The Internet in developing nations: Grand challenges

Abstract

This is a call for a "Grand Challenge" project for achieving truly global connectivity. For over a decade, we have hypothesized that the Internet could raise the quality of life in developing nations. We have conducted hundreds of studies of the state of the Internet and "e-readiness," done extensive training of technicians and policy makers, run pilot studies, and held local, regional and global conferences and workshops. After all of this activity, Internet connectivity is nearly non-existent in rural areas of developing nations, and far below that of developed nations in the urban areas of developing nations.

This is not to say the activity of the past decade has been a waste. We have demonstrated the value of the Internet and raised awareness. The United Nations and the administrations of nearly all nations have acknowledged the potential of the Internet. The way has been paved, and it is time to act on what we have learned.
After outlining the work of the last decade, we explore one possible Grand Challenge: Connecting every village in the rural developing world to the Internet using a strategy similar to that used in building the NSF Net. We speculate on wireless technologies that might play a role in working toward that goal: Terrestrial, high-altitude platform, and satellite.

The time is ripe for an audacious project. What could we achieve with US$15 billion and ten years time?
Would Bangladesh be a good place to start?

Biography

Larry Press, Professor
California State University, Dominguez Hills, U.S.A.
Email: lpress@csudh.edu

Larry Press is Professor of Information Systems at California State University, Dominguez Hills. He has spent over a decade working to further Internet diffusion in developing nations. He was a founder of the Internet Society Developing Nation Workshops that trained over 2,500 network technicians and policy makers, and, with his colleagues in the Mosaic Group, Dr. Press has developed a comprehensive six-dimension framework for characterizing the state of the Internet in a nation. He and his colleagues have used this framework in case studies of over thirty nations and in survey research. He has written regularly on networking in developing nations for publications including OnTheInternet, The Communications of the ACM, and First Monday.

Dr. Press visited Bangladesh in 1998, and wrote a short Mosaic Group case study and two articles at that time.
In addition to his work with developing nations, Dr. Press is working on the installation and instrumentation of a wireless network serving a dorm complex of 22 apartment buildings and the design and evaluation of a municipal wireless network. He chairs the technology advisory committee of an Internet performance monitoring company, is evaluating a set of on-line modules as an alternative to a textbook for teaching programming, and is on the editorial boards of several journals.

Dr. Press has a PhD (AI and data mining) and MBA from UCLA.

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