 | Issue: | Global-ICT 2008 |
| Article no.: | 11 | |
| Topic: | Building the Information Society one network at a time | |
| Author: | David Hershberg | |
| Title: | Chairman and CEO | |
| Organisation: | Globecomm Systems | |
| PDF size: | 221KB |
About author
David Hershberg is the founder, Chairman and CEO of Globecomm Systems. Mr Hershberg, a satellite communications pioneer since 1959, helped develop the ground stations for the first active satellite systems at ITT. Prior to Globecomm, Mr Hershberg was the founder and President of Satellite Transmission Systems, Inc, (STS), a provider of satellite ground segment systems and networks, which became a subsidiary of California Microwave, Inc. He is also a member of the Society of Satellite Professionals Hall of Fame and winner of the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Satellite Communications exchange conference, and holds numerous patents in the satellite communications field. Mr Hershberg holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University and an M.S. in Management Science from Stevens Institute of Technology.
Article abstract
Every society is an information society; those with more information will do better than those with less. Developing countries face serious problems, but those that develop their ICT infrastructures, and give their citizens access to communications and information, tend to do better than those that don’t. By leapfrogging to the latest technologies, and taking advantage of satellite systems to provide vital backbone and management services, countries can quickly and cost-effectively upgrade their communications infrastructures and give their citizens access to information.
Full Article
They say Rome wasn’t built in a day – and the Romans didn’t even have to figure out how to make GSM and CDMA work over IP. Anyone predicting what the Information Society of 2015 will look like should do so with humility. As we build the networks that are bringing it about, I am struck over and over again by the transformational power of what we do. On the ground where engineers and technicians are working, we see a step-by-step process and incremental progress, but when you look at the same work from a distance, we see a giant leap. The Information Society in Afghanistan In 2003, there was a bid to construct a government communications network in Afghanistan. The client was the Ministry of Communications and funding came from the World Bank. The goal was to provide voice and data services to ministries and government offices in Kabul as well as the provincial capitals. Afghanistan contains more history than any one nation deserves. Over the centuries, it has been invaded by the Greeks, Arabs, Mongols, Turks, British, Soviet Union and, after the September 11 attack on New York’s World Trade Centre, by the United States. After conquest, civil war and the destructive rule of the Taliban, the Afghanis did not have much left but poverty, broken infrastructure and the world’s largest concentration of land mines. We learned that, outside Kabul, there is little or no infrastructure, few roads and no electricity. Security is a continuing concern. There were many times where professionals building the network had to stop at the edge of a stream, unload trucks, hand-carry electronics across the stream, get the truck across and reload it on the other side. The Ministry had, under a separate contract, also purchased CDMA mobile switches from a Chinese company. They were providing local mobile service in ‘telecom islands’, but had no outside connections. Interconnecting the switches and linking them to long-distance circuits became an unexpected priority. What was originally planned as a private network rapidly became a public network. In effect, the new network became the backbone for a public telephone system, with bandwidth, trunking, backhaul of traffic to Kabul, and international voice, video and Internet service through satellite links to the USA. All that was in addition to meeting the government’s urgent need for basic communications. While the project specifications were changing, so was the identity of the client. It was still a Ministry project, but as the infrastructure was completed, it was transferred to Afghan Telecom, the national carrier. It was a clever strategy developed by Communications Minister Amirzai Sangin – the visionary who was behind the communications and information technology revolution in Afghanistan. With each project, Afghan Tel gained assets, which improved its ability to attract outside investment. In 2006, I was honoured to participate in a ceremony in New York City, in which an NGO called the Intelligent Community Forum (www.intelligentcommunity.org) presented Minister Sangin with its Visionary of the Year award. When completed, the IP-based government communications network linked 42 ministries and offices in Kabul via fibre and microwave, and extended this core network to 34 provincial capitals via satellite. Satellite bandwidth also linked dozens of CDMA mobile switches in the provinces with a mobile switching centre in the USA. All calls taking place within the footprint of a CDMA switch remained local, while calls between the switches or outside Afghanistan were routed via satellite through the Network Operations Centre in the USA. Ultimately, networks were built that connected a hub in Kabul to police and fire services in 337 legislative districts as well. Electronic democracy The impact of this modern telecommunications infrastructure became clear in 2004, when Afghanistan held the first democratic election in its history. While pictures of Afghanis holding up their purple-ink-stained fingers made the newspapers, it was the communications networks that made the election work. Every day, services on these same networks now help newly elected legislators and cabinet members understand what it takes to legislate and govern. Communications create opportunities for commerce, to obtain finance and credit, to interact with NGOs and with the government. Each day, as the mobile call volume rises, we see a revolution of rising expectations among Afghanis for the benefits of peace and security. These networks contribute greatly to Afghanistan’s Information Society. Much of the credit though for this success in-country goes to the Afghan partner in the project, Watan Telecom. They started early to make sure that resources were in place to train the people who would carry out the installation and maintenance. Together with the prime contractor, they have transferred a great deal of technology know-how, and have built the capacity of the Afghan technicians who now operate and maintain the networks. The mid-Pacific in the 21st century Shortly before the Afghanistan projects began, another project in the Kingdom of Tonga would transform this chain of islands into one of the most advanced ICT centres in the world. Tonga is a set of three islands and island groups – Vava’u, Ha’apai and Tongatapu – in the middle of the Pacific Ocean east of New Zealand. Separated by water, Tonga’s 112,000 people had no reliable access to modern communications; this made the islands difficult to govern and sharply limited economic opportunity. The network solution leapfrogged over the technologies of more advanced nations. The Internet Protocol is the data standard for the network that uses point-to-point microwave to connect the islands and GSM, fixed wireless and digital TV broadcast systems to interoperate with IP. As in Afghanistan, gateway service via satellite connects the network to the international public telephone network, to the Internet and to the network’s operations support and systems maintenance. The result was a network providing broadband Internet to consumers as well as business and government customers, private data services, GSM mobile phone service and both audio and video entertainment on a subscription basis – all over a single network. The cost savings compared with traditional networks was huge, and the capabilities anticipated what we now call the triple play in telecom. Robust infrastructure There is one aspect of the Information Society we can be sure of. As Web 2.0 and software-as-service applications become more tightly woven into our daily lives, the stakes for network reliability will steadily increase. Truly robust networks – able to recover from component failure or software glitches in seconds or minutes – will become as necessary as reliable electricity. Such redundancy, as this is known in the telecom trade, will not be limited to industrialized economies. Like Tonga, many developing nations are leapfrogging the development path pioneered by industrialized nations. They are finding new solutions to the problem of keeping the lights on and the bits flowing. Access to mobile telephony, for example, has skyrocketed in Africa, from 37 million subscribers in 2002 to 270 million in 2007. This access has had the same transformative impact for people there as in Afghanistan or Tonga. The largest mobile carrier in Kenya, Safaricom, has introduced a service called M-PESA, which enables Safaricom’s customers to send money to each other by text message faster and cheaper than by conventional funds transfer. In 2008, it was moving US$1.5 million per day across Kenya, and the company had begun rolling the service out in India, Tanzania, Afghanistan and other markets. The ability to send money by phone has multiple impacts. Day labourers can be paid by phone. Money can be sent to friends and family in emergencies. One popular practice is to deposit money before making a long journey and then withdraw it at the other end, which is safer than carrying lots of cash. When money is at stake in this way, reliable connectivity is essential. MTN, another of Africa’s major mobile players, understands this well. In 2003, MTN sought to develop a diversity hub for the VSAT network that backhauls their GSM mobile traffic in Cameroon. The network ties all of the outlying areas of Cameroon to the main hub, which acts as the system’s international gateway. With the existing hub located in Doala, the client chose to place the diversity hub in Yaounde, far enough away to prevent bad weather or disaster from affecting both stations. The project was completed ahead of schedule, which turned out to be a good thing. The diversity site was commissioned just as a massive lightning storm knocked out most of the equipment in Doala. Working through the night, engineers were able to switch traffic onto the new Yaounde hub and minimize both traffic and revenue loss for MTN. When we speak of the Information Society, we tend to think of first-world industrialized nations that top the ITU’s annual tables for broadband penetration, but the truth is that every society is an information society. The flow of information is essential to every aspect of life in a community, state or nation, whether that information moves on sheets of paper or as digital bits flowing through an optical fibre or satellite link. The coming decade will be shaped by what one economist has called “the rise of the rest” as developing nations grow into economic giants. Based on my experience building networks around the globe, I think that is where we will see the Information Society make its greatest strides.
