When you’re dying of malaria, I suppose you’ll look up and see that balloon, and I’m not sure how it’ll help you. When a kid gets diarrhea, no, there’s no website that relieves that. Certainly I’m a huge believer in the digital revolution. And connecting up primary-health-care centers, connecting up schools, those are good things. But no, those are not, for the really low-income countries, unless you directly say we’re going to do something about malaria.

I’ve heard this sort of thing from folk in the international development world for years, mostly older folk still dictating their emails to their secretaries.  ”Yeah, but how is this going to help the poor farmer in rural Tanzania?”  It is frankly surprising to hear it from it from Bill Gates.  Erik Hersman responded to Gates’ comments by pointing out two things:  1) that Gates is perpetuating a narrative about Africa which portrays Africans as helpless; and 2) that development is of course multi-dimensional and it is not an either-or question.

I agree with Erik on both points but I want to go farther in saying that Gates is just flat-out wrong.  Communication infrastructure has everything to do with Malaria according to this 2007 study on the “Role of information and communication networks in malaria survival“.  The researchers claim that up to 82% of all malaria episodes in sub-Saharan Africa are treated outside the formal health sector and that 70% of the malaria cases that are treated at home are mismanaged.  As a result, access to a resource or a person that can assist in diagnosis and treatment is key to reducing morbidity and mortality.

In a study carried out across 70 countries, the researchers found that intensity of communication infrastructure is strongly correlated with reduced probability of death from malaria.  They conclude by saying:

In preventing malaria, ICN [Information and Communication Networks] may not have a direct impact similar to malaria drugs but it can certainly increase the effectiveness of the intervention strategies and resources indirectly. ICN can speed up the delivery of services and provide access to crucial health information. Access to information and knowledge allows the community members to participate in opportunities and activities related to their own development.

This reinforces Erik’s point that constructing the argument as a choice of one or the other is disingenuous.  It also points out that basic communication infrastructure does in fact have a critical role to play in malaria prevention.  Note also that there is no direct causal line here.  No malaria hotline or mobile app.  No philanthropic initiative that can claim victory for their intervention, just access to communication infrastructure generally.

So what about Project Loon?  Is it going to revolutionise the world of connectivity?  I seriously doubt it.  That said, I also doubted YouTube and Twitter in their infancy.  Project Loon is a very high-risk idea, so risky its sounds a bit “loony”, a fact that is obviously not lost on the the project founders.  Is pursuing high risk projects like Project Loon a bad idea?  No, it is a pretty smart approach.  They are pursuing what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls a barbell strategy which promotes a combination of investment in extremes kept separate, with avoidance of the middle.  Thus Google can continue to milk the ad revenue cow they have reared but also take chances on risky bets that have very high upsides if they succeed but low comparative cost to Google if they fail.

Finally, what appeals most to me about the role of communication infrastructure is that it ultimately promotes self-reliance, increased social capital, and local innovation.  Initiatives that focus on lowering the cost of access and making it more ubiquitous will indirectly (and perhaps directly) contribute to African countries shrugging off the vestiges of dependency they have on the largesse of plutocrats of any flavour.

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Mosquito image courtesy of Gerald Yuvallos CC 2005 BY-ND

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Electromagnetic spectrum is the crude oil of last-mile connectivity, especially in Africa where more traditional kinds of last-mile communication infrastructure are not especially well-developed. As in the oil business, anyone who has gained control of spectrum in the last ten to twenty years has made a great deal of money. But unlike oil, spectrum is something that is much harder to put your finger on. The struggle to understand what kind of thing spectrum is and consequently how it should be managed has led to a lot of disagreement, to the extent that we can’t seem to work out whether it is abundant or running out. In the past couple of years you may have seen articles with titles like these:

Apparently even with our remarkable technical capacity to manufacture smartphones that are more powerful than all of NASA’s computing power in 1969, we still can’t really get to grips with the elusive nature of radio spectrum.  To unpack this problem, let’s go back to basics.

What is Electromagnetic Spectrum and Why Does It Require Regulation?

Spectrum is not actually a thing, it is simply the range of possible frequencies for electromagnetic radiation.  By varying the size and frequency of radio waves, we are capable of sending information wirelessly.  This was first achieved with voice and telegraph but has now evolved into digital communication capable of transmitting anything that can represented digitally from documents to sound to video.

So what does wireless communication look like?  Imagine a still pond into which you have dropped a single pebble. It is easy to see the propagation of waves caused by the stone.  Now imagine twenty people dropping stones into the same pond at the same time.  Can you still see the waves caused by your stone?  Unlikely. This is called interference.  You can no longer see your waves.  While radio waves are not physical waves like water, they interfere with each other in a similar sort of manner.  When the signals from two television stations overlap, you can no longer distinguish the program you wanted to watch.  Counter-intuitively, radio waves are not destroyed when they collide with each other.  They pass through each other.  Thus if you had the magical ability to colour only the waves caused by your pebble, you would clearly see your waves again even though others were dropping pebbles at the same time.  The technical meaning of “interference” is at odds with its more colloquial meaning which is to block or obstruct.  When radio waves interfere they don’t impede each other but they can make the original wave form hard to recognise.

And that brings to the most significant reason why radio spectrum is regulated and that is to prevent interference.  Another reason to regulate spectrum is coordination to encourage people doing similar things and using similar technologies to use the same frequencies. In the early days of wireless communication, interference was an easy problem to solve. The range of available spectrum was vast and demand was comparatively small. Interference could be solved by making sure that people using spectrum in the same geographic region were allocated individual bands of spectrum that were well apart from each other in the spectrum band.  This strategy was reasonably successful for nearly 70 years.

And so things might have continued to this day had it not been for the explosion of demand for wireless spectrum from broadband service providers and mobile operators. In the last 15 years, spectrum has gone from an abundant to an apparently scarce resource. But is it truly scarce? It is certainly true that demand currently exceeds supply but there is debate as to the nature of the scarcity and that debate is rooted in the nature of what spectrum is and how, as a result, it should be treated.

So What Kind of a Thing is Spectrum?

A key consideration when looking at public versus private access to any resource is whether that resource is rival or not i.e. does use of it by one person preclude use by another. Rival goods tend to become private property whereas non-rival goods such as solar power, for example, are public goods that do not require explicit management. And of course there is a range of goods in between which are partially rival such as the oceans and nature in general which are non-rival as long as care is taken to ensure the resource is tended and non-overused. Historically, regulators have been obliged to treat spectrum as a rival good because of interference. In fact, in order to ensure the absence of interference for television broadcasters, regulators were obliged to establish spectrum frequency no-man’s-lands between television channels to reduce the chances of stray interference.  However, the now rapid evolution of both wireless and information technology obliges us to reconsider how we think about spectrum and spectrum management.  Is spectrum a rival resource?  The answer is fuzzier than it used to be.

Technological increases in efficiency

First we have to acknowledge the steady increase in spectral efficiency in wireless technologies. Every year we are able to pack more data into less spectrum with less power. This efficiency is typically expressed as bits per hertz per km2.  While spectrum is not infinite, the trend towards efficiency increase shows no immediate sign of slowing down. In fact, wireless pioneer Martin Cooper has coined a law similar to Moore’s Law in which he argues that spectral efficiency has doubled every 30 months since Marconi patented the wireless telegraph in 1897.  The evolution of radio and antenna design has meant that with increased sensitivity we can now communicate the same information with much less power.  You can imagine old television broadcast transmitters as effectively having to “shout” at the relatively deaf television sets.  But sensitivity is only part of the story.  Engineers are making great strides in mitigating wireless interference. It is increasingly possible to design wireless technologies which are sensitive to other radio transmissions and which can operate in “noisy” environments.  The scenario described above where one might be able to recognise the pond waves from ones own pebble is now increasingly possible through techniques like beamforming with multiple antennas.

Administrative increases in efficiency 

Imagine having a hotel room permanently reserved for you in every city in your country.  No matter where or when you travel, you room is always ready.  Great for you but a bit of tough business for the hotel owner.  This is effectively how early spectrum regulation operated and it was feasible because capacity far exceeded demand.  With the situation now reversed, regulators have had to embrace a more nuanced approach to the different dimensions of spectrum.  Here are some of the different ways in which spectrum can be administered:

More control of radio propagation means that we regulate different for different regions in a country.  This might mean having different spectrum license holders in different areas or it might mean varying the allowable power output based on geography.

The proximity of devices to each other can make a difference.  Low power devices that are nearby each other can operate in the same spectrum as much higher power technology but below its “noise floor“.  Imagine two people talking to each other at a rock concert.  Their conversation doesn’t interfere with a the very loud concert yet they are close enough to communicate with each other “at low power”.  I am grateful to Sascha Meinrath for that extremely apt analogy.  

Some spectrum technologies have a specific orientation, that is to say as opposed to radiating generally, they are pointed in a specific direction.  Satellites are a great example of this.  They obvious point upwards.  This creates an opportunity for re-use of the spectrum in ways that don’t point up e.g. point-to-point terrestrial links.  Another means of reducing interference is to use antenna designs that polarise communication i.e. radio waves propagate orthogonally to each other and so reduce interference.

Spectrum can also be shared in time.  This could happen in big chunks such as someone using television spectrum late at night when the station is not broadcasting to sharing of micro slices of time.  Thanks to computing technology, it is possible for the same spectrum to be automatically shared in tiny time slices which give the appearance of continuous connectivity.

Letting Technology Handle the Administration

To date the regulation of spectrum has largely relied on human management and oversight.  This places a significant burden on the regulator and is necessarily somewhat slow.  New technologies offer the potential for the use of spectrum to be managed dynamically via a database.  This would not only lower the barrier to access but could be used to ensure fair play among spectrum holders.  Allowing computer systems to dynamically assign spectrum on demand could create both spectrum and organisational efficiencies. 

Not All Spectrum Is Created Equal

A final important thing to know about spectrum is that not all wireless spectrum is created equal. At the lower frequency end of the radio spectrum, radio waves tend to have better propagation characteristics than at higher frequencies. This means they have better reach because they are capable of travelling through solid objects with less signal loss. Thus radio spectrum at the lower frequencies are often considered quite valuable because fewer transmitters are required to cover an equivalent area at a higher frequency. There is a trade-off though: the physics of lower frequencies present bigger constraints to broadband capacity than higher frequencies.  So higher frequencies can carry more data but don’t propagate as well while lower frequencies have much better range but are more limited in terms of throughput.

So Is There a Crisis?

Perhaps crisis is the wrong word.  Are we running out of spectrum?  The answer to that seems to clearly be that ongoing innovation and efficiency increases will ensure we don’t run out of spectrum for some time to come.  So no crisis?  Well, not exactly.  We still haven’t worked out a very satisfying means of deciding who gets what spectrum and for how long.  As a result, there is an apparent scarcity of spectrum as debate about how best to make spectrum available leads to delays, confusion, and missed opportunities.  More about that in the next posts in this series.

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Water images courtesy of Snappy.joneS 2006 BY-NC-SA and Marc Dezemery 2006 BY-NC-ND

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I’ve been thinking this week about the similarities and differences among the various TV White Spaces (TVWS) pilots that are currently underway in Africa, in particular about Kenya and South Africa, my favourite countries to compare in terms of ICT growth and competitiveness. For the last few years, Kenya has offered a great stick to beat South Africa with. With strong leadership in the Ministry of ICTs and a thriving entrepreneurial sector, they have provided a striking contrast to the internecine battles and lack of progress in the ICT sector in South Africa. Happily, TVWS technology provides a counter-example where South Africa now leads the continent.

TVWS in South Africa

In a few months I will mark five years of advocacy for TVWS regulation. My first blog post on the topic in September 2008 explored what was happening in terms of U.S. TVWS regulation and what potential impact that might have in South Africa. The issue was first picked up in the mainstream press in early 2009. By late 2009, I had begun to collaborate with the Wireless Access Providers Association (WAPA) to look for potential opportunities for change with the regulator (ICASA). We explored Lite Licensing, expanded ISM bands, TVWS, among other technologies. WAPA, in particular its chair Henk Kleynhans, became vocal advocates for TVWS spectrum. We formed the Open Spectrum Alliance which further brought the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) into a coalition of civil society organisations lobbying for regulatory change. Our strategy was to seek every opportunity to build mindshare for the idea of TVWS. You can see a list of articles published in the last 5 years which gives you a sense of how much work was involved in this. From late 2009 through 2010 we talked, we lobbied but not much happened. Then in early 2011, I was contacted by Ory Okolloh who had just joined Google as their Africa Policy Manager. She had picked up on a post I’d written suggesting that Google’s support for TV White Spectrum policy in the US could be extended to Africa to have even greater impact.

With Ory now strategising with us, we decided on our next move which was to convene a workshop bringing experiences from TV White Space regulation elsewhere in the world together with regulators, policy-makers, and representatives from industry and civil society. This workshop took place in October 2011. We invited regulators from South Africa, Kenya, Mozambique, and Nigeria. Only CCK, the Kenyan regulator, declined to send a participant. Happily the Kenyan Ministry of ICTs and civil society group KICTANet were represented. Our timing was perfect as the South Africa regulator, ICASA, had already started to take notice of TVWS technology. A September 2011 presentation on strategy from ICASA highlights “white spaces” as part of their digital dividend strategy. The highlight of the workshop was Google’s announcement that they would consider supporting a TVWS trial in South Africa.

It is worth briefly pointing out why trials are important to TVWS regulation. Because TVWS technology is designed to operate as a secondary use of spectrum, it is critical to demonstrate that the technology will not interfere with the primary spectrum holder, the television broadcasters. There has been a lot of pushback on TVWS by broadcasters in the US who argued that TVWS technology would inevitably interfere with broadcast quality. A trial is essential for the regulator to have a body of evidence that shows that TVWS do not interfere. As time goes on and TVWS becomes more mainstream, it is likely that not every country will need to carry out trials as they will be able to draw on the increasing body of evidence from around the world. A trial is also important for the regulator to be able to assess the functioning of the TVWS authentication database that is the emerging default means of managing secondary TVWS use.

As we considered the potential for a trial, two key questions emerged. One, what sort of trial should it be, rural or urban, commercial or government, small or large, etc. Two, who would manage the trial. WAPA was a possibility but as an industry association, it was really set up for operational project management on this scale. Google insisted on not managing the trial themselves as they wisely saw the importance of the trial being a fully South African initiative. Happily through my association with TENET, the National Research and Education Network (NREN) of South Africa, I was able to interest them in taking responsibility for the trial. This led naturally to a decision to connect schools in the Western Cape, bringing in a partner organisation to TENET, the eSchools Network (ESN). TENET hired Henk Kleynhans, who had by then stepped down as WAPA chair, as its project manager and Henk was succeeded by Arno Hart, who manages the trial now. This also became a great opportunity to forge an strong relationship with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) who have taken responsibility for the accurate measurement of spectrum throughout the trial.

And that is where my involvement stops. I relocated from South Africa to Canada shortly after the trial began and now simply cheer on the sidelines and look for more opportunities to advocate for shared spectrum approaches in Africa and beyond. Please forgive the somewhat “Steve-centric” description above. Think of me as just one of the blind men describing an elephant. The TVWS trial is the result of a truly collective effort with people from Google, WAPA, ICASA, CSIR Meraka, TENET, eSchools Network, APC, and ComSol all playing critical roles.

TVWS in Kenya

My version of the Kenyan TVWS story is less complete as I have only observed this from a distance. In July of 2011, as we were organising speakers for the October TVWS Workshop, Ory and I were introduced to Jim Beveridge and Paul Mitchell of Microsoft who have been leading Microsoft’s work in TVWS for some time. Microsoft not only agreed to attend the October workshop but also to share a panel on spectrum at the the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Nairobi in Sept 2011. Microsoft were able to talk about their work in TVWS and also to briefly demonstrate TVWS technology at the event. I think it was at this time that Microsoft were able to connect with the Ministry of ICTs and CCK about TVWS. Once again, there was support from the then Permanent Secretary, Bitange Ndemo but little buy-in from CCK.

Fast forward about 18 months and Microsoft have announced Mawingu, a TVWS initiative that is a partnership between Microsoft, Indigo Telecom, and the government of Kenya. USAID are also an important partner having contributed both money and equipment to the project but they don’t appear to get much of a mention.

As I mentioned in a previous post, this project was inspired by one of the true pioneers of connectivity in Africa, Malcolm Brew. Years ago Malcolm was the CTO of Bushnet Uganda, a company building HF radio links into rural Uganda and the DRC to deliver email into areas previously considered inaccessible except by satellite. Having since moved back to the Isle of Bute in his native Scotland, Malcolm convinced British Telecom to run a TV White Spaces trial on the Isle. Paul Henderson, chair of Indigo Telecom, happened to call Malcolm and was amazed by the quality of their Skype call over the TVWS connection. He immediately saw the potential of TVWS and the result is the project you see today.

One glaring fly in the ointment, however, is the fact that in spite of official support for this project from the Kenyan government, CCK are still reluctant to support the project in any way. To this day, as far as I know, the Mawingu project does not even have an experimental spectrum license to be able to carry out their trials. This is a pretty big deal. Without regulatory buy-in TVWS are going nowhere in Kenya.

So what is behind CCK’s reluctance to embrace TVWS technology and regulation? One Kenyan gov’t representative I spoke to back in 2011 seemed to imply that TVWS was seen as an “American” technology that was being pushed on them. There is an element of truth to this. TVWS technology has largely been developed in the US and US companies do have an element of first-mover advantage with TVWS. However, Huawei are busy developing TVWS equipment and because it is standards-based, it is open to competition. That feels like a bit of a red herring to me.

My gut feeling is that TVWS is, at best, perceived by CCK as an unnecessary added complication to the already complex Digital Switchover process. At worst, there is a lot of lobbying for television spectrum and I suspect that regulators are getting an earful from both broadcasters and mobile operators about why they should ignore TVWS.

Happily this is not the case everywhere. In Tanzania, Microsoft’s pilot with Costech is going very well with full support from the regulator. In fact, on Wednesday next week, Prof. John Nkoma, Director-General of the Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA) is chairing a sesion on TV White Spaces at the Global Symposium for Regulators in Poland. I hope someone from CCK is attending.

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Let me start by saying that the ideals of the Open Data movement: transparency; accountability; and, citizen innovation, are ones that I hold near to my heart.  Further, I admire and respect many of the leaders of the Open Data movement.  However, and it may simply be my own myopia, I have yet to see many voices for caution with respect to Open Data.  In particular, what concerns me most at the moment is the air of euphoria in which Open Government Data in particular is being pitched to the public.  The recent series of articles around the proposed G8 Open Data Charter such as this one by Martin Tisné and this by Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt create an expectation about data that will, at best, be very hard to fulfil and, at worst, actually shift the attention from where it ought to be.  Here are some of the things I worry about.

Data as Fetish

Children’s charity organiser Benita Refson is recently quoted in the Guardian as saying: “If you’re not using data, you’re just another person with an opinion”. Somehow this quotation sums up all of my pent up apprehension about the Open Data movement. Implicit in the above is the assumption that “data”, “facts”, and “truth” are roughly equivalent.  We see this in common expressions like “The data just doesn’t back it up”.  This amounts to a kind of fetishisation of data as having some mystical, immutable truth quality, a quality which of course does not exist.  Data is collected by people.  Even when it is collected by machines, it is collected by machines designed by people.  And this means that data is vulnerable to all of the vagaries that humans are prey to, bias, laziness, hidden purpose, myopia, etc.  We choose what data to collect and how often and where.  We choose what level of quality we would like.  We choose how to represent that data and what story we think the data is backing up.

As more data accumulates our ability to see whatever we want to see increases.  Researcher Kate Crawford and author Nassim Taleb have both eloquently pointed out that with larger amounts of data the ease of coming to a false conclusion only increases.  Taleb says:

big data means anyone can find fake statistical relationships, since the spurious rises to the surface. This is because in large data sets, large deviations are vastly more attributable to variance (or noise) than to information (or signal). It’s a property of sampling: In real life there is no cherry-picking, but on the researcher’s computer, there is.

Researchers ranging from Duncan Watts to Daniel Kahneman have documented our human tendency to apply our expectations and biases to what we see.  The image at the left, which recently became a popular meme on the Internet, illustrates the dangers of what can be done with too much data.

If we allow “data” to retain this mystical aura of “fact”, we run the risk of allowing ourselves to be swayed by the truthiness of the data sources we happen to like.  Far more reassuring for me is the Open Science Data movement which seeks to expose these very issues by allowing other scientists to corroborate or contradict the findings of other researchers using the same data.  The next Open movement I would like to see is one about Open Corroboration where we come up with better means for assessing the validity and meaning of data, news, research, etc.

Not to mention the fact that the very representation of data can influence how it is interpreted.  The rise of infographics has made data even more difficult to interrogate and can be used to skew the interpretation of data.  See this article on how the venerable pie chart can be used more to confuse and mislead than inform.

Data and Privacy

Also a key issue for me are the privacy implications of Open Government Data policies.  If the new default for all government data is to be open, then it is inevitable that at some point the Mosaic Effect will come into play.  The Mosaic Effect occurs when the information in an individual dataset, in isolation, may not pose a risk of identifying an individual (or threatening some other important interest such as security), but when combined with other available information, could pose such risk.  A recent US Government policy memo instructed agencies to they must  account for the “mosaic effect” of data aggregation.  This can be quite hard to do and there is concern among the Open Government Data community that such a requirement could be used as an excuse to block the publication of data. A better strategy would be for the Open Government Data community to move towards a more demand-driven approach.  Indeed this is the recommendation of UK researcher Kieran O’Hara in his paper, Transparent Government, Not Transparent Citizens: A Report on Privacy and Transparency for the Cabinet Office, where he suggests:

In a demand-driven regime, information entrepreneurs would ask for the datasets they felt they needed, or felt that they could use to create value, whether social value or commercial value (profit) for their own firms. This suggests two requirements.
1. Entrepreneurs must know what datasets there are.
2. There must be a screening process to ensure that privacy-threatening releases (and other problematic releases, such as ones which might threaten national security) could be challenged and blocked.

The issue of privacy is not limited to that of personal information.  For instance, what right does an endangered species have to not have its location disclosed.  The impact of making datasets public is hard to predict.  Martin and Prof Shadbolt have done a great job in highlighting the positive but there are negative outcomes as well.  Consider the saga of the map of registered gun owners that was published in the wake of the Newtown shooting.  Patrick Meier has a thoughtful analysis of what happened and its implications.  He ends by drawing on a basic principle from the hippocratic oath, do no harm.  Addressing the “do no harm” standard in some way should be an essential pre-requisite for publishing any dataset.

Data and Complexity

Yet another concern for me is the danger of looking a complex systems in an overly simplistic way.  The fact that we can measure one aspect of a complex system may give us the temptation to intervene without fully understanding the systemic role of the thing we measure.  It may give us a false sense of understanding.  If we have complete scrutiny of government, will that affect the way civil servants and politicians behave in an entirely positive way?  Or will it simply move existing bad behaviour into areas beyond scrutiny.

A top-down, data-driven, supply-side approach to Open Government is also likely to mean a focus on what is available as opposed to what is needed.  As Einstein (and others) famously said, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

Open Data as Symptom or Cause of an Open Government

Finally, real Open Government is a cultural issue not a data issue.  I worry that the disproportionate focus on datasets will distract from the harder challenge of building a culture of openness.  I can’t help but wonder whether Open Government Data is a symptom of Open Government and not the other way around.  Of course it is a bidirectional relationship but perhaps it only becomes bidirectional when there is a sufficient level of cultural openness in government.

This may be less of a worry in the G8 nations where there is a reasonably robust civil society to advocate for openness but for countries without that luxury, a focus on Open Government Data may not bring about the desired results.

A move towards a more demand-driven approach would have the benefit, not only of allowing due consideration of the merits and impact of releasing specific datasets but would also hopefully catalyse more of a dialogue (as I have argued for previously) between civil society and government.  To paraphrase JFK, ask not what your Open Government can do for you, ask what you can do to open your government!

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Never mind whether Edward Snowden is a martyr or a rogue warrior, just know that he is extremely unlikely to ever exist in South Africa thanks to the recently approved “secrecy bill“.  Whistleblowers in the public service in South Africa enjoy some protection if they are disclosing information that reveals criminal activity but what the NSA have been doing with Prism is apparently legal.  The law itself requires review.  In South Africa, the chances of anyone getting that far are slim, not to mention the fear engendered by the current ambiguity around whistleblower protection.

And in South Africa the situation is arguably worse than in the US.  Note that while the big Internet companies have leapt forward to seek permission from the government to be more transparent about what they have shared and how, the reactions from Verizon and AT&T have been “We have no comment”.

Verizon and AT&T on PRISM: "We have no comment." http://t.co/DKPziaVGWq

— CNNMoney Tech (@CNNMoneyTech) June 7, 2013

There is no tradition of openness or transparency for telecommunications operators, not even the pretence.  In South Africa, the communication regulator can’t even get the information they are legally entitled to from the mobile operators in order to better regulate the market.  The culture of secrecy is embedded in telecommunications companies where all attempts at transparency are brushed off as potentially compromising their competitiveness.  I experienced this first hand when trying to get Telkom to release a map of their fibre infrastructure in South Africa.  They responded that they “decline to grant access to the records since they contain financial, commercial, scientific, and/or technical information, other than trade secrets, the disclosure of which is likely to cause harm to the commercial or financial interests of Telkom“.  In the end only public embarrassment forced their hand.

And South Africa, similar to at least 34 other countries in Africa, has enacted legislation to make the registration of mobile sim cards mandatory.   In the security-conscious United States, you can still purchase a pre-paid SIM card without having to register it.  The argument for SIM registration has been that of improved law enforcement though be able to better track criminals yet no evidence has ever been presented that backs up that assertion.  Maintaining a SIM registration database is dangerous to personal privacy.  While there are legal protections against its abuse, you have to be confident that the technology and process safeguards exist to back that up.  When the South African Police Service website was hacked a few weeks ago, they didn’t even know it had happened.

So here are three things I’d like to see in South Africa in the wake of the NSA Prism scandal:

1. Real whistleblower protection for public service employees. Support the Right2Know campaign!
2. An end to mandatory SIM card registration until evidence is produced that a) it actually makes a difference; and b) sufficient safeguards are in place around its use.
3. Tougher rules that oblige better and more consistent transparency on the part of telecommunication operators.

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In the field that has come to be known as Information and Communication Technologies for Development or ICT4D, the management and regulation of electromagnetic or wireless spectrum has evaded most donor programmes and debates. Broadly speaking ICT4D is a field that looks at the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on development and explores how equity, rights, and social and economic development can be positively affected by access to ICTs. ICT4D embraces both policy and technology in a quest to create equitable access for all. In this article, I will make the case that the absence of debate or action on the regulation and management of wireless spectrum now stands as a gap in development thinking about ICTs.

Why Worry About Spectrum?

Why should wireless spectrum be given special consideration? For much of the developing world, wired technologies, especially in rural areas, are simply not practical. In the industrialised world, wired technologies feature heavily in the last mile for high-speed data whether via an ADSL-enabled copper telephone line or via a the co-axial copper cable provided by a cable television operators. However copper-based last mile solutions present particular challenges in poor countries. The roll-out cost of copper infrastructure is comparatively high, and often not practical in lower-income countries, even less so in sparsely populated rural areas. The steadily increasing value of copper as a commodity also makes it a target for thieves.  Fibre optic cable infrastructure is another important connectivity technology especially for national and international communication backbones but it is currently only viable as a last-mile solution in wealthy communities. Satellite-based infrastructure is also a powerful technology for delivering access in remote areas but it too is currently not cost-effective as a last mile technology.

This means that when talking about affordable, ubiquitous access to communication in developing countries, wireless technologies offer the most hope for effectively bridging the digital divide. And indeed, the mobile phone has become more or less synonymous with access in the South.

Much has changed since mobile networks began rolling out in the early-to-mid nineties in the South. When the first mobile operators were granted licenses to use wireless spectrum to build their networks, they were simply given the spectrum at no charge. There was plenty of available spectrum to go around. Today popular spectrum bands are auctioned for large amounts of money, often running into the billions of dollars.

Because so much money is now at stake concerning spectrum, the process of making new spectrum available has become complex. It is increasingly hard to ensure that spectrum is made available in a timely manner and to the entities that are most likely to serve a country’s strategic interest.

As ICTs become increasingly valuable to government, industries, and citizens alike, demand for spectrum has steadily increased. Yet the process of making spectrum available and managing it as a resource still fails to feature in ICT4D initiatives and strategies.

So Why Don’t We Talk About Spectrum?

One possible answer to why spectrum doesn’t feature significantly in ICT4D lies in its multi-dimensional complexity. It’s a daunting issue to address, requiring technical, economic, and legal expertise. Here are just a few of the ways in which spectrum is a challenge to understand and manage.

Technical complexity. What we understand about wireless spectrum is flux. Eighty years ago the only way to manage spectrum was to give exclusive rights to a spectrum holder and ensure that significant “guard bands” or gaps between spectrum holders existed in order to prevent interference. Transmitters were obliged to operate at comparatively high power outputs in order to reach the comparatively “deaf” receiver devices. Today wireless communication technology continues to increase in efficiency and in its ability to mitigate interference. There are limits to this, however, and understanding how to maximise the efficient use of spectrum is an ongoing technical challenge which attracts a lot of R&D investment. Understanding the trends and changes in spectrum technology is essential to understanding how to regulate it.

Money and Corruption. As the business of telecommunications has become more lucrative, an increasing premium has been put on access to spectrum. As a result, regulators find themselves managing a resource worth millions of dollars to interested parties. Where that much money is on the table, ensuring fair play in the national strategic interest can be a challenge. Spectrum auctions have emerged as the de facto mechanism for dealing with licensed spectrum yet effective auction design and execution is a challenge even in well-resourced regulatory environments. Success in this area doesn’t just involve designing an optimal auction but also creating a sufficiently well-organised and disciplined process that doesn’t attract legal challenges from disgruntled parties.

Market and Manufacturing Complexity.  Spectrum usage is dependent on having technology capable of using a given set of frequencies and this, in turn is entirely dependent on manufacturers producing transmitters and receivers for those frequencies. Many technologies only become practical when manufactured at scale so there is a kind of catch-22 with new technologies that requires commitment from manufacturers to support specific standards and frequencies. In the past, the trend in spectrum allocation has been to tie a particular spectrum band to a particular technology. This has led to chunks of spectrum lying fallow because the markets and manufacturers did not follow the path that regulators expected. Today, there is an increasing emphasis on technological neutrality in spectrum allocation but this can be challenging because some technologies, for example those that require paired spectrum, are dependent on spectrum allocations being organised in a particular manner.

The Challenge of Coordination. Prior to the advent of mobile telephony and wireless broadband technologies, the availability of spectrum exceeded demand and incentives to coordinate spectrum allocation existed but were often trumped by local or regional priorities. So while there is broad coordination in general areas of spectrum use, there are critical variances in the details. This has led to the need for mobile phones that operate in three, four, or more spectrum bands in order provide a working service internationally. Regulators today find themselves in a catch-22 situation where they recognise the need to harmonise spectrum but are tempted to act individually because the pace of international coordination is so slow.

Institutional Capacity. When it comes to effective regulation of spectrum, there is a clear need for the technical, economic, legal, and administrative capacity within every country to address the above issues effectively. For developing countries, this is often the most significant challenge as communication regulators are typically under-resourced and sometimes insufficiently independent of state and industry alike. Because so much money is on the table, regulators are often outmatched by their wealthy industry counterparts.

Where Do Things Stand?

In poor countries, regulators and governments are caught between the growing market demand for more spectrum and the need for more human and financial resources to manage the increasingly complex web of issues including spectrum auctions, technological advances, regional harmonisation, not to mention vested interests.

This is compounded by the fact that decisions about spectrum can have consequences that can last a generation or more. The interplay of investment, evolving technical standards, and administrative complexity tends to make this a very slow-moving decision-making environment. This means that not only does it take a long time to introduce new spectrum regulation but also that strategic errors in regulation can take many years to undo.

South Africa is a good example of how challenging it can be to carry out a spectrum regulation change. In May of 2010, the South African communication regulator, ICASA, announced an auction of spectrum in the 2.6GHz and 3.5GHz bands. The auction was plagued with problems. Insufficient attention was given prior to the auction to the need to migrate incumbents within the 2.6GHz band in order preserve technological neutrality. Build-out requirements for the spectrum licenses were claimed to be unrealistic by some major players as well as other factors that were critiqued. For nearly two years the regulator went through an on-again, off-again process with the auction. Ultimately the auction was withdrawn and three years later the spectrum remains unavailable. Worse, trust in the regulator’s capacity to successfully carry out a spectrum auction has been undermined.

Unlicensed versus Licensed Spectrum

Standing in stark contrast to the traditional method of assigning spectrum through exclusive-use licenses is the world of unlicensed spectrum. Unlicensed spectrum is regulated but instead of being managed through a licensing process, it is regulated through the technical specifications imposed on devices operating in spectrum designated as unlicensed. Typically this means that the power output of these devices is required to be lower than is found in licensed environments. The lower power output limits the ability of any device to interfere with another and any device operating in these bands must be tolerant of interference.

Originally conceived for non-communication-related use of radio spectrum, the Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) bands have come to be dominated by popular communication technologies such as WiFi, Bluetooth, and Near Field Communication. The success of these technologies, WiFi in particular, is something to consider in the context of spectrum management strategies. The ultimate use of the ISM bands was not predetermined. WiFi emerged as a success story more through a process of natural selection than by design. Its success has eclipsed all expectations.

According to market research firm IHS, in excess of 2.14 billion WiFi chipsets will ship in 2013 – 20% more than in 2012. WiFi technology is emerging as a critical part of mobile broadband infrastructure. According to a survey of Android devices by mobile analytics vendor Mobidia, WiFi predominates as the access technology for smartphone and tablet data. This research is corroborated by reports from Nielsen that WiFi also dominates smartphone data in the UK with only 22% of data traffic travelling via mobile networks.

It is interesting to note that this dominance has evolved without the intervention or design of mobile operators. The success and importance of WiFi to broadband strategies has begun to receive some attention in the industrialised world but receives almost no attention in debates on bridging the “digital divide”.  A recent ITU / Unesco report entitled The State of Broadband 2012: Achieving Digital Inclusion for All mentioned WiFi only twice.

As a broadband connectivity success story, unlicensed spectrum is under-represented. We rely on WiFi connectivity everywhere we go yet it is seldom mentioned in a strategic context, perhaps because its growth has occurred so organically.

TV White Spaces Spectrum – a new frontier

While the existing unlicensed spectrum technologies have gone from strength to strength, a new opportunity for unlicensed spectrum use has emerged in the form of TV White Spaces spectrum. Originally conceived of as a technology that could take advantage of the guard bands or “white spaces” that were left between television channels to prevent interference, TV White Spaces (TVWS) spectrum is a secondary spectrum technology that can take advantage of unused television spectrum in a dynamic manner. In the US and the UK, communication regulators have endorsed TVWS regulation and the commercial scale-up of TVWS technology has begun.

What Promise Does TV White Spaces Technology Hold for the Developing World?

There are four key reasons why TVWS technology holds tremendous promise for the developing world:

Low Risk Regulation. Because TVWS is a secondary-spectrum-use technology, there is no need to re-allocate spectrum in order to regulate its use. It doesn’t commit the regulator to giving away a spectrum band for years to come and doesn’t expose the government to the challenges of spectrum auctions which range from stalled processes (as we have seen in South Africa) to widespread corruption (as we have seen in India). Whether TVWS succeeds in its potential to spur the same innovation and market development that has happened in WiFi is a risk for the market not for the regulator.

Availability of Television Spectrum. The profusion of terrestrial broadcast channels in use in North America and Europe may limit the impact of TVWS applications in these regions. However, a region like Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is very different. Most countries in SSA have few terrestrial broadcast channels in use, leaving large amounts of television spectrum available for use. This is even more true in rural areas where TVWS show their greatest potential. The flexible nature of TVWS technology means that more spectrum can be taken advantage of in the least serviced areas. Of course this doesn’t preclude using television spectrum for other purposes too such as digital terrestrial TV and mobile broadband.

A Great Rural Technology. While mobile technology has been an access boon for the developing world, mobile operators still struggle to deploy access in rural areas where low incomes and sparse populations do not make a viable economic proposition for the establishment and maintenance of mobile base stations. TVWS has specific advantages that make it well-suited to being a complementary access technology. First, TVWS use of the UHF spectrum band offers better propagation characteristics than other technologies higher up in the spectrum band. This means that individual base stations can reach further, thereby lowering the total number of base stations required for a given areas. Second, UHF spectrum doesn’t require direct line-of-sight between radios. This will also lower the cost of deployment thereby reducing the need for high towers and more complex network design. Finally, the market cost of TVWS devices will be closer to that of WiFi equipment than traditional wireless broadband equipment used by licensed spectrum operators.

Opportunity for Entrepreneurship. Perhaps the least acknowledged benefit of TVWS regulation is the opportunity that it will offer to entrepreneurs. Rising demand for licensed spectrum has raised the bar for market entry so high that none but the wealthiest of investors can get involved. The high cost of entry also raises the risks of market entry. By contrast, TVWS technology will open up rural broadband service delivery to an entire generation of entrepreneurs interested in providing local, competitive broadband services. If TVWS technology lives up to its promise, it will not only provide opportunities to small entrepreneurs but perhaps will also provide the foothold they require to nip at the heels of and ultimately challenge the market hold of incumbent operators.

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Google and Microsoft

After a welcome by Minister Cheikh Abiboulaye Dieye, I moderated the first session giving first a brief introduction to TVWS.  Much more interesting though were the two key presenters for the first session:  Kai Wulff  of Google and Paul Mitchell of Microsoft. To have Google and Microsoft on the same stage making common cause for affordable access through TV White Spaces spectrum is a bit of a dream come true for me.  For Microsoft and Google this is very much a case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend.  They compete in search, mapping, mobiles and just about everything else but in this case Google and Microsoft share an enemy in the high cost of access in Africa.  Both stand to benefit from having more Africans affordably online and in this particular case, their corporate goals are fairly well-aligned with a development goal.  And on that front, standby for news in June of a new industry association on dynamic spectrum supported by both Google and Microsoft.

What stuck in my mind from this session was an interesting analogy shared by Kai Wulff who pointed out that in Africa, taxi drivers generally don’t fill up their tank completely but just enough to get where they need to go.  Similarly, pay-as-you-go airtime has allows for dynamic management of phone charges.  This is common knowledge but it was a nice insight that this conceptual framework might be applied to spectrum management.

Pilots and Trials

So what’s going on in Africa with TVWS?  A lot.  Both Google and Microsoft are sponsors of significant of trials in Africa; Google in South Africa and Microsoft in Kenya.  There are also independent efforts going on in Malawi.  Here’s an update on them.

South Africa

The Google-sponsored trial in the Western Cape of South Africa is a small success story in collaboration.  TVWS technology was initially instigated by an active civil society and by the Wireless Access Providers Association (WAPA).  After gaining the attention and then support of Google, other key players came on board.

• TENET, the South African National Research and Education Network (NREN), offered to be the project manager for a TVWS trial;
• ICASA, the South African communications regulator,  expressed its support for the trial;
• CSIR, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, a parastatal research agency, offered to carry out the necessary spectrum measurements to provide the necessary evidence of non-interference that would pave the way towards regulation; and,
• the e-Schools Network provided a local network of schools in need of affordable access to be connected through the trial.

Arno Hart, TENET’s project manager for the trial, presented the work of the trial so far.  So far 10 schools have been connected representing more than 6400 students.  So far the technology has met its most important goal which is demonstrating non-interference with television broadcasts.  Cape Town has more active terrestrial television broadcast channels than most place in South Africa so it was ideal for a trial of TVWS.  The throughput and latency of the connectivity is not quite the 10mbps over 8km that has been advertised but it was still respectable.  It is evident that TVWS technology is still evolving and performance improvements can be expected.

Arno’s talk had lots of interesting insights into TVWS such as the fact that the frequencies below an in-use television channel are more sensitive to interference in the frequency directly above the channel.  This is because the lower end of the television channel is a marker that helps define the wave form for the channel.  Interfering with this marker has a bigger impact on the television broadcast than interference at the top end of the channel.  Critical information like this will help shape the spectrum authentication database that will determine what television spectrum can be used for TVWS access and where.  You can read more about the trial on TENET’s website.

Kenya

The genesis of the TVWS pilot in Kenya is a little different.  It was inspired by one of the true pioneers of connectivity in Africa, Malcolm Brew.  Years ago Malcolm was the CTO of Bushnet Uganda, a company building HF radio links into rural Uganda and the DRC to deliver email into areas previously considered inaccessible except by satellite.  Having since moved back to the Isle of Bute in his native Scotland, Malcolm convinced British Telecom to run a TV White Spaces trial on the Isle.  Paul Henderson, chair of Indigo Telecom, a Kenya satellite services provider, happened to call Malcolm and was amazed by the quality of their Skype call over the TVWS connection.  He immediately saw the potential of TVWS for rural Kenya and, with the support of Microsoft and USAID, has rolled out a pilot in Nanyuki, Kenya.  You can read more about the pilot on Microsoft’s website.

While this pilot has gone ahead with a lot of international support, its internal support is a little more complex.  The pilot enjoys support from the Ministry of Information and Communications but it doesn’t appear that the communication regulator (CCK) are particularly involved in the trial.   I was disappointed not to see someone from CCK at the Dakar event.  Moving forward it will be essential to engage more closely with the regulator as they are crucial to the success of TVWS.

Malawi

Another very interesting trial is getting underway in Malawi.  Championed by Dr. Chomora Mikeka of the University of Malawi and Jonathan Pinifolo of the Malawi communications regulator (MACRA), they are carrying out background research in anticipation of setting up a pilot in a few months.  They have partnered with the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste who have a long history of supporting wireless research in African universities.

What I found interesting about their story so far was their innovative approach.  Among other things, they have developed a very low-cost spectrum analyser based on Open Hardware which has allowed them to carry out a spectrum survey at a fraction of the typical cost.  In listening to Dr. Mikeka, it was evident to me that Africa has the potential not just to be a leader in regulatory innovation around TVWS but a technology leader as well.

Others

And of course there is more going on.  Microsoft is supporting other pilots in Tanzania and soon in the Limpopo province in South Africa.  In Nigeria, a company called WaveTek has secured the West African distribution rights for Carlson Wireless and is on the verge of carrying out a trial.

Manufacturers and Wireless Standards

There are an array of competing standards around TVWS technology.  First there is the 802.22 standard also known as Wi-Far which has evolved out of the WiMax standards group.  Next there is the 802.11af standard also known as White-Fi which has evolved out of the WiFi standards group.  Then there is also the Weightless standard which has been put forward by Neul, one of the earliest developers of TVWS technology.  Neul developed its own Weightless standard because they originally designed their TVWS technology for machine to machine (M2M) communication.  As the demand for TVWS in rural broadband applications became more apparent, they adapted their Weightless standard for broadband use.  Finally there is the wild card in the mix, the TD-LTE standard for White Spaces being developed by Huawei.

Neul have licensed their technology to Carlson Wireless so currently all Carlson equipment also uses the Weightless standard.  Interesting to note that Neul are also releasing their own equipment shortly which will perhaps end up competing with Carlson.  The South African TVWS trial is using Carlson equipment as is the Malawi trial.  In Kenya, the TVWS pilot is being carried out with Adaptrum equipment.  Adaptrum currently use the 802.22 standard or something fairly close to that standard.

So which standard is likely to dominate?  That was what I hoped to find out more about at the event but I was disappointed.  Manufacturers were pretty vague on the topic.  When I asked the question, I didn’t get much more than “the market will decide”.  On the one hand letting the market decide is a good thing but on the other hand, the balkanisation of the standards community makes it hard to build momentum.

From what I can make out so far, 802.22 is designed for rural broadband but is not that well-loved by manufacturers because it is a complex standard to implement.  802.11af is simpler and easier to get to market but suffers some of the limitations of its WiFi parentage.  Weightless appears to have an early advantage but will other manufacturers really but into a standard so closely associated with one company?  Finally, TD-LTE doesn’t currently feature in any trials and is targeted at the mobile industry not the rural broadband industry but it would be a mistake to discount Huawei from any calculations in this arena.  I found it a bit hard to understand the presenter from Huawei but I believe a typical use case for TD-LTE White Spaces would be something like backhaul and coordination among femtocells.  While an interesting and possibly very efficient use of TVWS, the TD-LTE approach holds much less interest for me because it puts TVWS directly into the mobile operator supply chain as opposed to enabling entrepreneurship that could lead to more competition in the broadband marketplace.

White Spaces and the Authentication Database

Although it didn’t start out that way, TVWS technology is now inextricably connected with the concept of an authentication database.  Early proponents of TVWS argued for a spectrum-sensing approach to regulation where TVWS devices would regularly “sniff” the spectrum to see if it was in-use by the primary spectrum holder and dynamically switch out of any occupied spectrum. There was sufficient push-back from broadcasters on viability of spectrum sensing that an alternative had to be devised.  This alternative came in form of an authentication database that all TVWS devices are obliged to connect to in order to receive information about available spectrum in their area.

Andy Lee of Google gave a great presentation explaining the basics of how the authentication database works.  In short, the database combines information about spectrum in use with information about the geography of the region and performs a calculation to determine where current broadcasts reach and on what frequencies.  It then uses the inverse of that to establish what spectrum is free for use and where.

In Africa, even in urban areas, it is clear that there is a lot of unused television spectrum that could be re-purposed for TVWS rural broadband applications.

A lot of work has been done in the US and elsewhere to establish an open standard for TVWS databases. The Internet Engineering Task Force have developed the PAWS standard for accessing TVWS databases.  While different companies have developed TVWS database applications, Google and Telcordia among them, they all operate according to a common standard.  Thus it is possible to have more than one authentication database in a country.

In terms of regulation and TVWS databases, it is worth noting that there is one significant difference between US and UK regulation of TVWS.  In the UK, the power output of the TVWS device is not pre-determined but can be dynamically set via the database.  Thus if the database knows that the device is in a remote areas with few or no terrestrial television broadcasters, it can permit the TVWS to operate at a higher power output offering better range and throughput.

There was some discussion among the participants as to whether an authentication database was the best approach to TVWS for Africa.  Some people argued that this was importing unnecessary limitations from the US.  It is an interesting question.  On the one hand, I would like to see TVWS achieve the same kind of success that WiFi has through an unlicensed environment.  I fear that constraints such as an authentication database might limit the uptake of the technology.  On the other hand, variable power output (described above) which a database enables is a significant advantage.  In addition, an authentication database also offers a big security blanket to regulators who need not worry that they are opening Pandora’s Box because they ultimately are still in complete control of the spectrum.  This may prove to be a critical ingredient to speed adoption.

The Regulators

Most interesting of all was what the African communication regulators had to say.   Speaking at the event were representatives from the communication regulators in Senegal, Niger, Malawi, and South Africa.  In the audience, there was representation from communication regulators of Benin, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Togo.  What was most striking for me was the wide range of perspectives on TVWS. Some regulators clearly saw the potential and were working to integrate TVWS into their strategic planning and others were frankly sceptical.  Of those who were doubtful of TVWS technology, a lot of the concern centred around the fact that television spectrum was already a subject of heated debate related to the Digital Switchover and the potential release of one or more IMT bands for mobile use.  The spectrum bands in question,  700MHz and 800MHz,  form the upper block of the UHF television band.  I have my own opinions about how this could be handled but it is clear that there is a lot of interest in television spectrum and, as a result, a lot of concern that it be handled appropriately.   It was proposed by some that TVWS should wait until the Digital Switchover was complete and firm agreements had been made on new IMT bands such as the 700MHz band.  In my opinion, making these issues dependent on each other robs TVWS technology of its primary innovation, the ability to continuously and dynamically adapt to a changing spectrum regulatory landscape.  One thing is clear to me and that is that more awareness raising and healthy debate of TVWS needed.

No discussion of regulators would be complete without mentioning the stand-out presentation from the UK regulator (OFCOM)’s head of spectrum, Prof H Nwana.  Prof Nwana’s roots are in Cameroon but at OFCOM he leads what is arguably the most progressive approach to dynamic spectrum regulation in the world.  His vision of the evolution of dynamic spectrum management is inspiring.

Summary

This is a watershed moment for Television White Spaces in Africa.  There is a lot going on.  With the backing of companies like Microsoft and Google, TVWS are getting recognition as a key part of the regulatory toolbox.  Manufacturing is starting to come on board but the process is a little slower than anyone had hoped.  TVWS equipment has yet to achieve its full mass market potential.  Equally the standards for TVWS are still evolving.  Expect to see one of these standards leap forwards in the next 24 months.  The tide of TVWS is at the flood and it is up to African governments, regulators, and entrepreneurs to decide whether to seize it or not.

All the presentations from the TV White Spaces Africa Forum 2013 are available online. Kudos to Google and all the other partners for making this extremely worthwhile event happen.  Finally, if I have missed nuances or missed the mark entirely on any of the above, please do correct me.

However things turn out, it is clear to me that we need a better understanding of the choices and their implications.  While most of my time is still taken up with Village Telco, I am very happy to say that I am now also affiliated with the Network Startup Resource Centre (NSRC), an organisation that has dedicated itself to building the capacity of Internet network operators around the globe . My role with them is to build understanding of the opportunity that shared spectrum technologies and policies represent.

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Inspired by the recent successful launch of the Television White Spaces pilot in South Africa, I am once again tempted to engage in providing  mostly unsolicited advice about what Google’s strategy in Africa ought to be.  What I want to propose today is the launching of a Netflix-like streaming television service aimed at African markets and serving African and international content.  In this I take a more radical point of view than I did in my recent post about the Digital Dividend. This idea is borne of two recent experiences, one, some work I did recently looking at the migration process from analogue to digital broadcasting in Africa; and, two, my personal experience with Netflix.

Digital Migration

Most of the industrialised world has made a transition from analogue to digital broadcasting of terrestrial television.  The process in most African countries is much slower.  Because digital broadcasting requires a fraction of the spectrum needed for analogue broadcasting, a transition to digital television broadcasting:

1. creates space for more television channels;
2. allows the possibility of broadcasting in High Definition (HD);
3. makes some spectrum available for other purposes such as broadband; and,
4. allows broadcasters to keep pace with changes in broadcast technology.

Of the above benefits, I question whether a. and b. are relevant in Africa.  There has always been plenty of space for television channels.  The majority of African countries have four or fewer terrestrial broadcast channels.  As for High Definition broadcasting, it is hard to make either the social or economic case for HD broadcasting.  You could make the argument about Africa not being left behind or given second class technology but frankly I have trouble seeing the real market demand for HD television in the industrialised world, perhaps for sports broadcasting.  HD television feels like the upgrade that manufacturers tell you you want.  Which of course doesn’t rule out HD television via other means such as satellite.  So the real benefit of the switch-over to digital terrestrial broadcasting is the spectrum that is freed up for other purposes such as mobile broadband or TV White Spaces technology, etc.  And if that’s true, then does there really need to be a switch-over to digital broadcasting at all?

Across the continent, the switchover process is not going very well at all.  Very few countries seem to have come up with an effective strategy of how to manage the switch-over let alone finance it.  Few countries have an effective strategy of even how provide everyone with the Set Top Boxes (STBs) that are required to view digital broadcasts if you don’t happen to have a shiny new digital television set.  In South Africa, unspent funds from the Universal Service Agency are being re-purposed for the purchase of STBs for the masses.  The bottom line is that the economics of the transition to digital broadcasting simply don’t make sense.  It is an extremely expensive process for an, as yet, undetermined benefit.  Digital broadcasting is being treated as a giant “build it and they will come” project that will hopefully create both supply and demand at the same time.  And if you don’t buy that, there is always the argument that one must embrace the digital switch-over because it is inevitable.

Most African countries signed an agreement in 2006 that they would commit to the digital switch-over.  The general sense is that you simply have to get on board because analogue broadcasting will soon be obsolete.  It reminds me a bit of the furore a few years ago about the need to move to IPv6 because all the IPv4 addresses were about to run out.  Strangely the sun has yet to set on the IPv4 address space.

So what if there were another option, an option that didn’t exist or seem credible in the near future in 2006 when the switch-over policy decision was taken?  I am referring to Over The Top (OTT) broadcasting or the delivery of what was traditionally broadcast content over the Internet.

The Success of Netflix

Netflix is the most successful example of OTT service delivery.  As of the end of 2012, they claim over 33 million subscribers worldwide, most in the United States.  Not too long after moving to Canada from South Africa last year, I signed our family up for Netflix.  I was unprepared for how cheap and how efficient their service is.  $7.99 per month for all-you-can-eat television is pretty good, by any standard.  In fact, $7.99 looks roughly like mobile ARPU in Africa. People complain about the choice and how up-to-date their offering is but for our family it is the right blend of price and service.  What was even more impressive is how well it works.  We have a single 6Mb/s dry-DSL link that provides all of our household communication including VoIP phone service and Internet.  I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my kids watching Netflix did not affect the quality of my VoIP phone calls.

Last month, I attended an event at which Netflix’s Director of Cloud Infrastructure, Adrian Cockcroft, spoke.  He further impressed me with just how far and how fast Netflix has come.  One of the first things he said was that Netflix expects to become the largest Content Distribution Network (CDN) in the world some time this year.  That may or may not turn out to be true but just the fact that he thinks it likely is saying something given the likes of Akamai, Level 3 and others.  If you know anything about the distribution of video and other big media on the Internet, you know that it is dependent on CDNs which are gigantic local caches of content.  So when you request that YouTube video in Cape Town, it appears to stream internationally at high speed but actually you’re just getting a local copy from Google’s Global Cache CDN in South Africa.  This makes for much more efficient use of the main arteries of the Internet although how CDNs should be implemented and by who is a subject of much debate.  Netflix have built their infrastructure entirely on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure which makes them a completely virtual organisation.   It impressive just how flexible and efficient at content delivery Netflix are.  No doubt the competition is not far behind them but just to say that remarkable things have been achieved in the last 6 years in both video compression and content distribution.

An Opportunity for Google?

So, a bold move for an African country would be to scrap the digital switch-over entirely and invest all that money planned for a digital broadcast network into broadband fibre and wireless infrastructure to support OTT service provision.  Bold but inconceivable.  I think we all know that that is never going to happen.  The digital switch-over ship has sailed and there is too much money already committed to it.  It is officially too big to fail.  However, that wouldn’t stop a smart company from doing the right thing.

Google already operates its own CDN network in Africa.  There are Google Global Caches in South Africa and Kenya and doubtless other countries on the continent.  It is well-positioned to manage the delivery of content on the continent.  Arguably, as a company, Google understands African media markets better than most international Internet companies having invested significantly over the last 4-5 years in local offices and local talent in Africa.

An African digital television service could be a low-barrier opportunity for new content-makers and a great way to promote thriving national industries like Nollywood to the rest of the continent.  It would be an opportunity to innovate service delivery perhaps creating new super-low-bandwidth options or perhaps overnight updates or local WiFi-based mini-caches of television content.

Are Google the best company to do this?  They certainly have all it takes although it doesn’t mean that someone else might not do it faster and better.  The three takeaway points I want to leave you with are these:

1. The switch-over to digital broadcasting in Africa is a slow-moving train wreck.
2. OTT television services are growing faster and more efficiently than you might have imagined.
3. The combination of 1 and 2 could mean a different television future for Africa.

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I think it started back in 2006 when the South African government established a policy directing the use of Open Source software within government departments “unless proprietary software is demonstrated to be significantly superior”.

This policy did not achieve its aim of converting government departments to the use of Open Source. If anything it probably alienated civil servants more than it made them converts to Open Source. It made them feel like FOSS was some kind of second class solution they were obliged to use because they couldn’t afford the best. I knew I didn’t like this policy at the time but I couldn’t really put my finger on why except for the basic awareness that nobody likes to be forced to do something, even if its good for them.

Fast forward a year to 2007 and we have Tony Blair saying:

“Open v closed” is as important today in politics as “left v right”. Nations do best when they are prepared to be open to the world. This means open in their economies, eschewing protectionism, welcoming foreign investment, running flexible labour markets. It means also open to the benefit of controlled immigration.

Once again, I respond positively to openness and indeed open vs closed does seem a more practical unit of political analysis than left vs right these days, at least on some levels. However, again I experience a trace of unease and this time I can’t put my finger on it. And in the ensuing 5-6 years we see openness emerging as a western agenda with the implicit assumption that open = good and by extension more open = more good.

I expressed some of my concerns when I wrote about this in 2009. I likened open vs. closed as a kind of yin and yang, two parts that can’t live without each other.  That was close to what I want to say here but I think the problem is bigger now and that analogy misses some critical nuance

More recently I’ve been thinking about “open” in the context of Open Data and how that relates to personal privacy. Clearly more open cannot always equate to more good in this context. If we acknowledge that the need for privacy is contextual, then it is axiomatic that the need for openness is also contextual. The problem with making a virtue of “open” is that it tends to steamroller nuance and context.

I am reminded, as I often am, of the Taoist parable of a farmer and his “good” fortune.  Nothing is inherently good or bad but is defined by the context in which we understand.  The more I think about it, the more I think the crux of the problem lies in an essentially manichean worldview where open is now equated with virtue, where we must fight the forces of closed-ness wherever we find it.

This is wrong in the same way that the Golden Rule is wrong. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. What could be simpler? Yet, the angry drunk who enjoys getting into fights in bars has no problem with this rule. It helps him get into more fights. Absolute rules tend not to fair very well in complex environments.

So, let’s consider some other “good” words.  How about “kindness” and “cleanliness”? Any parent or anyone who has been in the wrong relationship knows that you have to be “cruel to be kind” sometimes.  Doing the right thing might actually involve not being “kind”.  So perhaps kindness is not a very good goal.  And cleanliness.  We know it is next to godliness and on the surface of things how could one argue with it.  But a quest for cleanliness actually has led to some surprisingly negative outcomes such as the growth of allergies.  The more we understand about our bodies, the more we realise that what we previously thought of as “unclean” is actually a part of what makes us human.

So, would a “kindness” movement serve us well?  Or a “cleanliness” movement? Well, the answer is not yes or no, it is “mostly”.  Mostly being kind is a good idea and mostly being clean is a good idea but they are bad when turned into doctrine and orthodoxy. The rationale for orthodoxy is that if you don’t keep things pure enough, then it is a slippery slope to the increasing adulteration of all you hold dear.

The problem with purity is that is that it leads to fragility.  In Anti-Fragility, Nassim Taleb argues that all complex systems need to be stressed in order to grow stronger, to reduce fragility. Perhaps open works need proprietary works to stress them into improving and evolving.  As I wrote previously, the evidence from multi-party prisoner’s dilemma simulations would seem to support this, namely that “open” strategies succeed very well in a very closed ecologies and “closed” strategies succeed very well in a very open environments.

So what’s an Open Source advocate to do?  Well, if you were Evgeny Morozov you could rubbish the entire open movement but that doesn’t work for me because I really do see and live the benefits of open all around me.   I think what is needed is a new concept, that of “Right Openness”.  In Buddhist philosophy, one of the principal teachings is the Noble Eightfold Path, which describes the “path” to enlightenment.  Each path begins with the word “right”, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, etc.  What is notable about this is that there is no prescribed behaviour.  There is the overall goal of reducing suffering and being compassionate but the way you achieve that is not specified.  Mostly kindness is a great way of being compassionate but not always.  Mostly openness is a great way of achieving good outcomes in the growth of knowledge  in good governance, etc but not always. One need only look at a for-profit 3-D gun printing initiative to see how “open” as orthodoxy can lead to the wrong sort of outcome.

Let’s take the example of Right Speech. In the west, we value truth and freedom when it comes to speech. Yet, anyone who has uttered the words “Let’s be honest” in a relationship, knows that there are truths and there are truths. Time and geography matter when it comes to truth. Learning the truth about a murder that happened hundreds of years ago, half-way around the world is not the same as learning the truth about a murder that happened an hour ago, next door. The same with freedom of speech. Encouraging someone to help their neighbour is not the same as encouraging someone to kill their neighbour. We know this, yet we still defend freedom of speech when I think what we really mean is Right Speech, speech that does not harm others, that is timely, etc.

What then would Right Openness look like? It would recognise that “openness” is not an inherent virtue but rather a contextual good. What would that look like in practice? Well it would always hark back to the question of the larger goal, whether more equitable sharing of knowledge, good governance, etc.  It would then ask what right openness looks like in that context. It would lead by example, not by doctrine. In the Open Data world, it would embrace privacy issues as being fundamental to effectiveness openness without getting hung up on privacy as a violation of openness.

As we struggle to understand the complexity of the world we live, we look for simple rules to help guide us through the storm.  That’s great as look as we treat them as rules of thumb.  To paraphrase George Box, all rules are flawed, but some are useful.

So let’s hear it for Right Openness and remember kids, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes”

–
Photo courtesy Stephanie Davidson 2008 CC BY SA

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Current television spectrum allocation

Digital Divide, Digital Dividend, Digital Yadi-yadah.  You would be forgiven if the term Digital Dividend didn’t immediately resonate with you given the proliferation of all things “Digital” in recent years.  A quick reminder then.  The Digital Dividend refers to the spectrum that is freed up in the conversion from analogue television broadcasting to digital broadcasting, also referred to as the Digital Switch-over (DSO), a change that has largely already taken place in the industrialised world and is slowly gathering pace in Africa.  This involves deploying digital transmitters to replace the analogue ones and either new digital televisions or digital Set Top Boxes (STBs) for existing televisions.  But the fact that more channels may become available or that you can receive television channels optionally in high-definition is less exciting to me than what can be done with the spectrum that is freed up. How much spectrum is being freed up?  There is over 400MHz of television spectrum.

Digital broadcasting uses a fraction of the spectrum that analogue broadcasting does and in Africa, there are few enough analogue terrestrial television channels per country to begin with.  What is more, it turns out that television spectrum exists within a very attractive range of the frequencies. What makes a frequency attractive?  Propagation or the ability of a radio wave to go through obstacles.  The lower down you go down the spectrum, the longer the radio waves and the less they are inclined to bounce off solid objects.   That means that you can cover a larger area with a single transmitter and that means that the cost of building a communication network drops significantly.  There are trade-offs however.  Longer waves carry less information so you can’t pack as much data into the same channel but that is a very reasonable trade-off when it comes to planning rural networks where the cost of network deployment may be a bigger issue than ensuring >20MB/s download speeds. So the Digital Dividend spectrum is extremely appealing from an infrastructure cost-of-ownership perspective.  It is unfortunate then that most of the debate around the Digital Dividend has largely been held within the broadcast community.  Not that digital broadcasting isn’t important but the Digital Dividend is an extremely valuable resource that needs to be considered holistically in terms of its national strategic value.

At the World Radio Congress (WRC-12) last year, there was confirmation of 790-862MHz (popularly known as the 800MHz band) as a global IMT (mobile) band. There was also a move by some African countries to have the 694-790MHz band (popularly known as the 700MHz band) made available in Region 1 (Africa and Europe) on an accelerated basis, probably because there are lots of CDMA players already in the 800MHz band. 700MHz is likely to be confirmed as an IMT band for Region 1 at the WRC in 2015.  So that’s good news for mobile operators except that the release of the 700MHz and 800MHz bands is being treated as contingent on the completion of the DSO.  Given the delays that have plagued the DSO on the continent, this seems like a dangerous strategy.  Why can’t one or both of these two new IMT bands be cleared for use while the DSO is going on in the lower end of the television spectrum?  At the very least, preparatory work for release of this spectrum ought to be going on now.

What a future allocation of spectrum might look like.

But the situation is worse than just a disconnect between the broadcaster and mobile operators.  There is also the prospect of missing out on an alternative access technology that could make a real difference for rural access.  Television White Spaces technology has the potential to create a vibrant rural access industry in Africa.

Television white spaces refers to the guard bands left between analogue television broadcast channels in order to prevent interference. TV White Spaces technology is capable of serendipitously re-using that empty spectrum without interfering with existing television broadcast. The initial vision was that through spectrum sensing, the devices would automatically use whatever empty spectrum was available, as a secondary user. That means if a television signal suddenly turn on in a frequency being used by a TV White Spaces device, it would automatically cease using that frequency and find another empty frequency to use. The broadcast and wireless microphone industry in the U.S. were not satisfied with this solution and the concept of an geo-located authentication database was introduced whereby TV White Spaces devices would need to authenticate against a spectrum database to see what spectrum was available for use in the area it was being used. Very low power TV White Spaces devices are still allowed to use just spectrum sensing. In general TV White Spaces regulation in the US has been the victim of massive lobbying and the result is some extremely hamstrung regulation.

The UK has largely followed the US regulation with one significant improvement. The power output level of the devices is not fixed but can be dictated by the settings in the authentication database. This means that higher power output levels could be assigned in sparsely populated rural areas versus areas where there are many other spectrum users.

What is exciting about this technology?

1. No spectrum license required or at least a very nominal one. This means new opportunities for small entrepreneurs to provide alternative access.
2. Great propagation. A typical TV White Spaces link can go 8-10km without any effort and is not obstructed by trees, buildings, etc.
3. Innovation. WiFi has gone from a niche spectrum for experiments to an industry that is expected to be worth over 6 billion dollars in 2015. ~70% of smartphone data traffic in the rich world goes over WiFi. This is what open spectrum offers. TV White Spaces has the potential to be another such industry because of the low barrier to entry.
4. No spectrum re-farming required. Because TV White Spaces technology is designed for secondary use of spectrum, there is no need to move the primary spectrum holder. This is a quick and easy win. Conflicts can be easily resolved by the regulator thanks to the authentication database.

TV White Spaces are finally gaining traction however.  Google is sponsoring a pilot in South Africa and in Kenya, Microsoft are supporting a pilot in partnership with the Kenyan government and a satellite operator there.  Those are good signs but in general the discussion of the Digital Dividend has been trapped in bureaucratic silos.  There needs to be a broader acknowledgement of the strategic value of the Digital Dividend and a strategy that addresses it holistically.

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