 | Issue: | Latin America IV 2001 |
| Article no.: | 2 | |
| Topic: | Connecting the Citizen – Bridging the Digital Divide | |
| Author: | Amadeu de Paula Castro Neto | |
| Title: | Interim Member, Board of Directors, Competition and Universal Service | |
| Organisation: | ANATEL | |
| PDF size: | 24KB |
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Article abstract
The combination of Telecommunications and Information Technologies (IT) can make man’s long-time dream of communicating at any time-from anywhere, with anyone, as he wishes-come true. The growth of the telecommunications/information technology user base and the Internet has created a truly significant window of opportunity. The Internet channel made possible by these technologies now provides nations with the tools to democratise knowledge and improve the lives of their citizens. People need no longer be mere passive recipients of information. Today, with the Internet, they can generate, store, process and forward it as they like and use it as a tool to interact, as they will, with all others on the web.
Full Article
The Information Highway, the path of the Internet, has become an important part of the international scenario. It has emerged as a valuable tool to integrate and modernise economies. New Generation Networks (NGN) with their high capacity, and the almost unlimited and transparent information flows they make possible, promise to have a greater impact upon the development and competitiveness of countries than did, in the past, the construction of federal railway and road systems. In Brazil, only 8 per cent of the population now has access to the Internet. The Government, as a matter of public interest, on behalf of its citizens, is preparing programmes that will bring the benefits of the digital revolution to Brazilian society. The government’s task of bringing the benefits of the digital revolution to all is both difficult and delicate. The industry must be regulated, by establishing an equilibrium between the often conflicting interests of the sector and the efficient and exemplary use of the country’s infrastructure, and services must be guaranteed. Democratising Access to the Information Infrastructure From a regulatory point of view, the government’s actions to democratise access to publicly available digital network services, such as the Internet, need to focus upon providing citizens with universal access to telecommunications, fostering competition between telecommunications service providers and enhancing the connectivity of systems throughout the country. Such a focus should result in improved quality and generally reduced costs. The ideal of universal access is to make available to all of Brazil’s people, on a fair and just basis and at a reasonable price, whatever telecommunication services are needed for full, effective, social and economic participation. Several measures have been put into effect by Brazil’s government to make this happen: 1. Service obligations and commitments were formally defined in the licences for telecommunications service providers. Service providers must comply with these ‘Universalisation’ obligations, at their own expense, to keep their licences. 2. A fund for universal telecommunications services was established (FUST). The fund-financed in part by a 1 per cent tax on the gross revenues of telecommunications service providers and a series of other sources defined by law-is charged with the task of financing the growth of telecommunications services that would not, otherwise, be economically or commercially viable. FUST will provide resources for schools, public health facilities, small rural communities and, as well, a host of other points where telecommunications facilities can best serve the interests of society. 3. Regulations have been put in place to optimise the use of existing telecommunications services and networks, particularly the existing fixed-telephony system, for access to the Internet and other digital information backbones. In this regard, the tendency has been to encourage the growth of ‘non-geographic area codes’, which cost the same to access no matter where in the country one dials from, and to promote rate models less susceptible to distance factors. Other initiatives with similar intent can be expected. To encourage healthy competition among the providers of telecommunications and connectivity services, the idle capacity and the capillary structure of universal networks needs to be opened, unbundled, and made available to other service providers on a non-discriminatory basis. In this way, new forms of service-multimedia telecommunication networks, for example-will be able to economically enter the market and compete with existing services on a more equal footing. Supplementary regulatory action, no doubt, will have to be considered to reduce the competitive challenges facing new entrants and provide a ‘level playing field’. Measures such as the following could help to achieve this goal: 1. Encourage access to, and interconnection between, local telephone networks and other telecommunication networks, transparent to the nature of the information being transported, to enable efficient, lower-cost flow of non-voice traffic to the web; 2. Implement joint billing mechanisms so that local telephone company invoices can include charges for connection to, and transport by, digital networks such as those used for the Internet; 3. Establish telecommunications service plans and rates suited to the Internet-i.e. a flat, not volume or time-dependent, rate-thereby enabling the user to forecast his expenditures; 4. Systematise and broadly disseminate the conditions for network use, interconnection and compensation by creating a ‘Public Interconnection Offer’, to be complied with by all telecommunications service providers without regard to the nature of the information transmitted; 5. Define quality standards for connections to digital network to guarantee user satisfaction. Anatel, Brazil’s independent telecommunications regulatory agency, has been co-ordinating efforts to achieve universal access to telecommunications. Anatel’s actions have already produced, among others, the following results: 1. More than 45 million individual fixed telephone accesses have been installed in approximately 13,000 localities in Brazil; 2. More than 1.3 million public telephones (payphones) have been installed at 25,000 points, in 5,560 municipalities, providing access to the telephone system for almost all Brazilians who do not have their own phones; 3. Brazil now has 27 million mobile phones in use and 3.5 million subscription TV subscribers. It is estimated that investments of approximately US$45 billion will be needed to increase services (fixed, mobile and mass communication) and to meet the demand during the period 2000-2005. This level of investment would serve to increase Brazil’s telecommunications plant to a total of 120 million fixed and mobile accesses. The Government as a User – Using the Infoway to Benefit Citizens Telecommunications are already widely used by government institutions, departments and agencies to interconnect their headquarters, administrative centres, state units, regional departments and offices. This interconnection, though, is devoted largely to facilitating internal processes and not to facilitating contact with the public or producing externally visible results. Each government organisation tends to have its own network. The high proportion of separate, narrowly focused telecommunications networks-one per department-has been mistakenly associated with the need to maintain the independence of each organisation. In truth, the proliferation of networks is largely a result of un-coordinated action encouraged, in the past, by generous budgetary resources that, today, no longer exist. This lack of co-ordination in the use of intrinsically sharable resources has been highly detrimental to the government -predominantly with regard to the government’s relationship with the operators of the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure. In practice, these service providers market services, of a single network or system, separately to each government department. As a result of this separate marketing, the gains from the shared use of technical resources have not generated savings for Brazil’s government or benefits for its people. A study of the use of telecommunications services by several public administration agencies revealed wildly differing costs for data communication services. In some cases the cost to the government to transmit a kilobit of data was found to be as little US$0.60; other agencies paid as much as US$40.00 to transmit the same amount of data. It seems obvious, then, that the integration of the networks used by the government would generate real savings. The integration of the government’s data communication networks would also make possible a new level of co-ordination not only with the government’s suppliers and financial agents but also in providing services to the Brazilian people themselves. The complexity involved an integration effort of such dimensions is not the main obstacle. The real obstacles faced by would be systems integrators include: the self-interests of the current user organisations; the lack of an overall government telecommunications co-ordinator; organisational inertia; and lack of faith-incredulity that this seemingly impossible task can be accomplished. Brazil is now building a government ‘infoway’ to provide all of its people at all levels of society with easy, interactive, access to government services. Initially, the main focus of the effort is to provide access to education and information at all levels about safety, health, communications, law, justice, voting, culture, social security, research, specialised technical advice, community activities, job openings and the like. The infrastructure will also serve the government itself in such areas as national safety, control, border protection, tax collection, the census, instant opinion polls, public education campaigns, emergency and calamity services, among others. One of the federal government’s most important initiatives is its ‘e.gov’ e-government project. The project will integrate departmental networks into a nation-wide information highway, called Br@sil.gov. It is intended to attend to the following goals: 1. To emphasise the government’s public action programmes, not just its internal functioning but also in meeting citizen demands as means to add value to citizenship; 2. To give priority to collective services for citizens who live in the interior of the country, in remote places or in peripheral and rural areas, to diminish social exclusion; 3. To build a new cultural paradigm favourable to the intensive use of information technologies; 4. To increase social awareness and involvement-as the main beneficiary of the project, society should actively take part in project management and control; 5. To stimulate co-operation and convergence of efforts and the streamlining and sharing of resources (human, technical, budgetary, material, logistic and other) by the various government bodies; 6. To involve all departments and agencies, at all levels of federal, state and local governments, adding value to their participation; 7. To pursue professional, transparent and decentralised management according to a matrix of roles and responsibilities, taking into account the responsibilities and excellence of each government body; 8. To design mechanisms which will ensure self-sustainable growth and encourage competitive and efficient participation of the private sector. The Br@sil.gov project will start with a public tender bid, based on price. It will initially focus upon eleven federal public administration agencies. Approximately 4,600 points throughout Brazil will be covered. The project is expected to gradually gain momentum as other government agencies joint the programme. The plan is to establish several thousand Government Electronic Points of Presence, or ‘PEPs’ where Brazilians can access them. Conclusion By making use of the resources of FUST, the Brazilian Government expects to place hundreds of thousands of PEPs across the country. By the end of 2003, the project aims to install PEPs in all the public schools, hospitals, libraries, museums, and remote government offices in the country. The PEPs will provide democratic access, not only to essential services, but also to all the priceless resources of the Internet.
