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claims
This
page considers some claims about digital divides, illustrating
problems regarding basic data and its interpretation.
It covers -
Tokyo Syndrome
In late 2001 the International Telecommunications Union
announced
that there are now more than twice as many telephone lines
in Africa as in Tokyo, questioning the claim
that "Tokyo has more telephones than the whole of the African
continent".
That was reinforced by a 2005 World Bank report
claiming that there were 59 million fixed-line or mobile
phones in Africa in 2002, contradicting the claim by Senegalese
President Abdoulaye Wade at a 2004 UN news conference that
there were more telephones in Manhattan than in all of Africa.
The report sniffed that
Unless
New Yorkers and their commuter friends have 12 phones
each, Africa now has many more telephones than Manhattan.
We have questioned what is a very crude measure of teledensity:
the ITU counts lines but does not identify whether they
are working, who is using them and how much the traffic
costs. Ten lines to urban villas of the kleptocrats, for
example, have a different value to ten lines in regular
use by poor farmers in a remote village.
The distribution of those lines is even more problematical,
since independent research suggests that Capetown and Johannesburg
for example account for a large proportion of the continent's
lines.
Tim Kelly of the ITU (PDF)
noted that although there were more telephones in Tokyo
than in Africa at the time of the 1985 Maitland Missing
Link report (PDF)
- the acknowledged or unacknowledged source of what critics
have labelled 'the Tokyo Syndrome' - that had changed by
the late 1990s. As of December 2003 the ITU considered that
there were around 25 million fixed lines and over 50 million
mobile phones in Africa, several times more than Tokyo's
population. Some figures are here.
a phone-free life?
A corollary is the claim that "half of the world's
population has never made a telephone call".
There has been no comprehensive survey of who has made a
call - whether from their own device, from a phone lent
by a family member or friend, or from a 'community' phone.
(Figures for the number of people who have received a letter
or, in the past, were recipients of a telegram, are also
uncertain).
The claim does not appear in the Maitland report. The ITU
has suggested that although large parts of the world's population
still lack physical access to a landline or mobile phone
(and more significantly cannot afford to make a call if
infrastructure is available) those people now comprise less
than half the global population. Some ITU estimates, as
of 2006, indicate that under 20% of the world's population
have no telephone access in their home or village.
Iceland Syndrome
The Tokyo model has been adapted for the 'Iceland Syndrome',
with claims that "there are more internet users in
Iceland than in Africa". Variants include more users
in London, Sydney or Manhattan.
The claim was publicised in the 1999 ITU Internet for
Development report. By 2004 there were an estimated
12.4 million internet users in Africa (unevenly distributed,
with most being located in South Africa), well over 40 times
the total population of Iceland.
Critics have responded to dismissals by noting that on a
per capita basis internet access is much more likely to
be a luxury in Africa than in Reyjkavik or Melbourne and
that people in the First World are more likely to go online
at home.
A perhaps more searching criticism, consistent with disagreements
about the meaningfulness of teledensity
counts, is that recent ITU figures merely identify whether
someone has been online. They do not, for example, differentiate
between some who is online every day (often for much of
each day) and someone who is online for a few minutes each
week or each month. They also do not identify the shape
of access: is 'use' restricted to email or encompasses electronic
commerce and YouTube?For fixed line telephone networks,
which still form the main telecommunication infrastructure,
the
digital gap fell from 14 times to 5 times greater, in the
decade between 1992 and 2003, as economies
such as China and Viet Nam greatly expanded their fixed-line
networks.
• For mobile telephones, the reduction is even more
dramatic. Mobile phones began in commercial
service in the early 1980s, and took around twenty years
to reach their first billion users. But the
second billion was reached in just four years, between 2002
and 2005. During the decade, the digital
gap was reduced from 30 times to five times. Since 2002,
mobile phones have outnumbered fixed-
lines and will soon be more diffused than them. Indeed several
developing countries—like
Cambodia, Morocco, South Africa and Uganda—already
have many times more mobile phones than
fixed line telephones.
• Personal computers are one area where the digital
divide is not narrowing quite so quickly.
Although the level of penetration in developing countries
has risen from one PC for every 243
inhabitants in 1992 to one for every 29 in 2003, this is
still a long way behind the rate of one PC for
every 2.2 inhabitants in developed economies. The digital
divide is wider in PC ownership than any
of the other indicators tracked here. One reason for this
is because of the high cost of acquisition and
of ownership (e.g., upgrading memory, software etc) of a
personal computer. The advent of low-cost
computers and laptops, together with the widespread adoption
of free and open-source software, may
help to reduce the digital divide for PCs.
3
• But the most dramatic reduction of all in narrowing
the digital divide has come in Internet use,
where, between 1992 and 2003, the gap between developed
and developing narrowed from 41 times
more to 9 times more. Interestingly, although there are
fewer estimated Internet users than PCs in
developed countries (44.8 and 44.9 per 100 inhabitants respectively),
in developing countries there
are more Internet users than PCs (5.1 and 3.4 per 100 inhabitants).
This suggests the significance of
Internet access from cybercafes, post-offices, schools,
universities and other public Internet access
centres (PIACs) in the developing world.
As the evidence shows, for the main bearer networks the
digital divide is narrowing as diffusion spreads, and
in most cases at an accelerating pace. Nevertheless, because
technological change is also accelerating, and
ICT innovations are being introduced on an almost daily
basis, the popular impression is that the digital
divide is expanding, because each succeeding ICT innovation
starts the diffusion process all over again.
Innovations tend to start in the richer countries and spread
to the poorer ones
Because of this problem of the long “tail” of
the teledensity curve (in other words, countries with the
lowest
teledensity exhibiting the slowest growth), it can sometimes
be more meaningful to look at progress in
crossing particular thresholds. Consider the following:
• At the time of the publication of the Maitland Commission
report, in 1985, some three billion
people, or around half of the world’s population,
lived in economies with a teledensity (telephone
lines per 100 inhabitants) of less than one. The global
average teledensity was around seven. There
were fewer than one million mobile phones worldwide and
only a few tens of thousands of Internet
users (the World Wide Web did not yet exist).
• Now, in mid-2005, only eight economies
1
, with a population of less than 160 million, or around
2.5 per cent of the world’s population, have a total
teledensity (fixed and mobile combined) of less
than one. The global average total teledensity is around
50. There are some two billion
mobilephones worldwide and around 750 million Internet users.
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