Search Results for: literacy

A report with recommendations to drive universal broadband service was released by Blair Levin last week.

Levin was the former FCC insider – chief of staff for Chairman Reed Hundt in the 1990’s. The report, Universal Broadband: Targeting Investments to Deliver Broadband Services to All Americans [pdf, 1.96MB]was written with the perspective that “all Americans will need access to broadband networks and public policy should encourage broadband adoption.”

   

The report envisages repurposing the Universal Service Fund to flow towards filling service voids in a technology and company agnostic manner.

The report acknowledges that satellite is part of the universal broadband solution, although there is no information provided as to how it developed the estimate of only 0.2% of households being un-reachable by terrestrial services.

Ultimately, it will be too expensive to provide service to the last .2 percent of homes, so those homes should be served by satellite broadband.

But the paper goes further than supply-side.

Numerous surveys show that low-income Americans adopt broadband at less than half the rate of wealthier Americans. Cost is the biggest factor, but it is not the only factor. Digital literacy and relevance also loom large as factors affecting adoption.

There are a number of recommendations to increase demand among those who are economically disadvantaged. To what extent will Canada look at these kinds of programs?

The 10 days leading up to the start of Yom Kippur tonight are a time for reflection, a review of the past year.

I have taken the past week to recuperate from some surgery, which provided an opportunity to have narcotics influence the thought process. As a preamble, I wish to note that my surgeon recommended not conducting any major legal or financial transactions while under the influence. So, I hope this note of reflection doesn’t end up like the epiphanal manuscript from Jerry Maguire.

It has been 4 months since the launch of Canada’s consultation on the Digital Economy. In that time, we have seen some huge amounts of money allocated for rural broadband by the Broadband Canada program and the CRTC’s deferral account decision.

It seems to me that we have been spending a huge amount of money without first having a clear statement of our objectives. What are we trying to accomplish by spending this money, with what kind of paramenters to measure success? What is the liberalization of foreign investment rules trying to accomplish?

I’m not being facetious here. What is the one-line elevator pitch description of the objective of more than a half billion dollars (or more) that was committed to extend broadband access over the past few months?

Without a clear statement of our objective, how can we measure whether it was the most effective way to spend the money. Sure, there are regions that are now in line to get access to improved connectivity – but that doesn’t mean we got value for the money. Are we even heading in the right direction?

Clearly, it has not been to get as many Canadians on-line as possible. If that was the objective, we would be spending more money stimulating demand among the millions of Canadians that already have access to broadband, but have not yet connected.

Around one in 5 Canadian homes doesn’t subscribe to a wireline high speed broadband service that is at their front door. We know that broadband adoption rates are skewed toward higher income Canadians.

So, if our objectives for a digital Canada are geared toward improving economic advantages, shouldn’t we focus on greater digital participation among those Canadians who are already the most economically disadvantaged?

And if increasing broadband adoption is the primary objective, are our current government programmes consistent with the most effective way to achieve that goal?

There have been some commentators that have argued that Canada needs a Digital Minister – a single point of focus around the Cabinet table. I disagree: this is perhaps one implementation approach, but not the only one. I could argue as forcefully that a government that truly buys into a digital vision could (and should) have a more pervasive virtual digital leadership; digital strategies should be found within every government office.

The “how” is more of an implementation detail. I am far more concerned with the “what”. What are we trying to do? Let’s start by making that answer clear.

What is our national digital connectivity objective? Do we want the fastest speeds? Do we want the most people to have access? Do we want the most people to be connected? Do we want global leadership in certain types of content or applications development?

I would vote to focus on maximizing the number of Canadians who are connected on-line all the time. And if that is the case, then spending programs need to be measured based on how effectively they deliver on that goal, with technological neutrality.

I am less fussed with what gizmo or plumbing pipe people use, as long as it serves the purposes of enabling us to be able to leverage the capabilities, efficiencies and opportunities afforded by digital connectivity and literacy.

Nokia recently announced its focus on getting the next billion connected to the internet. It is a clear statement of a bold objective.

It is a new school year, a new season, as we prepare for the return of Parliament on Monday, let’s look forward to a clear statement of a bold digital vision.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project provides wonderful insights into trends in broadband adoption and attitudes for our neighbours south of the border.

The 2010 Report [pdf, 2.2MB] was released last week and the headline from Engadget observed that “Pew study finds majority of Americans don’t want government to prioritize affordable broadband.”

we have to imagine researchers might have seen this coming. Those with broadband don’t need it, those without it don’t want it.

It is a telling statistic – that should concern those who are looking to build enthusiasm for national or regional digital strategies.

The US is seeing a drop-off in adoption rates now that residential broadband penetration has reached two-thirds of American adults. But policy makers need to understand what is causing the lack of support for increasing adoption to the remaining third of the population.

Digital literacy remains a concern.

A fifth of American adults (21%) do not use the internet. Many non-users think online content is not relevant to their lives and they are not confident they could use computers and navigate the web on their own.

What information can be extrapolated for Canada? Is broadband access too much of a focus, when education and skills training appear to be holding back even more users?

Can we explore similar research being conducted in Canada?

In the wake of the World Cup finals driving enormous streaming video across the globe’s internet backbones, Canada is receiving the final submissions for its Digital Economy consultation.

There was a last minute extension granted that pushed the deadline to tonight at midnight. As an aside, there was a bit of ambiguity on what exactly was meant by “The deadline for ideas and submissions on Canada’s digital economy strategy has been extended until midnight, Tuesday, July 13.” After all, with all of the time zones we have in Canada, the time midnight varies. For that matter, the time “midnight” occurs twice each day: at 00:00 and at 24:00. Which was meant? Even the countdown timer was confused, showing 2 days remaining all day on both Sunday and Monday. It seemed humourous that a digital strategy consultation specified an imprecise analog time, rather than a universally understood specific digital time.

But I digress.

The last minute extension meant that some submissions are available early. I had a chance to skim through some, including a few that indicate that Canada’s infrastructure is doing pretty well; our adoption needs attention.

Which brings me back to the World Cup. Just as we Canadians experienced for the Vancouver Olympics this past winter, the World Cup drove spectacular levels of broadband usage on a global scale. Some of the more impressive statistics from Rogers were: More than 75,000 fans signed up to Rogers On Demand Online (RODO) to be able to watch matches streamed live; through last Friday, almost 225,000 hours of FIFA action was watched on RODO; more than 10% of the matches viewed were in a language other than English; nearly 10,000 fans downloaded a Rogers On Demand Mobile app, letting them watch live on their smartphones. According to an article in the National Post this past weekend, when Sidney Crosby scored the goal that earned Canada’s gold medal in hockey, “a torrent of texts, streaming video and other data requests” flooded Bell’s mobile network.

Use of technology increases when people see the value of (or at least they apply a value to) the technical capability. The assumption is that we are helping educate a new group of users among those who watched the Olympics on-line or streamed World Cup action to their computer or smart phone.

Step by step, event by event, we are increasing Canada’s digital literacy. Increasing broadband adoption will require increased engagement by people who haven’t been able to find enough value to justify the effort and cost of going on-line – up until now.

The ITU has released its latest report on the state of the information society around the world [pdf, 4.28MB].

There is a lot of information in there to be digested, but for now, let me highlight a couple observations.

The first point that I found interesting was a table in Annex 3, that is the basis for computing the IDI – defined as the ICT Development Index. In passing, allow me to applaud the ITU for its use of a SRT: a Secondary Recursive TLA: a rarely used three letter acronym that embeds a second TLA within it.

In that Annex 3 table, we can see that in 2008, Canada had computers in 80% of our households and broadband in 75.1% of the households. Assuming that households with computers would be the only ones that would subscribe to broadband service, it appears that close to 94% of Canadian households with computers had broadband service. As a comparison, Sweden has 87% of households equipped with computers, 84% with broadband. It seems to me that ensuring computer accessibility, through increased digital literacy and affordability, is one of the things that needs to be looked at when we try to increase broadband penetration.

Section 2 of the report has a couple important text boxes that speak about the challenges of international data comparisons. Box 2.1 talks about the importance of shifting to household survey data, using mobile penetration as an example of the distortions created by use of supply side data from operators.

Box 2.3 looks at specific limitations of international data comparisons, looking at the Korean and Japanese cases as examples.

‘International Internet bandwidth per user’ is another indicator where the performance of the Republic of Korea is relatively weak (ranked 58th globally). International bandwidth is low since Korean Internet users rely mainly on national bandwidth, available abundantly and at relatively low cost. Koreans have produced a large amount of national Internet content in local language and surf ‘at home’ (on web sites that are hosted within the country, not abroad), in their local language. The top twenty most popular Korean websites are all hosted in Korea. Few Koreans visit websites abroad due to language constraints.

The box doesn’t mention the anomaly for Korea with computer penetration (80.9%), yet 94.3% of households are reported as having broadband. Interesting?

Canada’s international bandwidth is most certainly understated since there is no mechanism by which cross-border connections can accurately be counted. In addition, to what extent do domestic sites satisfy the needs of francophones, similar to Korea’s domestic content producers.

As the ITU report itself cautions:

These data issues make international comparisons difficult and prevent policy makers from truly assessing the development of the information society.

There is no substitute for applying critical thought to any set of simple metrics.

Digital issues will be covered with lots of critical thought at at The 2010 Canadian Telecom Summit. Have you registered yet?