By MATT REYNOLDS
Big tech firms are battling to connect the half of the world's population who don't have internet access, but their solutions might not be best for the people that they're trying to help. For some villagers living in Mwandi District in rural Zambia, the only way to get online is to pay a visit to the MTN tree. Every day a constant stream of people stand under its branches, phones aloft, hoping to catch a data connection to the tree’s namesake, the telecoms company MTN Zambia. Dotted throughout Sub-Saharan Africa you’ll find countless similar landmarks. Sometimes it's a conveniently-placed rock that marks a place with a decent data connection. At other times getting online means queuing to walk up a termite mound. But with with only 22 per cent of people in Sub-Saharan Africa online, it remains a place where the internet isn’t within easy reach – it’s something that people have to actively hunt down, if they can afford a device in the first place.
“The vast majority of the continent is disconnected,” says Mike Santer, founder of BluPoint, a UK-based company that lets rural communities access information on their mobile devices without needing an internet connection. “From the mobile operator’s point of view, there is no commercial reason why you’d put internet into rural areas.”
For Google and Facebook the unconnected world – and the three-and-a-half billion people in it – represents a lucrative business opportunity. In the past half-decade the two tech firms have been battling to connect users in the developing world and in the process, as much as double the number of people using their services, gaining precious access to new customers and, perhaps, their data too. And while Google has proven it has the physical infrastructure to bring the internet to the unconnected world, the race is only just beginning.
Out of the two tech giants, it’s Google that has had the most to crow about in recent months. On July 11 it spun its rural connectivity project into a fully-fledged company under parent firm Alphabet. The company – now called Loon – plans to beam the internet to rural areas from helium-filled balloons that linger 20 kilometres up in the stratosphere for 100 days at a time. The technology, which has already been trialled in New Zealand, Sri Lanka and Puerto Rico will be used to provide internet to regions of central Kenya, starting from 2019.
While Google was betting big on balloons, Facebook took a different tack, opting to provide high-altitude connectivity via drone. To this end it spent $20 million (£15m) on Ascenta, a UK-based drone builder, in March 2014. But after only two test flights – one of which ended in serious damage to the drone – Facebook finally announced it was abandoning plans to build its own drones in June 2018. Instead, it will continue its connectivity plans by partnering with Airbus to explore high-altitude internet delivery as well as experimenting with launching its own internet-streaming satellite in 2019.
Despite these high-profile setbacks, Facebook has already connected millions of people to its own limited version of the internet through a scheme called Free Basics. Through Free Basics, Facebook partners with telecoms providers in developing countries to let users access a pre-selected number of sites, including Facebook, without using any extra data. The hope is that this makes it cheaper for people to access information online, while also making it easier for them to access Facebook.
Facebook has now connected 100 million people in 60 countries through Free Basics, according to Mark Zuckerberg, who shared the latest figures during an earnings call with investors in April 2018. But getting there has not been easy. In February 2016 India’s telecoms regulator banned the service on the grounds that it unlawfully prioritised some sites over others, in effect creating a two-tier internet where those that could pay were able to access any site they wanted while others could only access sites hand-picked by Facebook.
Elsewhere, Facebook has quietly been pulling Free Basics from other countries, according to reporting from The Outline. In Myanmar, where Facebook was flooded with hate speech in the wake of the Burmese government’s ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims, Facebook ended up pulling the Free Basics program in August 2017. In recent months, Facebook has also pulled the service from half a dozen other countries besides Myanmar.
If Facebook and Google don’t connect people, who else is going to do it? “Digging up roads and laying cable is really just very hard and expensive,” says Ken Banks, head of social impact at digital identity firm Yoti. In the past, governments around the world have tried to encourage telecoms agencies to put aside money to connect rural communities. According to the trade body representing the mobile industry, the GSMA, more than half the money set aside for that purpose was never used.
Not only is connecting rural communities expensive, but in pure economic terms it doesn’t always make an awful lot of sense. Disconnected people are more likely to live on very low incomes and so are less likely to spend large amount of money online, Banks says. With little profit motive for mobile networks or governments to connect rural residents, the field is wide open for big tech firms who have the cash and technical know-how to connect the billions of people still outside of the internet’s reach.
But Santer says that, even for Facebook and Google, providing internet to half of the world is no easy feat. “These are all sort of top down approaches,” he says, that work on the assumption that if you provide a WiFi connection, people will be able to get online. This would be fine if everyone in the developing world had a smartphone, Santer says, but they don’t. “I think it’s completely inappropriate for much of Sub-Saharan Africa, and also much of India and other emerging markets,” he says. In Zambia 72 per cent of people have old-fashioned feature phones instead of smartphones and in India and Sub-Saharan Africa shipments of feature phones are increasing while smartphone shipments are slowing down.
With his own company, BluPoint, Santer has already adapted to the devices that people in the developing world are using. His company sets up hubs that allow people to access pre-loaded information through BlueTooth, FM Radio or WiFi, without any data costs to the end user. “That means that really low end phones can still access online content,” Sante says. The system has been used to provide people in Ethiopia with information about healthcare and sustainable forest management and in Mwandi District in Zambia the BluPoint hub is updated daily with news, sports and agricultural information.
While Santer is a supporter of projects like Loon, he says that western companies need to show more awareness that what works for them doesn’t always translate to the developing world. “We have got to wrestle and be really sensitive about the notion of digital imperialism,” he says. A better approach, he says, would be for big tech firms to partner with local agencies that know the needs of local communities.
For the company that does get crack the formula, the rewards could be vast. The other half of the world suddenly available to use their services, and an accompanying treasure trove of data that could be used to build sell advertising or build new monetisable services later down the line. “You’re trying to solve something that’s quite difficult, but there’s a big prize,” says Banks. “If you develop the right technology that can work well, and you strike up the right partnerships, there’s a couple of billion customers there, it’s massive.”
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