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
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.
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.