The Challenges of Building and Changing Infrastructure

Right now the U.S., via the FCC, is reworking the way that their broadcast infrastructure is distributed.  In a hotly contested auction, major telecom and Internet interests are pleading their cases for the use of the 700 MHz spectrum.  It offers a unique study of the effect that a move from government regulation to private ownership, of even just a piece of a massive infrastructure, can have on the direction of the whole.

The telecommunications industry is a lucrative enterprise – to say the least – and these types of shifts on existing framework make it all the more attractive for businesses to compete for ownership.  But what about other countries, or even other continents that don’t have the same extensive system of towers, cable, roads, etc. we have here in the U.S.?  Is it profitable or even possible for private interests to lay the framework themselves where governments have failed, for operation of wireless networks and other means of travel and communication?  As Ethan Zuckerman explains in a recent Boston Globe OpEd, it is if you follow certain guidelines.

As the founder of Geekcorps and co-founder of Global Voices, Ethan has seen the progress and roadblocks of technological advancement in rural and undeveloped areas firsthand.  Using, among other examples, mobile phone towers in the Congo, he establishes the three criteria necessary to predict success of infrastructure development:

Successful Internet and phone projects suggest that there are at least three common characteristics of successful incremental infrastructure projects. These projects are atomic: A small part of the infrastructure is useful by itself, like a single mobile phone tower that allows people in a single city to make calls to one another. The projects are financed in part by users, lowering the costs for the operator: Mobile phone users buy their handsets and Internet users purchase their own computers. Finally, these projects are providing capabilities that weren't available before: they're new services, not an upgrade of existing systems.

To learn more about the accomplishments and hurdles in Africa’s telecom development, check out Ethan and Eric Osiakwan’s Luncheon on the African Internet infrastructure from this past semester.  You can also follow the latest developments in the 700 MHz auction with our friend Susan Crawford, who has written extensively about this topic on her blog.