy. “That's good for Google, but it's also great for users," he said at a U.S. Agency for International Development event on investment in Africa. Improving access benefits Google, which makes 90 percent of its revenue from ad sales and has a huge market opportunity on a continent where only 10 percent of households have Internet access. In many cases, the Internet is too expensive, even in places where it is available. That is part of what drove Nigerian entrepreneur Funke Opeke to launch MainOne. The telecommunications company built cables from Portugal to South Africa that have dramatically reduced the cost of Internet backhaul service, or networks that connect providers to the Internet. Efforts like hers have opened the door for new models like EveryLayer. “Born in Silicon Valley, built in Kigali,” the company saw an opportunity to help independent ISPs in Rwanda and elsewhere negotiate rates for the newly reduced cost of backhaul. EveryLayer works with ISPs to map out and design their networks, set up hardware and bill the end users in order to provide connections to the last mile. White space There are gaps in between analog television stations. These gaps are actually unused broadcasting frequencies with the potential to deliver Internet connectivity farther than home Wi-Fi can. With the transition from analog to digital TV, white space is emerging as an inexpensive and easily deployable connectivity solution. Mawingu Networks is one example of an organization installing solar panels and raising antennas to transmit TV white space data to substations. “Customers are accessing 15 [megabits per second] broadband and device recharging at $3 per month,” reads the Mawingu Networks website. The group has received an initial grant from USAID, angel investor Jim Forster, Paul G. Allen’s Vulcan Inc. and Microsoft’s 4Afrika initiative. Devex spoke with a range of people at Microsoft about how their work to connect people via white space ties into their new mission statement to “empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.” They expanded on the connection between connectivity and agency, saying this goes beyond corporate social responsibility as part of an effort to grow a market. In late 2013, Microsoft worked with the Philippine government to leverage TV white space to provide both victims and first responders of typhoons with connectivity. While the partnership indicated the potential of white space in emerging markets, barriers remain, including opposition from incumbents that have slowed regulatory processes. Taking to the skies From undersea cables to unmanned aircraft in the clouds — companies like Facebook and Google are exploring how drones can expand Internet access, experimenting with everything from solar-powered planes to high-altitude balloons. Google is working on two drones to harvest data and beam Internet to Earth as part of Project Titan, housed within the Access and Energy Division under Google’s newly created parent company Alphabet. This is an expansion of its Project Loon initiative. But drones and balloons do not solve the cost issue, still at the center of access. “The primary barriers to access fall into three categories: infrastructure, affordability and awareness,” said Vaughn Hester, program manager for Internet.org, at a Social Capital Markets panel on expanding Internet connectivity. Hester explained how the Facebook-led initiative is using drones, among other technologies, to connect the two-thirds of the world without Internet access and thereby expand its user base in emerging markets. Facebook recently rebranded Internet.org as “Free Basics,” opening it up to to any developers creating services that integrate with the platform. This was partly in response to criticism that the company was favoring its partners by offering limited access to services rather than a small amount of free access to the whole Internet. Pipes and towers Experts who spoke with Devex emphasized the value of projects like Project Link over Project Loon, saying the real solutions lie in building infrastructure and reducing cost, even though that is less appealing to the technology companies competing for buzz. Jim Forster is chair of the board at AirJaldi, which is setting up rural network infrastructure in India by putting transmitters on small towers on roofs. He spoke with Devex from a car bound from Jaipur to Delhi as part of a trip to deliver high-speed service to community locations and prepaid hotspot service to individuals. “Every company tends to push their model as, ‘This is going to enable everything,’ but there is not a single technical solution that is a panacea," Forster said. He was behind “Wireless Networking in the Developing World,” a handbook for how to design, implement and maintain affordable wireless networks, and emphasized the need for building local capacity. “Without that, it’s all just pie in the sky and later rusty dusty equipment on the ground,” he said. A space race The next key battleground for companies competing to deliver Internet connectivity might be out of this world, in low to medium Earth orbit. Earlier this month, Mark Zuckerberg announced in a Facebook status a partnership with a satellite communications company to deliver Internet from space. “To connect people living in remote regions, traditional connectivity infrastructure is often difficult and inefficient, so we need to invent new technologies,” he wrote. Google is getting in on the action, too. In 2013, the technology giant acquired O3b Networks, which was founded in 2007 to place satellites in medium Earth orbit to connect the “other three billion,” as part of its $1 billion satellite venture. The next year, O3b Networks founder Greg Wyler left the company, and reports surfaced that he was spending a lot of time with SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who has his own plans to drive the future of satellite Internet. Now Wyler has a new startup called OneWeb, which Bloomberg described as a "supercharged" O3b. When it comes to satellites, Facebook is taking advantage of proven technologies, with a satellite 22,000 miles above Earth. While that will cover a far larger area than low Earth orbit satellites, it has the same constraints of speed and cost as existing satellite Internet. But while it is possible that low to medium Earth orbit satellite Internet experiments will succeed, the end users must have access to affordable satellite dishes and subscription costs, which remains a problem in most of the world. That is why some have deemed this a space race with no winners. It comes down to cost “The big challenge with satellite technology is, in its current incarnation, it’s expensive,” Wayan Vota, a digital development entrepreneur based in Washington, D.C., told Devex. “If you have infrastructure that’s expensive to maintain, then how are you going to amortize that cost over the number of people using it?” Different companies are working to answer that question. For OneWeb, the plan is to launch hundreds of satellites into low Earth orbit by 2018, and to install satellite dishes in public spaces like schools and hospitals rather than have individuals buy their own. These extraterrestrial approaches are complementary rather than competitive with infrastructure projects on the ground, Forster explained. They bring a signal close to the area, and from there initiatives like AirJaldi and Mawingu can connect people. When it comes down to it, the reason over half the people on the planet are not connected is that available networks are too expensive. So in addition to new ideas to expand coverage, there must be new strategies to reach people at a rate they can afford. “Ultimately the way any of this should be evaluated is cost per gigabyte delivered to end users,” Forster said. “I don’t see how putting roughly the same transmitter on a fancy plane that’s circling around reduces the cost.” To read additional content on innovation, go to Focus On: Innovation in partnership with Philips.