ICTworks by Inveneo

Last year, the Canadian/Indian company Datawind, announced the $35 Aakash Android tablet computer as an ICT solution for education. While I still believe that the Aakash will fail education like OLPC did, do not take that as a mark of complete failure. The Aakash Ubislate 7 should be viewed as consumer electronics, and as such, it will be a roaring success.

Free Internet access

Just look at Datawind's core technology, which is all about squeezing waste from Internet data transfers to make even 2G bandwidth feel fast and snappy on a weak chipset.

Its Internet compression technology (18 patents issued & approved) reduces network load, and speeds delivery of content by factors of 10X to 30X. Like the Amazon Silk browser, Datawind offloads much of the browser computation to servers, so just the pertinent web content downloads to the device, not all the webpage bloat that now consumes most browsing bandwidth

During a talk at the World Bank, the Datawind CEO Suneet Singh Tuli revealed that his goal was to use this technology to make the bandwidth usage so cheap that it became ad-supported. In effect, free to the end user. This is the modern killer app - free Internet.

Today, Internet access costs us all significantly more than hardware or software, more than electricity even. Even Intel says that bandwidth costs are the single largest barrier to ICT adoption. And Datawind has cracked that nut.

Just look at the numbers

Now a $47 tablet is exciting. I know a number of geeks who got all lustful for it, who don't even live in India. And in India... Well, let us read what the Wall Street Journal has to say:

On December 14... the Aakash [went one sale] on sale for the absurd price of 2500 rupees, or around $47, hoping to move 100,000 units over the course of 2012. That figure was seen as staggeringly optimistic, since it represented 40 percent of India’s total market for tablet computers. But as soon as the announcement went all, their call center was jammed with calls, and their website started crashing due to excess traffic, to the point where their Internet provider warned them they might be experiencing a malicious hack attack. Their initial inventory of 30,000 units sold out in three days. Within two weeks, they’d built up a backlog of 1.4 million preorders. According to CEO Suneet Tuli, that reservation pool is now over 2 million - and still going strong.

Just wait till the word gets out that $47 is close to the total cost of ownership in India! If the Ubislate 7 uses the Datawind servers when it connects to the Internet from Africa or America, expect this revolution in Internet access to spread faster than Facebook and Twitter combined!

Is this the library the future of public access ICT after cybercafes and telecenters?

Back when Bill Gates was young, he had multiple opportunities to geek out - he had access to computers at home and at school - but he would sneak out of his house to go the library. Why? Because he loved the wealth of knowledge, curated and guided by libraries.

With that background, it's easy to see why the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has a strong focus on libraries. And that many communities have a library and it's seen as a knowledge repository already, makes it also easy to see why the Gates Foundation has added public access to ICT as a tenant of their library support. ICT-enabled libraries can provide guided access to the wealth of information that computers and the Internet can bring to young minds.

"Library" as a dirty word

Yet, let's be honest - what comes to mind when you read the word "library" or "librarian"? Long nights spent in the library as a youth, with an ever-present librarian quick to squelch any study-break frivolity. Not as a 21st Century guide to personal life-long knowledge or greater community development. This is true around the world, as EIFL found:

Most people in six African countries believe public libraries have the potential to contribute to community development in important areas such as health, employment and agriculture. However, libraries are small and under-resourced, and most people associate them with traditional book lending and reference services rather than innovation and technology.

In fact, say the word "library" in international development or technology circles and instantly half the room is bored or tunes out.

Libraries are the most effective public access to ICT

Communities need access to the benefits and services only found online but the ICT infrastructure is often prohibitively expense for individuals to buy for themselves. Mobile phones, while ubiquitous, do not provide for any meaningful depth of information acquisition - certainly not when compared to a computer. So we are looking at computer labs where the costs are best aggregated over entire communities.

As we all know, telecenters are not sustainable without donor funding, and local governments are loathe to add yet another infrastructure support demand onto their shrinking budgets.

Enter the library. Of all the public access to ICT models discussed at the Future of Public Access to Information Technology Salon, it was the library, or similar government-supported information infrastructure, that is the most viable, sustainable, and compelling model.

Governments already understand the need for libraries and their role in supporting them as a government-funded service. Adding ICT to the library model is a small marginal cost with great community development potential - even when the model doesn't look like a library at all.

Library Parks - a new public access model

Enter the Parques Biblioteca or "Library Parks" of Medellin, Colombia. There, libraries are the anchor for multiple municipal knowledge and community building services (public park, library, information center, cultural center, and entrepreneurship incubator) to bring a concentrated development impact to the city's poor areas.

ICT access is a central resource that supports these activities, but not the only one. In addition, there is an acknowledged role for the librarian as a knowledge guide with technology. Colombians, just like others around the world (including "digital natives"), may not have the greatest media literacy. The librarian is seen (and trained) to be a modern knowledge guide, conversant in books and bytes, to help users navigate the still wild online world.

Do libraries need better marketing?

But if libraries are to be more than book repositories, should we start calling them something else besides a "library"? Could there be a need to re-brand the library as a "community knowledge center" or "life-long learning center" to show they are for more than just students studying? Or maybe "media centers" or "knowledge factories" to show they are more than just a collection of books? And can librarians move beyond being "martyrs to knowledge" and be more the learning facilitators we also hope teachers to be in 21st Century schools?

Knowledge is power and therefore libraries should be the cool thing in international development and technology circles. The still-open question is how can we get from the dim mental image of the past to the dynamic reality of the future?

The greatest financial hurdles to open a computer cybercafe in Africa have been Line 1 on the Capex – Computers, and Line 1 on the Opex - Internet Access. Africa has the highest fees for Internet access in the world. What a lousy business - great demand, but expensive machines and expensive Internet in rural areas that are hard to service.

Mobile phones and mobile data at first seems a great competition to the Internet cafe. Both have low Capex, low Opex, and easy to service.

The rural Cybercafe owner is crying - "When do I get the cheap rates!" The Mobile companies are starving the Internet cafe. They don't offer cheap broadband off the backs of their connections. In the towns I've been visiting, I can get GPRS/Edge connections on my phone, I can see the backhaul is often highly contended satellite, sometimes fibre, but the mobile carrier isn't in the business of offering me a broadband connection to a home or to the Internet cafe. That is going to cannibalize his mobile data business.

In Washington DC? Then RSVP for a Technology Salon on this topic

Value Added Services

So what to do? Value Add! All successful businesses change. Nokia started as a tree company!

I am John Hawker I can only tell you my experience with Sat-ed which developed and made this model for rural areas. You need to be more than just an cybercafe. You need to value add and grow with your customers. They're gaining in sophistication. This months model mobile phone is not enough, so be there waiting for that moment. Grow with them. They'll want more. As more phones join the network, their experience is going to fail.

We never took our test concept past 4 commercial “Internet” sites, but it worked for over 5 years, each site was financially viable within weeks and made much more than an Internet site, yet had the same staff and similar costs. What we did was offer a wide range of ICT services, always as low cost as possible as our areas were poor. Each site had 2 rooms, one for PC's, one for other “things.” Our site offered many things that being home alone with a mobile can't offer.

Local Trainers and Employees

We'd find teachers in the villages we worked in, identified who had good reputations and wanted to work as after school tuition in different subjects. That gave us a small margin, and a good reputation.

We'd run classes teaching kids how to use computers safely; parents liked that and felt safe. We repaired computers belonging to others, so that we created an environment that made people want to buy computers. The site manager/owner was a local trained to repair.

Be sure you add a cybercafe control system like "CafeCup" or any other system. This stops people messing with your system. You'll save yourself thousands for a $50 investment or a free system.

Scanning and Photcoyping

We added scanning which everyone does, and found old binding presses, very cheap, kids love them, and for a few extra cents it means their school project looks much better, you sell the plastic folder that goes with it at a mark up. So that over time the shop can evolve as well. Anyone running an Internet Cafe becomes over time adept at computer repair, we trained someone in the village.

We found a cheap old photocopier, copying is a great business, always in demand. Old photocopier also meant older people came in, something they don't do if it's computers only, and they stop and chat and loose some fear of PC's.

Digital Cameras & Fax Machine

Oddly with digital cameras we found that printing out photos at our last shop, and at the site of where we want to open in Ghana, the demand is huge. Fax machines are always in demand and the mark up is huge. Many businesses need a fax, not email, must be a fax and are willing to pay. Our fax machine was one of our best income sources.

Now an Internet cafe is the last place to rent books, but it's full of kids, and there are no libraries in our areas, so we'd buy books and comics at second hand markets, then but them in our shelves, and rent them out. Along with school stationary, paper pens, rubbers, rulers. All the things kids needs.

Extend Your Reach

There will be ways to connect your site, Satellite guys are hurting, so find some other cybercafés and buy in bulk, be there waiting, change your game.

And most importantly, add a WiFi system, extend the reach of your Cyber Cafe! Your cafe doesn't end with the walls! Buy a cheap buy good system like Ubiquiti and you'll find the mobile data users switching to you if you can get a good backhaul. The more customers you get, the better a broadband deal you can negotiate.

Don't worry too much about licensing. Look to offer it to schools, enabling you to buy more bandwidth cheaper, and your then exempt from expensive licenses.

Eventually you'll be a broadband supplier. It's how big companies start.

Our Impact

OK – and how much more profit did we make than a regular Internet cafe? Over 50% more profit. That's significant. 50% more than a normal cybercafe.

Demand is coming, along with a list of needs such a good e-education booths, all sorts of opportunities. Cybercafes will there to offer it.

A few years ago, Internet access in Africa was crazy expensive. Entire projects would sink under the weight of a monthly broadband bill, often exceeding staff salaries to be the single largest expense in an ICT intervention.

Fast forward to 2010 and the ITU says that broadband Internet access prices are dropping by more than 50% globally with a special bonus for African countries:

The regional price trends highlight that while ICT prices are falling in all regions of the world, the greatest price drops occurred in Africa, where fixed broadband prices fell by over 55% and mobile cellular prices by 25%.

Despite this encouraging trend, Africa continues to stand out for its relatively high prices. Fixed broadband Internet access in particular remains prohibitively high, and, across the region as a whole, still represented almost three times the monthly average per capita income. Only one out of ten people in Africa is using the Internet.

Before you let that second paragraph depress you, realize that the ITU may need to update the way it records Internet access when mobile data subscriptions account for 99 percent of all Internet access in Kenya and mobile phones are killing the cybercafé business model.

It may be that Internet penetration is actually higher than 10% now that all that African fiber is being used by mobile subscribers vs. fixed line users. After all, Facebook usage in Africa doubled in a month in 2011, with half of its users globally accessing their favorite social network via a mobile device, not a traditional computer.

I am David Scanell and I would like to describe the Internet access landscape in Kisumu and Nyanza from my personal experience. Now this just Western Kenya, so I can't comment on the rest of rural Kenya, though I imagine it's pretty similar.

There are a few terrestrial and wireless ISPs in Kisumu - KDN, Africaonline, Orange Telkom and Swift Global spring to mind. I think a few more may arrive soon once the fibre optic cable installation marathon that's currently under way here is finished.

Right now, I know a couple of people using Orange ADSL and a few others using KDN's WIMAX. I only know a single person (through their business) using fibre but I think quite a few more homes and business may switch to fibre soon; maybe even more will move to wireless services from resellers. I'm pretty sure that far more people will start use mobile data over the same time frame though - coverage in Kenya is very good and the spread of mobile ownership continues apace - and there are a few drivers for mobile growth that are no where near exhausted yet.

Since I last lived here in 2007, there has been a noticeable influx of new, cheaper low- to mid-range phones to the market. Whereas before I saw high street shops full of second hand phones, today I see quite a lot more selling good looking branded phones from China such as Tecno - which has a broad range available here - as well as a Huawei and ZTE who also have a few products. There's also a pretty high volume of KIRF stuff for sale here too. Lots of weird and wonderfully specced Noklas, Samesungs and the like.

Huawei's IDEOS (android) phone has had a huge media push here of late, though it is still way, way out of the average person's reach though at it's current KSH7,999 price point. The Samsung brand seems to be going from strength to strength here and, as ever, Nokia has a big (though noticeably falling) high street presence.

Nearly all these companies offer mid level phones that have EDGE capability at least - some of them also have 3G (the cheapest one in Safaricom's shop right now is KSH3,999). High level stuff is available here too - PhoneExpress have my Desire Z on sale - but the prices are as high as you'd expect with, for example, a Samsung Galaxy S (i9000) setting you back KSH42,999.

For a mobile 3G modem, prices range from KSH1,999 for the Huawei E173 to KSH12,199 for the Huawei E5 (which is a portable wifi hotspot) and most come with a bundle of free data.

As for mobile data coverage and pricing, there may not be much 3G outside of major towns just now, but EDGE seems to be almost everywhere else, at least in the parts of Nyanza, Western, Central and Coast I've traveled to in the last 9 months (including some very out of the way places around Lake Victoria here).

The end user cost is relatively low - standard unbundled MB price on Safaricom is currently KSH8 - and the bundled prices seem to be dropping all the time. The main players Safaricom, Orange and Airtel are cooking up new, lower-priced data bundles. There's currently a new set of bundles being marketed by Safaricom as "affordable Internet for less". These daily bundles are priced from 5MB for KSH5 up to 25MB for KSH20.

I'd say the number of Kenyan's going online via mobile will continue to increase rapidly for a good while yet.