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To bridge Asia’s growing digital divide, help DIY community networks to flourish

  • Built and operated by communities themselves, DIY networks are a low-cost way of getting rural areas online. Governments can support this with regulation and innovative approaches to spectrum licensing

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Since 2002, rural internet entrepreneur Mahabir Pun and his team have been bringing community networks to rural Nepal, connecting dozens of villages to Wi-fi. The crux of the project is this relay station high above the Budi Gandaki valley, close to the entrance to Tsum Valley. Photo: Retailnewsasia.com

For many of us, a slow internet connection is annoying, a slow-loading screen or a frozen app is unbearable and going without the internet for just a few hours is unthinkable.

Yet, for almost half the world’s population, the internet is simply unavailable. To them, internet access, never mind its speed, presents not just connectivity but new opportunities in life.
The digital divide is particularly stark in the Asia-Pacific, which has some of the best and increasingly connected societies in the world – Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, and New Zealand – and some of the least connected: Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Papua New Guinea and East Timor.

Statistics from the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency, estimate that, for the first time, more than half of the global population – 51.2 per cent or 3.9 billion people – used the internet at the end of 2018. Yet in the Asia-Pacific, only 47 per cent of the population did so.

The UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (Escap) said that less than 2 per cent of people in 18 of its over 50 member states had fixed broadband subscriptions in 2016.   Data for 2017, the latest available, showed no improvement for these countries. In the case of mobile-broadband subscription, only a third or less of the population in 16 countries had access in 2017.

The connectivity gap exists in urban, rural and remote unserved and underserved areas in many countries, particularly in developing and least-developed nations. Reasons include a lack of affordable access, infrastructure barriers, regulatory and policy barriers (including licensing, taxes, and spectrum allocation practices), high deployment costs and the lack of digital skills and local content.
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