DIGITAL REVIEW of
AsiaPacific
2007–2008
Supplementary news, reports and analyses are available for download at:
http://www.digital-review.org
CHIEF EDITOR: Felix Librero
ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Patricia B. Arinto
EDITORIAL BOARD:
Danny Butt
Claude-Yves Charron
Suchit Nanda
Maria Ng Lee Hoon
Milagros Rivera
Rajesh Sreenivasan
Krishnamurthy Sriramesh
Jian Yan Wang
CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS:
The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and editor and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publishers. The designations employed and the presentation of material throughout this publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the publishers concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area of its authorities, or concerning the delimitations of its frontiers or boundaries. The publishers do not guarantee the accuracy of the data published here and accept no responsibility whatsoever for any consequences of their use.
Copyright © Orbicom and the International Development Research Centre 2008
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
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The SAGE Team: Sugata Ghosh, Maneet Singh and Rajib Chatterjee
The Digital Review of Asia Pacific wishes to acknowledge the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) for its technical and financial support, for its commitment and encouragement to regional research and authorship, and for its dissemination of research results within and beyond the Asia Pacific region.
This edition of the Digital Review of Asia Pacific
is dedicated to the memory of
PROFESSOR VANNIARACHCHIGE KITHSIRI SAMARANAYAKE
whose contribution to ICT institution building
and human capacity development in Sri Lanka was outstanding,
as was his commitment to and engagement with
regional and international ICT4D platforms.
The overview of emerging issues in information and communication technologies (ICT) for development in Asia Pacific in this edition of Digital Review of Asia Pacific (DirAP) takes up the question of whether ICT ranks equally in priority with other sectors of development for investing the scarce resources of poor countries. It then takes the position that ignoring ICT will only lead to further excluding poor countries from the circuits of power and prosperity.
Indeed, this is a small world today and ICT is making it even smaller. The list of Impossibles in this world is shrinking. We should not wait too long to cross off a few more items from this list:
• It is impossible to eliminate poverty from this world.
• It is impossible to provide basic education to all.
• It is impossible to ensure necessary health care to the needy.
• It is impossible to make universal access happen.
ICT is quickly changing the world, creating a distance-less, borderless world of instantaneous communication. Increasingly, ICT is becoming less costly. Thus, ICT has much potential to create opportunities for growth and development in the rural areas of Asia. As ICT begins to create income generation activities in rural areas and as it becomes an instrument of rural economic and social activities, it begins to pay back on our hard-earned investments.
The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries of the world, long ago made the choice to invest the present and future of the poor in ICT. ICT is a new opportunity for grassroots innovation. I saw an opportunity for the poor people to change their lives but only if this technology could be brought to them to meet their needs.
Towards this vision, we created Grameen Phone and we provided loans to poor women to buy phones to sell mobile phone services in the villages where they live. In this endeavour, we see the linkage between microcredit, our established strategy, and ICT, our newer strategy. Today, Grameen Phone is the largest phone company in Bangladesh and serves more than 12 million subscribers.
Social businesses such as Grameen Phone can play a significant role in creating opportunities that will help societies and their members to continue in the path of progress. Social business is a very important concept to me and very close to my heart. I define social businesses as a non-loss, non-dividend company, dedicated to achieving social objectives. Investors can take back their investment money, but they cannot get any dividend beyond that. Promoters of social businesses are the catalyst for positive change in a society.
Today, I would like to challenge our intellectuals, innovators, business leaders, corporations and institutions to help identify ways and means to help create social ICT businesses locally, nationally and internationally. Social business is a promising concept that I would like to bring into the ICT world, for we are applying it in earnest to our work with the poor in the villages of Bangladesh. I would like to emphasize that my challenge to our thought leaders is not only to create social business ideas in the ICT arena, but also to develop replicable designs that will help others in non-ICT sectors to be innovators of social ideas and social businesses.
In the future, I look to DirAP to document the stories of grassroots ICT innovation and learning for the Asia Pacific region, in technology deployment and research, as well as in innovative systems of delivery that bring useable ICT in a sustained manner to the doorstep of the poor.
Muhammad Yunus
Founder, Grameen Bank
Nobel Laureate, 2006
Information and communication technology for development in the
Asia Pacific region: Encountering Rashomon's diversity of perspectives
The Digital Review of Asia Pacific (DirAP) has the mission of generating new descriptive, analytical and predictive knowledge about the field of ICT for development in the Asia Pacific region. It attempts to provide in-depth analyses and syntheses of ICT policy, developments and applications, and issues and debates concerning the significance of policy and technology enabling environments for national and regional socio-economic development. DirAP targets both regional and global audiences, especially decision and policymakers and practitioners from both government and NGOs.
From our perspective as publishers, DirAP's key contributions to the state-of-practice and state-of-the-art in ICT and ICT for development in Asia Pacific may be summarized as follows:
1. It adds a major source of research-based data and information to a field that is growing into a discipline with as yet relatively little research literature especially relating to Asia Pacific.
2. It gives ICT stakeholders in Asia Pacific opportunities to develop skills in research methods, research processes and research documentation.
3. It draws together a large number of leading ICT players from both developed and developing countries in Asia to reflect on platforms they identify as important for engagement to influence change.
4. It permits a time series narrative macro view of how total project investments by all parties aggregate into national syntheses on both country-level performance and issues-based performance.
5. It harnesses the intellectual contribution of a sizable community of practitioners and researchers from a multitude of disciplines from most of the developing countries of the region.
The voices of DirAP are independent and if they are ideological at all, they are the voices of these writers who are the key movers and shakers in the ICT for development arena in the region. We believe that this multiplicity of voices, which includes those of policymakers, professionals from the private sector and senior scholars, offers a unique opportunity to access the richness and the complexity of the debates, of the choices being made and to be made, and of the major issues faced in the interface between communication and development. And we strongly believe in the importance of this complementarity and diversity of voices, ensuring that, as in Kurozawa's Rashomon, the perspectives of the different actors are represented but also debated through research and statistical evidence.
The previous editions of DirAP were launched at the UN World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva (December 2003) and Tunis (November 2005) in both English and French versions, and they were extremely well received. We hope that this edition will provide you with an important source of perspectives about the major achievements in the midst of constraints as well as the challenges ahead, in your respective working environments within Asia Pacific. And we hope that this edition will provide a well-deserved visibility to the different types of ongoing experiments in the region to stakeholders in other parts of the world, on the different lanes of the Information Highway towards knowledge societies.
Claude-Yves Charron
The Network of UNESCO Chairs in Communications,
ORBICOM
Maria Ng Lee Hoon
International Development Research Centre
In his Nobel lecture and in his Foreword to this edition of the Digital Review of Asia Pacific (DirAP), 2006 Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, observed that information and communication technology (ICT) is transforming the world into a 'distanceless, borderless world of instantaneous communications' and that poor people can change their lives if they had access to and can use ICT to meet their needs.
For Muhammad Yunus, the first step in bringing ICT to the poor in Bangladesh was the creation of a mobile phone company called the Grameen Telecom of Bangladesh, a part of Grameen Communications, which was undertaken jointly with Telenor of Norway. Grameen Bank provided loans to the poor women of rural Bangladesh to purchase their own mobile phones and to sell mobile phones to villagers. The mobile phone business proved to be a brisk one and today there are almost 300,000 women engaged in the mobile phone business serving 10 million subscribers to Grameen Telecom of Bangladesh.
The operations of Grameen Communications are anchored on the basic principle that 'empowerment of disadvantaged individuals and groups can be accelerated through access to information'. In the Grameen Digital Center website, it is reported that because 'information regarding government, community, health, education, agriculture, environment, etc., is not available to all people, specially to rural people', the rural areas 'suffer considerably from lack of adequate information services' and the rural areas of Bangladesh have 'become distant centres of poverty and hunger due to the lack of communication and other support facilities'. By providing computer, Internet and mobile phone services in the rural areas, therefore, Grameen Communications is 'creating opportunities for addressing poverty and hunger through technological intervention'.
Indeed, there is growing recognition of the role that the new digital technologies can play in fostering human development. In 2002, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan issued this 'challenge to Silicon Valley':
The new information and communications technologies are among the driving forces of globalization. They are bringing people together and bringing decision-makers unprecedented new tools for development. At the same time, however, the gap between information 'haves' and 'have-nots' is widening, and there is a real danger that the world's poor will be excluded from the emerging knowledge-based global economy.
Also in 2002, the United Nations adopted the Millennium Declaration, considered a landmark document reflecting the aspirations and concerns of peoples worldwide, setting specific targets to reduce poverty, and calling for 'concerted action to fight injustice and inequality and to protect our common heritage, the earth, for future generations'. One of the many commitments made in that document is to 'ensure that the benefits of new technologies, especially information and communication technologies, are available to all'.
Between 2002 and 2006, several documents on ICTs and their role in people empowerment, poverty alleviation and development have found print. Moreover, a number of conferences have been held by governments and by international organizations, including the World Summit on the Information Society in 2003 and 2005. Two major recent initiatives are the Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technologies in Development (GAID), which was convened the second time in Kuala Lumpur on 19–20 June 2006, and the First Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum convened in Athens from 30 October to 2 November 2006. A key message from the Internet Governance Forum is that the Internet must be 'accessible, usable and safe for all'.
The DirAP seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion of how best to put ICTs in the service of human development. DirAP is a biennial publication that aims to provide descriptive, analytical and reflective analysis of current initiatives and issues in ICTs for development (ICT4D) in the region. Given the diversity of concerns of more than 30 countries, economies and sub-regional organizations in the region, providing a descriptive analysis is not an easy task. However, the intention is not to focus on a specific direction that growth and development of ICT4D might take in the region, but to highlight some possibilities in light of current developments and the efforts of governments and institutions in the region.
In its 2003/2004 edition, DirAP reported on the status of ICT4D initiatives in 23 countries and economies, and provided an overview of issues on governance, open source and Internet politics in Asia Pacific. In the 2005/2006 edition, the qualitative analysis of the state of ICTs in 29 countries was complemented by a quantitative analysis that also provided a visual representation which revealed the wide gaps in the growth and development of ICTs across countries in the region. The 2005–2006 edition also included reviews of two sub-regional groups, ASEAN and APEC, and thematic chapters on: (a) bridging the digital divide in Asia Pacific, (b) Internet governance, (c) the social, political and cultural aspects of ICT, and (d) appropriate ICT for Asia Pacific.
This edition (2007/2008) continues the tradition of providing an analytical overview of the state of ICT4D in Asia Pacific. It covers 31 countries and economies, including North Korea for the first time. Each country chapter is an attempt to provide a relatively comprehensive coverage of the various aspects of ICT4D in each of the countries at the time that the chapter was written (in 2006). To provide a broad perspective of the issues covered, the chapters are written by a team of authors representing different sectors, such as government, academe, industry and civil society. There are also five thematic chapters providing a synthesis of some of the key issues in ICT4D in Asia Pacific today.
The banner thematic chapter titled 'ICT4D in Asia Pacific—An Overview of Emerging Issues' by Danny Butt, Rajesh Sreenivasan and Abhishek Singh analyzes current and emerging concerns regarding the growth and development of ICT4D in Asia Pacific, including the impact of ICTs on economic inequality, the environment, culture and content, and policy concerns with reference to Internet governance, e-Governance, regulation, and competition and security. The authors note that the dominant approach to ICT4D in Asia Pacific tends to be patterned after the approach adopted by advanced economies, with its focus on new technologies that might make older structures obsolete, limited discussion of potential risks or unexpected consequences, and little attention to cultural and social issues that are critical to project success. Rather than accepting a one-size-fits-all philosophy, governments in the region should 'formulate a strategy of engagement that suits their particular situation' while also 'foster[ing] networks where we can learn from the experiences of others in similar situations'.
In the area of regulation, for example, Butt, Sreenivasan and Singh note that because countries in the region differ greatly in terms of level of development, 'each country needs to develop its own set of culturally sensitive and national priority-consistent policies'. In so doing, countries must consider the need for regular and effective cooperation and coordination among ICT regulators and industry, a holistic view of the national and regional landscape, and focused and coordinated implementation. In general, governments must not forget that the non-ICT components of development are equally important, and that political will is necessary to ensure success.
In 'Mobile and Wireless Technologies for Development in Asia Pacific', Tan Geok Leng and Suranart Tanvejsilp discuss key technological developments—mobile phones, Wi-Fi, WiMax and meshed wireless networks—that bode well for ensuring universal access to the knowledge economy. The chapter highlights some highly innovative applications, especially of mobile phones, in Asia Pacific, including distance education via SMS, small-value transactions and e-governance. The chapter also discusses the barriers to use of mobile and wireless technologies in many parts of Asia Pacific that are caused by language and literacy, as well as some efforts to overcome them. The chapter concludes with 'a discussion of "development-friendly" policies that policymakers can adopt to expedite the rollout of [mobile and wireless] communication infrastructure and spur greater take-up of services and applications'.
An important application of mobile and wireless technologies in the Asia Pacific region is in risk communication and disaster management. In the thematic chapter titled 'The Role of ICTs in Risk Communication in Asia Pacific', Krishnamurthy Sriramesh, Chanuka Wattegama and Frederick John Abo provide a comprehensive analysis of experiences in the use of ICTs in dealing with serious public health emergencies such as the SARS and avian flu outbreaks and natural disasters such as the Asian Tsunami, volcanic eruptions, typhoons and other natural disasters that have recently occurred in the region with dramatic and tragic dimensions. The chapter highlights the importance of effective risk communication in disaster management in particular and in development efforts in general. Key regional and international programmes harnessing ICTs in risk communication during all phases of disaster management are described and a number of recommendations for policymaking in Asia Pacific countries are given. The recommendations include not only establishing the necessary ICT infrastructure that will enable the use of ICTs as tools in disaster management but also promoting 'risk communication in local languages, given that English is spoken by a mere fraction of the close to three billion people who live in the Asia Pacific region', harnessing the power of mass media and promoting coordination among them during disaster situations, including risk communication 'as one of the dimensions of the activities of telecentres, which are found in many rural Asian societies today', and participating in regional efforts.
Taking up the challenge of localization in Asia Pacific is the focus of the thematic chapter by Sarmad Hussain and Ram Mohan. Localization, defined as the 'process of developing, tailoring and/or enhancing the capability of hardware and software to input, process and output information in the language, norms and metaphors used by a community', is of utmost importance in a region where more than half of the world's 6,800 languages is spoken, including 21 of the 30 most spoken languages in the world, but where only about 10 per cent of the population is reached by the Internet. According to Hussain and Mohan, 'Asia Pacific is lagging behind in the use of ICTs not only because of the unavailability of affordable hardware and connectivity, but also because computing is still primarily in non-Asian languages', in particular, English.
Because of the 'great linguistic diversity of the region', localization is a complex undertaking for which there are no easy or short-term solutions. Hussain and Mohan point out that for policymakers, the decision to embark on localization projects involves striking a balance between the requirements of majority and minority languages and between basic and advanced localization, developing the necessary linguistic and technical expertise, generating resources, choosing the appropriate licensing option and computing platforms, and participating in regional and international standardization activities. They conclude that although it is challenging, the task of localization must be understood as 'an opening for Asia Pacific to revitalize its IT industry and to develop its knowledge economy'.
The intersection between intellectual property (IP) and technology is the focus of the thematic chapter written by Elizabeth Cardoza and Lawrence Liang. The chapter discusses key issues in IP policy for countries in Asia Pacific, particularly in light of increasing pressure from developed countries to impose IP regimes that fail to take into account the socio-economic, cultural and technological needs of developing countries. The key issues include copyright and its impact on access to knowledge and technology; emerging practices in IP protection that are likely to impact on technological development and innovation, such as digital rights management; and the implications of IP provisions in bilateral free trade agreements that go beyond the minimum requirements of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).
In the light of the possible trade-offs between stronger IP enforcement and technological and economic development in developing countries, Cardoza and Liang highlight the need for policymakers in Asia Pacific to make use of available flexibilities and exceptions under TRIPS and to adopt non-proprietary models of knowledge production and exchange such as free and open source software (OSS) and open content. In negotiating bilateral free trade agreements, countries need to take the initiative of proposing 'novel rules, related incentives and alternative mechanisms on policy areas where there are clear and significant interests' such as proposals relating to data protection and cultural heritage/traditional knowledge. They also need to ensure transparency in negotiations, foster better public awareness of what the stakes are, and weigh the impact of stronger enforcement of IP rights on other development priorities. Cardoza and Liang also recommend a regional or multilateral approach to negotiating trade agreements with powerful countries as this is more 'likely to result in commitments that are of general value and impact' and will thus help them avoid decisions that might jeopardize national socio-economic development goals.
DirAP's mission is to generate new descriptive, analytical and predictive knowledge about the field of ICT for development in the Asia Pacific region. It attempts to provide in-depth syntheses and analyses of ICT-related policies, developments and applications, and issues and debates that meet the needs of policymakers, academics, scholars and practitioners from government, the private sector and civil society. It is hoped that this edition of DirAP fulfills its mission.
Felix Librero
Chief Editor
3G 3rd Generation wireless networks
4G 4th Generation wireless networks
A2K Access to Knowledge
ACE ASCII Compatible Encoding
ADB Asian Development Bank
ADSL Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line
AiDA Accessible Information on Development Activities
AP Access Point
APT Advanced Packaging Tool
ASCII American Standard Code for Information Interchange
ASEAN Association of Southeast Asian Nations
ASR Automatic Speech Recognition
ATM Automatic Teller Machine
AUSFTA Australia-US Free Trade Agreement
B2B Business-to-Business
B2C Business-to-Consumer
B2G Business-to-Government
BcN Broadband Convergence Network
BPO Business Process Outsourcing
BTS Base Transceiver Station
BWA Broadband Wireless Access
ccTLD Country-Code Top-Level Domain
CDMA Code Division Multiple Access
CD-ROM Compact Disc Read-Only Memory
CIT Cheque Imaging & Truncation
CPP Caller-Party-Pay
CPU Central Processing Unit
DAB Digital Audio Broadcasting
DLT Distance Learning Technology
DMB Digital Multimedia Broadcasting
DNS Domain Name System
DRM Digital Rights Management
DSL Digital Subscriber Line
DTT Digital Terrestrial Television
DVB Digital Video Broadcasting
DWDM Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing
EDGE Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution
FDI Foreign Direct Investment
FLOSS Free/Libre and Open Source Software
FOSS Free and Open Source Software
FTA Free Trade Agreement
FTTH Fibre-to-the-Home
FWA Fixed Wireless Access
Gbps Gigabits per second
GDP Gross Domestic Product
GPLv-3 General Public License of the Free Software Foundation (FSF)
GPRS General Packet Radio Service
GSM Global System for Mobile Communications
GSMA GSM Association
gTLD Generic Top-Level Domain
HDD Hard Disk Drive
HDSL High bit-rate Digital Subscriber Line
HDTV High Definition TV
HSDPA High-Speed Downlink Packet Access
HTML Hyper Text Mark-up Language
iB3G Integrated Beyond 3rd Generation
IC Integrated Circuit
ICANN Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
ICDL International Computer Driving License
ICP Internet Connection Provider
ICT Information and Communication Technology
ICT4D Information and Communication Technology for Development
IDM Interactive and Digital Media
IDN Internationalized Domain Name
IDRC International Development Research Centre
IEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
IETF Internet Engineering Task Force
IOSN International Open Source Network
IP-DC Internet Protocol Datacasting
IPR Intellectual Property Rights
IPTV Internet Protocol TV
IPv4 Internet Protocol version 4
IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6
IR Information Retrieval
ISDN Integrated Services Digital Network
ISM Industrial, Scientific and Medical
ISO International Standards Organization
ISP Internet Service Provider
IT Information Technology
ITES Information Technology Enabled Services
ITU International Telecommunications Union
IVR Interactive Voice Response
IXP Internet Exchange Point
Kbps Kilobits per second
LAN Local Area Network
LCD Liquid Crystal Display
LDC Least Developed Country
LF Low Frequency
Mbps Megabits per second
MHP Multimedia Home Platform
MMS Multimedia Messaging Service
MPEG Moving Picture Expert Group
NAP Network Access Provider
NGN Next Generation Network
NGO Non-Governmental Organization
OA Open Access
OCR Optical Character Recognition
OECD Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development
OPGW Optical Ground Wire
OSS Open Source Software
P2P Peer-to-Peer
PBS Public Broadcasting Service
PC Personal Computer
PDA Personal Digital Assistant
PHS Personal Handy Phone System
PLC Power Line Communications
POP Point of Presence
PPP Public–Private Partnership
PSTN Public Switched Telephone Network
PTT Post, Telegraph and Telephone
PWLAN Public Wireless Local Area Network
R&D Research and Development
RFID Radio Frequency Identification
RIO Reference Interconnect Offers
SAARC South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation
SARS Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome
SCPC Single Channel Per Carrier
SDH Synchronous Digital Hierarchy
SIM Subscriber Identification Module
SME Small and Medium-sized Enterprises
SMP Significant Market Power
SMS Short Message Service
SSML Speech Synthesis Mark-up Language
S&T Science and Technology
STM Synchronous Transport Module
TDM Time Division Multiplexing
TD-SCDMA Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access
TLD Top-Level Domain
TPM Technological Protection Measures
TRIPS Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights
TTS Text-to-Speech synthesizer
TVRO Television Receive Only
UHF Ultra High Frequency
UNDP United Nations Development Programme
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
UPS Uninterruptible Power Supply
URL Uniform Resource Locator
USP Universal Service Provision
UTF Unicode Transformation Format
VAS Value-Added Service
VoiceML Voice Mark-up Language
VoIP Voice over Internet Protocol
VSAT Very Small Aperture Terminal
W3C World Wide Web Consortium
WAN Wide Area Network
W-CDMA Wideband CDMA
WGIG Working Group on Internet Governance
WiBro Wireless Broadband
Wi-Fi Wireless Fidelity
WiMAX Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access
WIPO World Intellectual Property Organization
WLAN Wireless Local Area Network
WLL Wireless Local Loop
WSIS World Summit on the Information Society
WTO World Trade Organization
ICT4D in Asia Pacific—An overview of
emerging issues
Mobile and wireless technologies for
development in Asia Pacific
The role of ICTs in risk communication
in Asia Pacific
Localization in Asia Pacific
Key policy issues in intellectual property and
technology in Asia Pacific
State and evolution of ICTs:
A tale of two Asias
In 2007, it cannot be denied that information and communication technologies (ICTs) have had a transformative impact on the entire Asia Pacific region. Even in the least developed areas of the region, where ICTs have yet to make a significant mark on everyday life, the processes of lawmaking and the flow of economic goods are in some way influenced by globalization and networked markets enabled by ICTs.
As ICTs become central to the economic structure of countries all over the world, the approach to their role in social and economic development has become more sophisticated. In contrast to earlier policy agendas which sought to increase the use of ICTs as a pathway to achieving development, there is an increasing recognition that ICTs cannot be seen as inherently good or bad, as their effects are dependent upon the particular context of use. For example, access to e-commerce facilities may allow a producer to sell goods to an external market, resulting in higher sales. However, this same channel will allow the importation of goods and services which will pose a threat to local industry development.
Therefore, the decision to enter a global electronic market is a strategic one: the success factors for local businesses and regions will depend to a large degree on access to e-business skills, marketing budgets and distribution capacity. Where these exist, there is the possibility of greatly enhanced economic prospects through e-commerce. Where they do not, it is likely that exposure to global markets will result in overwhelming competition. The early Internet dream that held e-commerce as the saviour of the artisan producer has not come to fruition, even though there have been well-promoted individual success stories. Instead, the rise of ICTs has brought unprecedented consolidation in markets.
Globalization researcher Saskia Sassen explains that this is due to the separation of organizational functions enabled by ICTs: the distinctive way information technologies facilitate dispersal of routine activities and centralization of control activities explains the increasing dominance of cities in global economic activity (Sassen 1991). While there will always be success stories among the poor, there is no doubt that ICTs are, overall, increasing the gap between wealthy and poor businesses, countries and regions.
Little of the policy literature on ICT for Development (ICT4D) explicitly considers these larger overall effects of ICTs. More commonly, ICT4D discussions share uncomfortable similarities with ICT analysis emerging from highly developed economies, such as:
• a focus on new, 'revolutionary' technologies designed to make obsolete older structures and ways of working, with little assessment of the total costs of such a transformation;
• limited discussion of risk or unintended consequences from ICT developments; and
• an abstract theoretical model for economic development through technology that downplays cultural and social issues which are critical to individual project success in the ICT field.
Throughout Asia Pacific, the theme of Universal Access drives ICT4D policy. Policy initiatives carry ambitious titles such as 'Computers for all' or 'One laptop per child'. These are worthy ideals but in the policy setting they become problematic as they are never finally achievable and they provide little guidance for the tough decision-making that is required to support the use of ICTs where basic poverty issues, such as access to food, water and basic health care, remain unsolved. Kerry McNamara (2003, p. 1) points out this significant gap in evaluation:
Despite a proliferation of reports, initiatives and pilot projects in the past several years, we still have little rigorous knowledge about 'what works'. There are abundant 'success stories', but few of these have yet been subjected to detailed evaluation. There is a growing amount of data about the spread of ICTs in developing countries and the differential rates of that spread, but little hard evidence about the sustained impact of these ICTs on poverty reduction and economic growth in those countries.
Given this unhappy trend, why should developing regions even consider expanding their investments in ICT? Would it not make more sense, as some advocate, to concentrate on traditional industries and means of development?
Our view is that even though ICTs are making economic development more challenging for developing areas, ignoring ICTs will only lead to further exclusion from the circuits of power and economic prosperity which rely on these technologies. But the challenges for a truly inclusive information society remain substantial and there are no magic solutions to follow from increased levels of investment in ICTs. It remains the task of each business, government, NGO and individual to formulate a strategy of engagement that suits their particular situation. More importantly, given the very unstable nature of ICT-enabled markets and relationships, it is imperative to foster networks where we can learn from the experiences of others in similar situations, rather than accepting one-size-fits-all philosophies proposed by those benefiting from the status quo.
Documenting and sharing these experiences is one of the key objectives of the Digital Review of Asia Pacific (DirAP). The thematic chapters in this issue, on Mobile and Wireless Technologies, Risk Communication, Localization, and Intellectual Property Regimes, highlight the wide range of options that are available for policymakers and ICT4D practitioners in these critical areas. The chapters on individual economies also highlight the diversity of ICT4D projects being undertaken throughout the region. In the rest of this chapter we outline the major trends in ICT as they affect human development—including technology, the knowledge economy, digital and economic divides, security, environment and e-Government. There is also an overview of the regulatory issues facing policymakers in Asia Pacific. After a brief look at the regulatory focus in developed ICT market countries, the chapter focuses on trends observed in developing ICT market countries and seeks to distil the key elements of regulatory approaches that have seemed to work, that have managed to encourage the growth of a healthy, competitive and innovative culture around ICTs. Our hope is that regulators and authorities in Asia Pacific can assess their own policy framing and implementation mechanisms against these measures and in cases where the measures are already adopted and part of the regulatory approach, there may be scope for a modified approach tailored to a country's culture and business environment.
Technological developments continue to bring about significant changes in cultural and economic life in Asia Pacific. The most significant changes are coming about through three linked areas of innovation: broadband, convergence and wireless. These technological changes reshape the social and economic opportunities that are available in the online environment.
Broadband diffusion is continuing at a rapid pace. At the technological level, DSL has established itself as the dominant protocol for broadband delivery among regions with a high investment in fixed-line Plain Standard Telephone Network (PSTN) infrastructure. The growth in available bandwidth via broadband changes the kind of content that is available to users, because of two distinctive characteristics.
First, broadband is 'always-on', which means that broadband Internet networks take on the form of a utility or basic service, in the same way that telephone or broadcast networks are consistently available. This means that Voice over IP (VoIP), for example, can become a viable replacement for the telephone, although the opportunities to significantly decrease telephony costs are somewhat offset by the lack of control and reliability that nations expect from critical infrastructure. Who gets to decide what is 'good enough' for service delivery remains a critical issue.
The second effect of broadband is in expanded bandwidth, which means that the online distribution of audiovisual material increases. This distribution mechanism replaces broadcast networks for many young and affluent consumers who engage in 'series stacking' (downloading many episodes of a series at once) or downloading pre-release music or movies. Further, the growth in processing power of the personal computer now allows users to treat their personal computer as a music and photo library, video player and home video editing suite. Users increasingly send their own audio-visual content among Internet networks, and this has led to the growth of popular user-generated content services such as the video-sharing site YouTube and the photography website Flickr. The expanded possibilities for audio-visual Internet communication among those without high levels of text literacy should not be underestimated.
The Asian region is a world leader in the development of broadband, with countries such as South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan having high penetration rates and offering new kinds of applications and services through high-speed data.
Convergence is coming to the fore, as previously distinct forms of media (radio, music stores, television, film, telephony) are now both emulated by and reconfigured within Internet networks. These raise challenging business and regulatory issues for communications regulators who have previously relied on regulation of different physical infrastructure for specific media forms. For example, spectrum allocation allowed for a finite number of free-to-air television and radio broadcasters and this also meant that content control via the broadcasters was a relatively simple affair. In the new media environment where content from a particular producer may be hosted offshore, and with an infinite number of content 'channels', maintaining complete control over local content is almost impossible. There are important cultural policy implications: for example, the concept of a 'quota' of local programming may no longer be appropriate in a non-channel based environment.
There is a continuing proliferation of mobile devices and wireless networks, facilitating both increased movement and reduced costs for 'last mile' delivery. In their country chapter in this volume, Ananya Raihan and Shah M. Ahsan Habib note that Bangladesh had 12.6 million phone users in April 2006, an increase of more than tenfold from 1.2 million phone users in 2001. During the same period, fixed line subscribers merely doubled. This reflects the central role that wireless and mobile technologies now play in extending the reach of communications networks in developing countries.
Platform choice for cell spectrum is also critical in a developing country with limited resources. In highly developed market economies, there is sufficient investment capability to allow firms to establish competing infrastructure (for example, both GSM and CDMA). For developing countries, a combination of donor and private sector investments from foreign countries will influence the technological platform that is deployed. This platform choice may have far-reaching consequences in the future.
Innovative mobile operators are embracing the changes that are occurring. As Keisuke Kamimura and Adam Peake point out in this volume, in Japan 600,000 'one-seg' telephones capable of receiving digital television broadcasts were sold in the first three months of the service being available. While this is encouraging, customized content still cannot be produced due to licensing regulations and a range of unresolved issues such as royalties, which are disbursed according to a system designed for a standard television environment. As usual, regulators are on the back foot with respect to the new technological developments.
Once again, Asia is playing a leading role in the deployment of wireless. While Japan has long been a leader in the provision of mobile data services such as i-mode, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Philippines are becoming recognized for their role at the forefront of the 'mobile information society'.
An important issue with respect to mobile and wireless is security. In a fixed line environment, it is usually possible to track the source of a particular communication made over a network. With the emergence of pre-pay calling and wireless Internet, such tracking is not always possible. Different policy remedies are available. For example, Australia requires identification to be shown at the point of sale of prepaid calling services (Australian Communications and Media Authority 2006), although such initiatives also raise privacy issues.
Overall, recent developments reflect the ongoing reality that technological change will continue to occur quickly and regulatory or business propositions that are tightly tied to particular technological solutions are at risk of becoming redundant when these conditions change. A focus on developing the capacity to adapt to change and developing a clear picture of the desired social, economic and cultural objectives, whether in public or private sector bodies, is required.
These new technological developments often make previous technologies obsolete. However, the physical items themselves do not disappear. A serious question regarding the ongoing sustainability of ICT4D is electronic waste or e-waste, which is the most rapidly growing waste problem in the world. Toxic elements of ICTs such as lead, beryllium, mercury, cadmium and flame retardants pose both an occupational and environmental health threat. Most of the consumption of information technologies occurs in wealthy economies, while the waste products are often shipped to developing countries (where the raw materials came from in many cases). This makes ICTs dependent upon a process which for many countries results in a conversion of their natural resources into toxic material.
International movement of hazardous waste is controlled by the Basel Convention 1992. There is also a proposed amendment, the 'Basel Ban', which prohibits international trade in waste classified as hazardous. Although this has not been ratified, the European Union is voluntarily abiding by the ban (Terazono et al. 2006, p. 6). Nevertheless, close to 40,000 tons of used electronic equipment find their way to India every month, unnoticed, and they are getting routed to illegal electronics dump grounds, reports Ravi Agarwal, director of the non-profit environmental group Toxics Link. The equipment is then incinerated, contaminating the environment with toxic organic compounds and metals (Basu 2006).
There are positive aspects of the international trade in e-waste. The working lives of products can be extended through reuse, and second-hand goods can still be used in many recipient countries even if the goods are considered obsolete in the exporting countries. This not only increases resource utilization efficiency, but also provides economic benefits for people in the importing countries. However, it is difficult to ignore the vastly asymmetrical risks associated with this trade. Often, related industries in recipient countries, especially in the informal sectors, do not consider externalities such as environmental effects. Market price alone does not reflect the true economic value of a material. There are human costs through illness and long-term spoiling of natural resources that can occur through toxic spillage.
There are initiatives in the region to control the e-waste problem. The EECZ Programme (http://www.eecz.org/index.html), for example, is dedicated to reducing the environmental pollution caused by industrial activities and hazardous waste in the Chinese province of Zhejiang. The programme is focused on establishing a well-regulated hazardous waste management system and supporting eco-efficient production.
Combating e-waste will require a range of strategies. As a net importer of waste, Asia Pacific could negotiate an agreed range of standards that will allow shared monitoring and enforcement. Much of the current trade occurs in the informal sector and it is difficult to determine the long-term effects. Of course, more eco-friendly manufacturing processes and more serious attempts to reduce the generation of e-waste will be critical. Ultimately, the selling price of technology should also reflect its true cost, including environmental and human costs which are largely ignored by ICT producers.
While the entire ICT4D sector would claim to focus on development in favour of the poor, it remains challenging to find simple solutions or agreement on priorities for ICT4D and poverty. The various technology parks invested in by governments as a key part of ICT strategic plans underscore the difference within countries between those able to make use of ICTs (largely in urban centres) and the rural poor. The question of how to foster social mobility among the rural poor is complex and will not be easily resolved.
McNamara (2003, p. 4) points out that this development issue is not confined to ICTs and that 'the enthusiasm for ICTs has also mirrored earlier fads in development thinking in overemphasizing one factor and failing to focus adequately on the complexity and difficulty of fostering pro-poor change, and on the political and structural constraints on that change in a given country'.
This is not to say that ICTs do not have a role to play, but it is one that needs to be integrated into a larger analysis of structures (for example, trade, education) that may not be largely driven by ICTs. For example, a recent UNDP report on telecentres aimed at empowering the poor found that user satisfaction with the centres is 'closely associated with the capability of the staff at the centres and this in turn affects the degree of community acceptance that the centres enjoy' (Harris and Rajora 2006, p. 13). Such findings show how technology by itself is far from sufficient to achieve clear results in the ICT field and that a range of human skills are required.
ICTs can, however, make a difference to many specific factors that exacerbate poverty. In the area of disaster alleviation, as outlined by Krishnamurthy Sriramesh, Chanuka Wattegama and Frederick John Abo in this edition, ICTs have a critical role to play in preparation, warning and response. This comes from the ability of ICTs to duplicate and deliver instantaneous data in many different formats. Krishnamurthy et al. note, however, that ICTs alone will not save lives and that they need to be integrated into a larger, holistic management system.
Another issue in pro-poor development is that transferring critical services to ICTs needs to take place without dismantling services that are relied upon by those who are not online. In this edition, Lelia Green and Axel Bruns discuss the further marginalization experienced by those unable to access online services after cutbacks to face-to-face bank transactions in Australia.
At the regional and nation-state level, ICTs and technological convergence pose significant challenges for economic development. Many countries throughout the region are beginning to focus their economic development policies on ICT industries. These industries can be difficult to develop without an existing base as they often require integration with dominant platforms and standard-setting bodies which are based outside the region (for example, operating systems such as Microsoft or Apple). A common strategy is to undertake clustering of ICT industries to enable learning from each other and develop regional linkages. The Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) in Malaysia is a prime example. The informal exchanges and learning that take place in technology parks lead to overall skill development. This is why countries such as Iran are providing large subsidies for such initiatives in their five-year development plan. As Masoud Davarinejad and Massood Saffari point out in their country chapter, there are now nine such parks in Iran alone.
Another significant and sometimes controversial strategy is the use of tariffs to protect local ICT manufacturers. Without such tariffs it is very difficult to develop a local hardware industry and without such an industry technological skills that are necessary for future competitiveness may remain undeveloped. On the other hand, the tariffs may also result in ICT hardware remaining unnecessarily expensive and out of reach of many users and thus prevent the development of new markets. For countries with a limited local industry, like Lao PDR, this debate is ongoing as the chapter on this economy by Phonpasit Phissamay makes clear. It is difficult for policymakers to view these issues objectively due to the tremendous pressure applied by industries with economic interests in the outcome of policy decisions.
Business Process Outsourcing (sometimes termed BPO or, more commonly, simply 'outsourcing') continues to be a growing phenomenon that is having a transformational impact on the economies of the region. On one level, outsourcing has become a significant source of income for many Asia Pacific countries as European and US firms make use of ICT to have labour-intensive service tasks such as call centres, animation work and data processing performed in lower wage countries. However, these industries are challenging to forecast, as they are subject to task migration: if one's own city can host a call centre for a firm, there is a strong chance that the firm could shift to outsourcing to somewhere else if it gets a better deal, as the required skills are relatively transferable (May 2000).
One of the newest pressures affecting ICT-enabled trade is the concept of 'Network Neutrality' (Butt 2006a). The theoretical model for the Internet suggests that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) carry any and all Internet traffic equally, rather than being able to prioritize or block certain traffic or charge differential rates for different kinds of data. User groups advocate for legislative measures to maintain this openness, arguing that it is necessary because users do not have true competition in the telecommunications area due to high switching costs and limited choice. These groups are concerned that the increasing attempts to link content with network service provision will result in users being required to sign up to a particular ISP in order to receive certain kinds of content. Competing businesses might bundle exclusive access to particular content packages along with network access in order to extract the maximum revenue per user, because provision of basic network access alone has low-profit margins. This will result in a fragmentation of the network, as users will not generally purchase more than one access technology in order to access all possible content.
Many people assume that the Internet is a public facility because the technical protocol for transferring information (TCP/IP) is public. But the actual physical networks are owned primarily by private entities who interconnect via market transactions. This raises significant new challenges for governments in particular who are dealing not only with a global facility that is relatively impervious to national interests, but also with a private governance structure that has little incentive to consider the needs of poorer potential users not already connected. In the early days of the Internet, the bulk of the bandwidth was owned by academic or research networks and the profit motive was not usually present, even though the networks only served a small elite. As the Internet becomes important infrastructure for communities around the world, serious challenges are developing for those seeking to expand Internet use in the public interest, when the infrastructure is privately owned.
Related to the issues arising from the ISP business model, there are also policy challenges emerging due to interconnection agreements between networks. Because the Internet is not a single network but a network of networks, the market transactions between these networks can have effects that seem unintuitive from a policy perspective. If two networks within a country do not have a 'peering' arrangement, for cost reasons, traffic may end up travelling to quite remote physical destinations before returning to the very same city. This is akin to how smaller economies are served by airlines—for example, travel between small islands in the Pacific can be more expensive than around-the-world tickets with stops at major cities. While many believe that a market economy will naturally lead to the establishment of Internet Exchange Points due to the economic efficiencies involved, there are indications in some highly developed countries that this is not the case. In New Zealand, for example, major ISPs are choosing to de-peer from exchange points (Bertram 2006). In Lao PDR, as Phissamay describes in this volume, the Lao National Internet Committee (a government agency) is investing in an exchange point to link traffic between the five ISPs and academic networks internally to help alleviate the current situation where national data will often be routed via Thailand or Singapore.
Security is an increasingly important concept covering a range of diverse areas with different political and social consequences. Security, dependability and trust are critical factors in stimulating the take-up of new ICT services. From the computer owned by the individual user which must be protected from hackers, to phishing scams, through to the use of ICTs for border control, the breadth of security threats is enormous. Tarimo (2006) characterizes approaches to ICT security as increasingly focused on the concepts of availability, confidentiality and integrity:
• Availability—The prevention of the unauthorized withholding or unscheduled inaccessibility of information or resources.
• Confidentiality—The prevention of the unauthorized disclosure of information.
• Integrity—The protection of information from unauthorized modification.
What makes security so challenging is that these concepts are often in tension with each other. For example, the desire to make information always available entails the potential for compromise at the level of confidentiality. The existence of a potential threat does not always mean that it can be eliminated. As Tarimo (2006, p. 46) notes, 'The way one defines ICT security will influence how one models the same and ultimately the design of the corresponding solution—approach and model. Many security designs are poor because they are based on unrealistic threat models.' Highlighting unlikely but easily fixable security issues is certainly more lucrative for security solution-providers than attending to more likely and difficult-to-solve security problems.
ISO/IEC 17799, the Code of Practice for Information Security Management, is an internationally recognized standard that provides a framework for security in the private and public sectors covering small to medium enterprises as well as large corporations. The 2005 version of the standard (International Organization for Standardization 2005) contains the following 12 main sections which constitute a useful outline of the issues that need to be considered in the area of information security:
1. Risk assessment and treatment
2. Security policy
3. Organization of information security
4. Asset management
5. Human resources security
6. Physical and environmental security
7. Communications and operations management
8. Access control
9. Information systems acquisition, development and maintenance
10. Information security incident management
11. Business continuity management
12. Compliance
The questions of peering and neutrality are currently addressed in forums associated with Internet Governance. The topic of Internet Governance, discussed by Adam Peake in the 2005–2006 edition of DirAP, has lost some of its momentum after the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) failed to come to any agreement on the issues in 2005. WSIS has developed the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to discuss the ongoing coordination of the Internet, but it has no authority to implement changes in the Internet's governance bodies. There can be broad or narrow definitions of Internet Governance. Increasingly, many actors favour a broader definition comprising the traditions, institutions and processes that determine how power is exercised, how stakeholders are given a voice and how decisions are made with respect to the Internet. The UN Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) differentiated clusters of issues related to Internet Governance that can be summarized as (a) access issues; (b) issues related to use of the Internet; and (c) issues around coordination of Internet resources.
One of the common myths about the Internet is that it is not governed (Ang 2005). Technically, the Internet is coordinated rather than governed and it is true that there is no single place where the Internet and a coordinating agency can be identified. But in reality, there are a number of different areas where self or state regulation is in place and these are areas where the analysis of governance is useful.
An Internet Governance issue which does seem to be ongoing is that of Internationalized Domain Names or IDNs, and it has particular relevance to the Asia Pacific region (Butt 2006b). As the number of non-English speakers on the Internet grows exponentially, the Domain Name System (DNS) overseen by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which works on a subset of Roman script, has proven to be incapable of effectively providing Internet navigation services in other languages and scripts. ICANN recently announced a new focus on the issue and it is deploying testbeds for new IDN systems. For Asia Pacific, however, many feel that this is too little, too late, and alternate systems are needed to allow people to use their own languages online. IDN testbeds were established by the Asia Pacific Network Group in 1998. There are also a number of IDNs already established by particular ISPs.1 Organizations such as the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium (MINC) are attempting to develop a coordination framework to ensure that fragmentation of the Internet does not occur through 'leakage' of these IDNs into different zones.
The debate on IDNs remains polarized: there are those supporting universality, standardization, stability and control, on the one hand; versus those advocating for multiplicity, diversity, loose coordination and accountability to local language groups, on the other. From the perspective of bodies such as ICANN and the IETF, a single system for IDNs should be established which can serve the interests of all stakeholders and multiple systems should be avoided. However, this 'universal' approach to IDNs raises much more complex technical, political and economic issues than developing a viable system for a particular language group. This complexity partially accounts for the slow progress on IDN development within the ICANN system. The major challenge will be to create viable mechanisms for mediating between these philosophies. While all agree that the goal is to ensure that the Internet remains a single, interoperable public facility, many increasingly believe that the right of all people to communicate in their own language must be maintained and expanded within this new medium.
The ready availability of relevant local language content is critical for the development of productive capacity in new media. One of the challenges in the early years of Internet diffusion lay in the dominance of the English language and US-centric content, with little relevance to many Asia Pacific Internet users. Without locally relevant content in local languages, immediate uses of ICT for day-to-day activities may not be apparent.
As Sarmad Hussain and Ram Mohan point out in their chapter on 'Localization' in this edition, there are many aspects to the technical issues in localization, including encoding, keyboard and input method, fonts and rendering, locale and local language interfaces. They state, 'Localization is conventionally defined or understood in a narrow sense—that is, it is usually limited to interface translation and other basic changes in the computing platform. We suggest that localization has a broader scope that includes the entire range of script, speech and language technology to enable access to information for the end-user.' Different language groups have very uneven capacities to deliver all of the components necessary for a fully localized experience, and therefore the priorities for Chinese language initiatives, for example, differ from those for Khmer.
There are a number of notable projects working to build local language computing capacity in Asia Pacific. In Nepal, the Dobhase project is currently building an engine for English-to-Nepali machine translation on the Web. Critically, they are also incorporating Nepali-to-English functionality to ensure that the Nepalese become Web producers and not just consumers of online content. Other projects are happening at the platform level: in Bhutan there has been successful development of Dzongkha Linux, a localized operating system.
Increasingly, regional ICT plans are focusing on content and cultural issues. For example, Lorraine Carlos Salazar and Shelah Lardizabal-Vallarino note in the ASEAN chapter in this volume that the ASEAN ICT Fund has endorsed the Brunei Action Plan which will (a) empower home workers in ASEAN countries, (b) conduct workshops on public domain and content development, (c) conduct e-learning, e-culture and e-heritage training for youth, and (d) develop an ASEAN Skills Standard.
In the area of IPRs and patents, countries are increasingly aware of the ability of overseas companies to patent technologies and materials based on traditional products. ICTs play an important role in allowing this commercialization and publication. However, ICTs can also potentially provide a mechanism to mitigate against such exploitation. The government of India's Traditional Knowledge Digital Library initiative has built a database of over 36,000 Ayurvedic formulations and other traditional medicines (see Noronha and Venniyoor, this volume). It is hoped that this can work as a defensive mechanism against inappropriate patents that may be taken out on such materials, which might otherwise result in their becoming inaccessible for India's citizens.
The question of viable financial models for local content companies remains troublesome in the Asia Pacific region, whether in the public or private sector. It is easier for nations with a high number of cultural producers using common languages, such as English or Chinese, to engage in cultural exports. But for smaller nations, export audiences may not be as easy to reach, and local audiences are at risk from increased competition from global sources, which contribute to difficulties in language maintenance.
Because media policies are based on control of national borders, the global nature of Internet media poses many questions. Overall, these can be seen in the shift in national interest content policies from control and quotas to growing effective new content producers who are able to thrive in an international market. Such initiatives are increasingly undertaken by economic development agencies pursuing the 'creative industries' rather than by cultural development agencies. This reflects the forum shifting that has occurred in the intergovernmental sphere, where media and entertainment are now more commonly discussed in the WTO as part of intellectual property agreements rather than in agencies such as UNESCO that have traditionally been the agency for the discussion of cultural issues. As Braithwaite and Drahos (2000) point out, Europe and the US have led these moves, more so than countries in the Asia Pacific region.
Even in nations managing to achieve significant control over content, such as China's 'national firewall', the controls are a partial measure. New social media such as blogs and wikis provide a challenge to holistic media policy, as much of this cultural activity takes place informally, outside of organizations easily subject to policy initiatives. However, these independent forms also allow an unparalleled opportunity for local content to emerge. Donny B.U. and Rapin Mudiardjo estimate that there are currently around 70,000 to 90,000 blogs within Indonesia alone (see the Indonesia chapter in this volume). Ultimately, there is much for the region to gain by supporting the user-generated content platforms that reflect the diversity of all countries in the region.
Perhaps the most important point about ICT regulation in Asia Pacific is this: Each country needs to develop its own set of culturally sensitive and consistent national priority policies. There is no 'best' approach to policy formulation and neither are there 'best' types of policies for dealing with specific aspects of ICT. Indeed, most developing Asia Pacific countries are striving to evolve their own set of policies and implementation methods, each using their own discernibly unique methods of consultation, policy formulation and execution/implementation. The differences in regulatory approaches in Asia Pacific are based largely on cultural as well as economic issues, such as the level of development of a country's ICT infrastructure, the penetration rates of different forms of ICTs, the emphasis people place on culturally unique content, the willingness to invest, and of course, two factors that greatly influences all of the above—per capita income and the level of education.
In terms of ICT market maturity, countries in the region can be classified as either 'Developed ICT Market Countries' or 'Developing ICT Market Countries'. 'Developed ICT Market Countries' refers to countries such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, where ICT markets are relatively mature, where current generation infrastructure is in place and there are definite plans (some already in the execution phase) to install next generation infrastructure, where there are multiple competitors in a market and where the market demand for services and products is healthy enough to encourage innovation. 'Developing ICT Market Countries' refers to two types of countries: (a) countries where ICT markets are rapidly growing due to economic prosperity and large populations capable of sustaining such growth, but where this has been a recent phenomenon (for example, China and India) and (b) countries whose economies and ICT take-up is not expanding at a rapid pace, either due to their small population and market sizes, geographic locations or economic size.
In economically developed countries with relatively mature ICT markets, such as Singapore, South Korea and Japan, infrastructure is a given and the build-out of future-proofed cutting-edge infrastructure and upgrading also tends to be a given. This is because the relatively high per capita income and critical mass of educated population able to use and fully benefit from ICTs tend to make new build-outs and massive capital commitments viable over a medium term for private operators. In such countries, market forces and dynamics make it viable for private operators to consider build-outs without too much assistance from government, although public–private partnerships (PPPs) are being seen as a mutually advantageous option for infrastructure build-outs.2 Here, monopolies in mainstream broadcasting, telecommunications and Web access have ceased and the regulators and policymakers have accepted the technology neutrality argument and have enacted (mostly) technology-neutral laws and regulations to regulate and enable convergence-driven technologies. The focus of policy and regulators in these countries tends to be less on the penetration rates of basic technology or technology accessibility and more on ensuring that the country is 'future-proofed' and that growth and sustainability of a competitive market are assured. This is evident in Singapore, where the IT and telecoms regulator, the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, has a number of infrastructure and training programmes already running under an 'Intelligent Nation 2015' masterplan.3
In contrast, in many developing countries such as Mongolia, Vietnam, Bhutan and Nepal, regulators and policymakers are tasked with creating the conditions that would enable an active ICT market to come about. That said, developing countries in the nascent stages of ICT adoption, with less mature markets but with access to current technologies, may actually be at an advantage compared to developed countries. This is because they may be able to 'leapfrog' some of the issues faced by the developed countries that can often distort or skew the ICT development process. For instance, developed markets may have had to make a tough political and economic choice when faced with the prospect of having to impose prohibitively high termination payments (using taxpayers' money) as a cost of dismantling tightly controlled or nationalized monopolies or oligopolies. Faced with such a prospect, a government might delay liberalization to ensure that the monopoly period granted runs out first.
Another perhaps more important issue is an outdated regulatory and legal framework. Developing countries may be at a relative advantage in so far as they can start from a 'fresh page' when it comes to developing regulatory and legal frameworks for ICT, especially since they can draw on the collective regulatory experience of developed countries to bolster and build their own expertise. Some developing countries have been able to use World Bank aid to consult professionals from countries with maturing regulatory regimes, such as Singapore, to get advice on structuring ICT regulation. This allows them to gain insight into the issues and challenges involved in successfully regulating for growth—ensuring end-user protection without stifling industry growth by over-regulating—and to put in place a market-conducive legal and regulatory framework. For example, through World Bank funding, both Mongolia and Lesotho in Africa have tapped professionals from developed ICT markets to assist in the formulation of enabling and technology-neutral ICT regulation and legislation designed with the above goals in mind.
The policy and regulation focus in developing countries tends more toward increasing ICT penetration rates especially in rural and semi-urban areas. In nearly all developing countries, there are direct or indirect policies aimed at increasing the usage of ICT. So for instance, Bangladesh did away with import taxes and duties on computers in 1998 (see Raihan and Habib, this volume), while Nepal is constructing a national optical fibre backbone for telecommunications partly with aid from the Indian government (see Pandey and Shrestha, this edition).
Some developing countries are devising novel ways to grow their nascent ICT industries via indirect policies encouraging growth in technology, content and software development, especially to encourage innovation. This allows policy to have an influence in a space that is rarely regulated because it usually does not need to be—the space between infrastructure and end-user. In Pakistan, as described by Jamshed Masood and Salman Malik in this volume, the government is engaged in a study to consider the viability of a government-backed venture capital fund that can provide subsidized funding for Pakistani ICT ventures. A further impetus is tax holidays granted to the income of ICT-focused venture capital funds.
The continuing diffusion of ICTs and the emergence of the Internet as the communications medium of choice among many businesses and citizens has increased the pressure on government departments to provide information and services through electronic means. This year, for example, Australia published Responsive Government: A New Service Agenda which recognizes the need to deliver a more coordinated and citizen-focused programme of activities and ensure that the capabilities to support this are present. This reflects many other similar initiatives in the region such as South Korea's u-Korea Master Plan (2006–2010), described by Jong Sung Hwang and Jihyun Jun in this volume.
There is a large variety of e-government projects and obviously, many of these require substantial expertise and experience that may not be available in governments with low IT capacity. Thomas Parks (2005) points out that very few government decision-makers have direct experience with IT. Even if they see the opportunity, they often lack experience in planning and implementation, which leaves them at the mercy of vendors and/or individual consultants. One common problem is the lack of time and budget for software acquisition and implementation, systems integration and training. Training in particular is vital and should thus be given as much budgetary allocation as the computer hardware itself.
Examples of laudable ongoing e-government initiatives can be found even in the remotest Asia Pacific countries like Bhutan (see Wangchuk and Pradhan, this volume) and the Maldives (see Ibrahim and Ahmed, this volume). Bhutan is working on implementing initiatives in border management, passport control and civil registration, while the Maldives is in the process of interlinking government offices via a WAN network as a precursor to e-government services. These initiatives show how policymakers can lead by example to encourage the uptake and penetration of ICT.
Nearly all of the Asia Pacific countries surveyed in this edition of DirAP encourage the development of open source software. Localized versions of the Linux OS are popular in a number of countries such as Vietnam, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Mongolia. This is not surprising, given the relatively high cost of licensed software. Perhaps the most visible examples of policy favouring open source are in China and India: since 2002 governments in both countries have taken policy stances advocating open source over proprietary solutions.4 This has been followed more recently by a number of institutions in Southern India successfully deploying Linux-based solutions and state governments advocating their adoption.5
From an economic perspective, this makes absolute sense: one should use something that can do the job for $0. The chink in Linux's armour, however, is usability. Especially in countries with a relatively low literacy rate, it is much harder to learn on Linux than on any other platform. Policymakers should encourage the development of easy-to-use localized user interfaces in open source platforms.
Regulators and policymakers in Asia Pacific need to grapple with the issue of how best to get local content online and make it accessible to the widest audience. This can have a direct bearing on penetration rates for ICT as more and more people may choose to come online or take up ICTs if the services are available in local languages and a range of local content is accessible.
As for a licensing model for open content, there is a discernible interest in Asia Pacific in the more flexible licensing models offered by the likes of the Creative Commons6 and the Free Software Foundation (FSF). For example, India has been involved in the updating of the FSF's General Public License (GPL) from version 2 to 3 (see Noronha and Venniyoor, this volume.
Legislation on IT and digital signatures is now in place in a number of countries in the region. When enacting such laws, attention must be given to the principle of technology neutrality: the laws should be applicable regardless of the technology.
With respect to approaches to applying and enforcing laws, the trend in developing ICT countries has been to follow the lead of the developed countries, which is to use a 'light touch' in ICT regulation—that is, regulators step in only when needed to correct imbalances in the market which the market cannot correct by itself (for example, monopolistic or cartelized competition).
We have found that most of countries in the region that have enjoyed productive and sustained ICT growth share certain features in terms of regulatory approaches. These are:
• Regular and effective cooperation and coordination among ICT regulators and industry;
• A holistic view of the national and regional landscape when seeking to determine and implement ICT policy; and
• Focused and coordinated implementation.
The regulatory and policy environment of some countries has all of these features, while others have only some of the features and they may be present in varying degrees. The point is that their presence appears to encourage holistic and forward-looking policy that is capable of being both visionary and realistic in terms of implementation resource requirements. A regulatory tool set containing some or all of these features (depending on national circumstances) can help to realistically address two key considerations facing the majority of Asia Pacific countries, namely:
1. Managing the digital divide: 'Digital divide' refers to the gap that in many cases has opened up between citizens who are versed in ICTs and able to derive maximal benefit from using them and those not versed in ICTs due to lack of opportunity or inadequate infrastructure.
2. Managing the convergence process: 'Convergence' in this sense denotes the convergence of content from disparate analogue formats provided over separate analogue infrastructure, to a single digital format (digital broadcast, digital sound, digital data) capable of delivery to multiple I/O, interactive devices via a single fibre optic 'fatpipe' infrastructure.
These tasks require regulators and policymakers to engage with ICT industry and users when formulating policy and laws. Coordination and consultation among the responsible government ministries and regulators, including those not directly responsible for ICT, are likewise essential. Singapore provides a good illustration of this model in practice. For nearly all major policy decisions, the Singapore IDA (www.ida.gov.sg) holds a public and industry consultation, and makes a decision only after considering the responses given.7 Thus, for example, the new IDA-administered Code of Practice for Competition in the Provision of Telecommunication Services 2005 was released with significant revisions most of which were partly or wholly attributable to concerns raised via consultations. Such coordination can inform the industry and users of the directions policymakers intend for ICT to take and it can give them a chance to adapt to it or, even better, to constructively influence it. Used properly, this collective decision-making process can make it easier to implement and get results from policies, as users feel the policies are cognizant of their interests.
Policymakers need to think through the objectives of a policy, law or regulation and assess whether its expectations are realistic in a national and regional context. If it is unclear how the expectations and goals can be reached, then steps to make those clear should be identified and implemented.
This may seem simple, but there are ICT policies drafted as vision statements, without guidelines as to who needs to do what to achieve certain goals. For example, a government might come up with a 10-point plan for putting a country on the ICT growth path but does not provide clear instructions to the concerned ministries and governmental bodies on what coordination is expected or should take place.
The regional angle can also come into play, especially if it can enhance a country's position on ICT issues, such as open source software development and content licensing. With respect to open source software, given the marked encouragement it has received in Asia Pacific, it is conceivable to imagine policy encouraging cross-border collaborations (whether between governments/regulators or commercial entities or both) on open source development, especially between countries with the same languages. This can accelerate the development process for both locally developed software and/or the localization process for all software.
As for content licensing, as countries consider more flexible licensing models for open content, they may at the same time hesitate to have stringent standards thrust upon them, complete with obligations to adhere to digital rights management. An example is Australia, where a number of critics have cried foul over the government's decision to bring its copyright legislation in line with that of the United States, as part of its obligations under a free trade agreement which came into force in 2005. Australia's modification of its copyright and intellectual property laws included adopting provisions rendering illegal any measure to circumvent technology protection measures (TPMs), which in turn could put Australian copyright law at odds with the hitherto unassailable fair use access rights available to users of copyright materials (see Green and Bruns, this volume).
In such cases, it may be possible for developing country regulators to collaborate across borders to agree on principles for flexible licensing and copyright protection and to then use this common ground to seek better terms when negotiating with countries with traditional licensing terms (see Cardoza and Liang, this volume). This common stance could be used collectively when negotiating as a trade bloc or it could be used to strengthen an individual country's bargaining position when negotiating individually. Such a policy stance could also be used to advantage by private entities negotiating content licensing terms even in the absence of a free trade or IPR-specific agreement.
Forming a regional position also involves determining all of the governmental and non-governmental agencies that need to be co-opted to work together to bring high-level ICT policy to practical fruition. First, the practical goals of the policy must be worked out. Second, who is empowered to do what is necessary to bring it to fruition should be identified. And third, the responsibilities towards achieving the policy goals should be delegated and a clear review process and schedule to monitor progress should be agreed upon. In short, political will is necessary to achieve ICT growth. That said, it must be clear that the process of guiding and implementing focused and coordinated policy implementation is the ICT policy goal that requires perhaps the greatest amount of political will.
It is frequently assumed that the introduction of more advanced ICT reduces opportunities for corruption. However, as Wescott (2002) notes, the reality is more complex. While ICT sometimes helps in combating corruption, it can also have no effect, or even provide for new corruption opportunities, including fraud. Indeed, unintended consequences are common in e-governance projects, even those that have positive outcomes. Consider the following related but contrasting examples.
The government of Andhra Pradesh developed a land registration system where the land owner enters some details of his/her property, such as location, dimensions and other factors that affect the value of the land, and then calculates the value. Prior to the system, land valuation was performed in an entirely non-transparent system by assessors and agents and often required weeks and some additional payments. According to Subash Bhatnagar of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, 'Land registration can be completed in a few hours (with the new system), whereas earlier it took 7–15 days' (Parks 2005, p. 6).
However, researcher Solomon Benjamin (2005) has found that new land regimes can have very uneven effects. He notes that in Bangalore, the reduction of complexity in titles and centralization has made land much more open to larger purchasers. 'This has allowed very large real estate companies catering to the IT industry to access land in Bangalore, resulting in dramatic changes in land markets' (Benajmin 2005, p. 8). Gentrification becomes an issue and the rights of the poor are made more tenuous when ICT enables companies and politicians to collaborate on larger 'real estate development projects', which may be good for a region's overall economy but result in the transfer of security away from the poor to the benefit of the wealthy. After all, it is unrealistic to think that the poor will be trading on the ICT-enabled property market.
While the discussion of ICTs is often posed in relationship to a 'knowledge economy' or an 'information society', the latter is usually taken to mean an advanced industrialized economy where service industries account for a very large proportion of the national economy. While this economic structure is identifiable in some nation states, there are very few roadmaps for how such an economic state can be achieved by developing countries and in this respect Asia Pacific is no different from the rest of the world.
There are five novel processes that characterize the Information Society in published literature. Identifying these processes provides an insight to the kind of policy responses required to prepare a population for this emerging society:
1. Global networks of finance capital are rapidly expanding, with economic advancement often based on the ability to shift informationalized capital between markets. This suggests the need for an international perspective and experience and a certain level of cosmopolitanism and outwardly-focused thinking among business owners.
2. Information itself is increasingly commodified. That is, there has been significant growth in the sales of 'information products' and media as a proportion of economic activity. This intensifies the need for literacy and for a critical capacity to assess information.
3. Lifestyle and consumption choices increasingly define diverse social structures, requiring businesses to have a more sophisticated understanding of cultural issues and empathy with their chosen markets.
4. Services are becoming an increasingly important economic category, suggesting a shift in the traditional policy focus on science and technology and increased emphasis on human disciplines such as the arts, humanities and social sciences.
5. There is the recognized emergence of significant 'informal' economies, which direct the flow of money outside of the formal market mechanisms where more open relationships take place. For example, most areas of the creative industries are heavily dependent on personal relationships. Skills in relationship development are necessary in more informal environments.
As a representative and influential example, Manuel Castells' view is that there is a new mode of development, which he calls informationalism, that is driven by changes in the mode of capitalist production. According to Castells (1996, p. 27), this trend is linked to the rise of the service industry and the informational economy, where the workplace is focused on the generation, manipulation and interpretation of text, images and other symbolic information. The result of these changes is the emergence of a 'skill bias' in changing employment opportunities under information-intensive economies, where jobs requiring manual labour are disappearing and new jobs require higher levels of information literacy and knowledge. Economists have put forward this notion of 'skill-biased technological change' to explain the growing overrepresentation of the least skilled workers in unemployment figures in many countries over the last two decades. Greenan et al. (2002, p. 10) note that this change 'induces an upward drift in the relative efficiency of skilled workers and a downward drift in the cost share of unskilled workers', leading to increased wage inequality without affecting aggregate wage and employment statistics. This is important in ICT4D because regional and national aggregate statistics are usually used as evidence for ICT-induced economic gains but may in fact be coextensive with decreased economic well-being for a majority of people.
While many jobs have been lost through ICT development, many new ones have been created. However, aggregate economic statistics such as job growth, usually used as evidence to support IT-supported economic gains, shed little light on the kinds of jobs that are created and lost in this transformation. Where are the contemporary skills shortages that must be addressed? These are often difficult to map and little is known about changes in on-the-job training. Certification may often be simply for convenience, providing barriers to entry rather than reflecting true business need. For example, the Microsoft Certified Software Engineer (MCSE) qualification became increasingly popular because it provided the type of ICT skills that were/are thought to be relevant in the labour market, but it rapidly produced over-supply (South Africa Human Resource Development Data Warehouse 2004).
There is widespread agreement that education is one of the most important issues in preparing people for the information society and in particular in adapting to technology-enabled networks. European researchers have highlighted three kinds of ICT skills that are important: ICT User Skills, ICT Practitioner Skills and e-Business Skills (European Committee for Standardization 2006):
• ICT user skills, such as using the Internet or desktop processing programmes, generally lead to productivity improvements for organizations and allow individual users to get higher paying work.
• ICT practitioner skills, such as software development, enable the development of new industries. These generally require a higher level of training and result in an individual who has a career in the ICT sector.
• e-Business skills (or what we might call e-organizational skills) are related to an understanding of changes in markets, policy and organizational structures which are occurring due to the rise of the Internet and ICTs. These skills are gained through education but also often by the experience of the user working in a particular field.
Chennells and van Reenen (2002, p. 199) suggest that while there is considerable agreement about skill-biased change, there is little research analyzing the means by which technological change translates into higher demand for skills. Their work points to organizational changes made possible through ICT, such as 'delayering, decentralization and giving greater autonomy to workers' as the link between technology and higher skill requirements or professionalization. While computer interfaces have not changed the knowledge that manufacturers must have about their production process, they do provide far more second-by-second information about the process that needs to be interpreted (Shaw 2002, p. 232). Consequently, firms develop highly skilled job designs that reflect this need for interpretation and cognitive skills.
In ICT4D in Asia Pacific, we can see this reflected most clearly in the changes in the telecentre movement. As Raihan and Habib point out in the Bangladesh chapter, a content-based approach gives a new direction to the global telecentre movement. Previously, a telecentre was essentially a technology learning centre and communication centre (with an Internet connection and telephones) which largely relied on the information processing capabilities of the end users. Now, telecentres are able to provide the core information and knowledge service for things such as market opportunities or information on the visits of aid organizations. These functions are unthinkable without ICT. However, ICT use is not the goal but simply a means for the telecentre to become an effective social and informational hub.
As this overview and the volume as a whole makes clear, the field of ICT4D is extremely diverse and it intersects with a wide range of other issues. There are indications that ultimately, specialization and focus on the non-ICT parts of society remain critical for successful ICT4D projects. Nepal is positioning itself as a communications gateway between China and India, making use of its unique physical location between these two emerging superpowers. In the Maldives, the few software developers who have been successful have been largely focused on the hospitality industry, and they have managed to market point-of-sale and hospitality management software to other countries as well.
Policymakers have to take stock of their true situation and the resources available to them rather than following one-size-fits-all blueprints for ICT-enabled development. In developed ICT market countries, policy and regulation are concerned more with future-proofing. On the other hand, in developing ICT market countries, policy seems to be more concerned with getting up to speed than with future-proofing. It is heartening to see a number of developing ICT market countries in Asia Pacific grappling with how to increase penetration rates and technology access, not just at the infrastructure level but also at the user level via targeted education, while at the same time trying not to over-regulate and maintaining a 'light touch'.
The main challenges ahead are likely to be managing the digital divide and convergence. While we have noted features that effective regulatory and policy frameworks appear to possess, it is still the regulators and the people of a country with ground-level experience who would know best what works there. That said, appropriate policy options and advice on what to do may be available but the political will could be lacking. Malaysia's well known leadership position in ICTs must be partially a function of the high-level support required to transform ideas into action. In 1994, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad chaired the newly established National IT Council. Other countries in the region have prime ministerial-level champions, such as Prime Minister Samdech Hun Sen, Chair of the National Information Communications Technology Development Authority in Cambodia, and President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in the Philippines, who initiated a National ICT Month in 2005. It is clear that many other countries in the region do not have the same levels of leadership in their government administrations.
ICTs are rapidly transforming many fields and their successful implementation requires high-level champions who can influence the strategic direction of governments, business and community organizations in response to the changing environment. However, such advocacy must remain critical, as ICTs are not simply a good, but offer a powerful capacity to disrupt long-standing markets, communities and technologies. Sometimes such disruption is necessary to enable communities to respond adequately to a rapidly changing environment, although as the current consensus on climate change suggests, we may not be able to evaluate the success or failure of our development efforts until many years into the future. For ICT4D decision-makers whose own fortunes rise and fall quickly, the only option in such uncertainty is to evaluate the situation as rigorously as possible and attempt to chart a course for the right side of history.
1. Providers of IDN systems include China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) in China; i-DNS.net, a plugin-based architecture; Japan Network Information Centre (JPNIC) which has registered over 60,000 domain names in Japanese; and Korean Network Information Centre (KRNIC), which has registered over 50,000 domain names in Hangul.
2. An example is IDA Singapore's recent Pre-Qualifying RFP for the build-out of Singapore's Next Generation Network on a PPP model basis. For further information see: http://www.ida.gov.sg/Infrastructure/20060919190208.aspx
3. See: http://www.in2015.sg/
4. For a more recent update on Linux in India see: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_40/b4003069.htm. The comments appended to this story offer an interesting view on the Indian public's view of Microsoft v Linux in India.
5. See: http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=138464
6. See: www.creativecommons.org
7. A list of current consultations and results of past consultations can be viewed at: http://www.ida.gov.sg/Policies%20and%20Regulation/20060418215526.aspx
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Development agencies have long recognized the role of telecommunications in the economic and social development of communities and nations. The provision of universal telecommunication services is now built into every nation's development plans. The traditional approach was to construct a wired, copper-based infrastructure and extend that to places where there are pockets of population. Unfortunately, this turned out to be an expensive and lengthy process that has denied large segments of the population access to telecommunications.
Recent developments in mobile and wireless1 technologies have opened up new possibilities to reach the population at a faster rate and at a lower cost than with the traditional copper-based approach. In this chapter, we describe the capabilities of several types of mobile and wireless technologies that have made a big impact on nations developing their communications infrastructure. These technologies include mobile phones, Wi-Fi, WiMAX and meshed wireless networks. We then discuss the barriers to use of mobile and wireless technologies in many parts of Asia Pacific that are caused by language and literacy, as well as some efforts to overcome them. We conclude with a discussion of 'development-friendly' policies that policymakers can adopt to expedite the rollout of communication infrastructure and spur greater take-up of services and applications.
There are many different forms of mobile and wireless technologies in use today. These include Near Field Communications (NFC), Bluetooth, DECT, mobile phones, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, High Altitude Platforms and satellite telephone networks. Each of these have been designed and optimized to serve a certain market segment. There is no one single technology that is able to meet all of the needs of all of the people, all the time. The greatest development impact is obtained by deploying the most appropriate technology for the situation at hand. For example, Bluetooth is designed as a cable-replacement and it is very inexpensive, but it is capable of supporting only very short range communications of moderate data rates. In contrast, a satellite system is very expensive to set up but it is perfectly suited to cover vast terrains; on the other hand, it works only when there is a direct line of sight between the end-user unit and the satellite.
In this chapter, we focus only on those technologies capable of delivering voice and Internet services to a large population spread across a vast geographical area. Two very important and widely-deployed wireless technologies that meet these criteria are the mobile phone and Wi-Fi LAN systems. We cover these in detail and show how they serve different segments of the community. We also discuss the technological evolutions of these systems and show that the differences between them may diminish in the future.
Mobile phones2 have become the most common mode of communication in the world. In 2005, there were over 2.20 billion mobile phone users compared to only 1.26 billion fixed-line telephone users globally (ITU 2005a). Even more interesting are their rates of growth: the Compound Annual Growth Rates (CAGR) for mobile phones and fixed-line phones were 24 per cent and 5.2 per cent, respectively, from 2000 to 2005. If this trend continues, mobile phone penetration will far exceed fixed line phone penetration in the next decade. Mobile phones are not just for developed countries. With over 690 mobile phone network operators operating in 213 countries, virtually every country around the world has access to the technology. And with mobile phone penetration in many developed and developing countries reaching saturation levels, mobile phone providers are developing more cost effective solutions that are targeted at less developed countries. More than half of the world's population resides in these countries and this is where future growth of mobile phones is expected to come from.
A lot of thought has gone into the design of mobile phone systems. It can seamlessly provide voice communications to a large population spread across large geographical areas. Each user is identified with a unique subscriber identification number for authentication and billing purposes. The system is capable of supporting roaming across national boundaries. It is these features that make the mobile phone personal to the user, enabling him or her to be contacted at any time and any place where there is radio coverage. Mobile phone systems are very reliable and communication across the system is secure against eavesdropping. Spam, or unsolicited calls or messages of an advertising nature, is almost non-existent in the mobile phone system. Because of these attributes, users have made the mobile phone their trusted personal device, which has contributed to the dramatic growth in mobile phone use around the world.
While a mobile phone may seem to be very easy and convenient to use, it only works because it is supported by an extensive network of base stations and a complex layer of management software working in the background. A mobile phone system consists of a cellular arrangement of base stations spread across the entire area of coverage. Each base station can provide cover to an area several kilometres in radius. A mobile phone needs only to communicate with the base station closest to it and through it reach any other mobile or landline telephone it wants to connect to. The cellular arrangement of base stations enables the technique of frequency reuse to be exploited, thus enabling a very large increase in the traffic carrying capacity of the system. It would not have been possible for policymakers to allocate sufficient radio spectrum for the general population if the technique of frequency reuse had not been invented.
When mobile phones were first introduced, only businesses and the very rich could afford them. Today they have become much more affordable and they have penetrated all segments of society. Furthermore, we are starting to see a trend of mobile phones displacing fixed-line telephones. In developed countries, it is the convenience of being reachable anytime and anywhere that drives the trend. The phone number is tied to the person and not to a specific location. Whereas residents of a household are likely to share one fixed-line telephone, it is highly likely that each individual within a household will have his or her own personal mobile phone. In the case of developing countries, it is the speed of deployment and lower investment costs that drive the take-up of mobile phones. A strategically placed radio base station can almost immediately bring communications to everyone within a 5–10 km radius compared to the months it may take to plan, obtain all the necessary permits and deploy a copper infrastructure to cover the same area.
The first generation mobile phone system was introduced by AT&T Bell Labs in Chicago in 1978 and it achieved success with the business community. The second generation mobile phone used digital technology to improve its capabilities. In this way, mobile phones began to make an impact on the general population. Besides voice, the second generation mobile phone system also has some basic data capability, such as the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) and the Short Message Service (SMS). While GPRS saw only limited success, SMS turned out to be a big hit. GPRS provides a data connection capability between the handset and the phone network and from there onto the Internet. The lukewarm reception towards GPRS may be due to the fact that it could only support a relatively low data rate of about 20 to 40 kbps and users have found it to be an expensive service. SMS allows the user to send short alphanumeric messages of up to 160 characters to other mobile phone users. SMS is extremely popular with youngsters and even businesses have found innovative ways of using SMS to take advantage of its low cost and the ubiquity of handsets. Last year, over one trillion SMSs were sent globally and it now accounts for a significant portion of an operator's revenue. For example, 16 per cent of China Mobile's 2004 revenue came from data, and SMS sent in China grew from a mere 0.44 million in 2000 to 300 million in 2005 (ITU 2006).
The third generation mobile phone exploits wideband digital communications to further improve on the second generation phone system. One key improvement is the capability to support multimedia applications. Another key benefit is the fact that third generation mobile phone systems can deliver voice services at a fraction of the cost of second generation systems, potentially making mobile phone service even more affordable than before.
The success of mobile phones is due to the work of many players. These include the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), the body which created the technical standards for GSM, the dominant mobile phone system in use today, and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an intergovernmental organization of public and private entities. The ITU, working together with National Administrations, endorses standards and regulations and harmonizes the radio frequency spectrum to be used by mobile phone operators around the world. Standardization of equipment enables production volumes to be efficiently scaled up, thus bringing down per unit costs. Through market competition, these savings can then be passed on to the consumer. A harmonized radio spectrum makes international roaming possible with just one handset. An extensive network of inter-country, inter-operator relationships have sprung up to enable seamless service across countries around the world. This is made possible by the fact that each mobile phone subscriber has a direct billing relationship with his or her home operator and can be uniquely identified through the personal subscriber identification module (SIM) associated with his or her phone subscription.
A country's telecommunications regulator has a strong influence on whether there will be a high take-up of mobile phone services in that country. The regulator influences the degree of competition and vibrancy of the market by the number of players it permits to play in that market. If there is insufficient competition, subscribers may end up paying more because operators need not fight too hard for the market share. However, it has also been argued that too much competition will create a market where the operators may not make enough money for re-investment to keep the infrastructure up to date.
Regulators also control the quantum and pricing of the radio frequency spectrum. It can be shown that there is an inverse relationship between the quanta of spectrum allocated and the intensity of infrastructure (related to capital expenditure) needed to service a particular distribution of subscribers. The cost of the radio spectrum can vary dramatically; some governments see it as a means to raise as much revenue as possible, while others may see it as a tool for telecommunications development and thus charge only a nominal fee. However, the trend is for regulators to use the auction mechanism and let the market establish a price for the radio spectrum.
Regulators must also play the role of referee to ensure a level playing field for the market mechanism to work effectively. The regulator needs to establish clear rules for interconnection between mobile operators and between the mobile and landline operators, and ensure access to critical infrastructure such as telecommunications ducts and pipes and access to telecommunications towers and exchanges. The regulator must also ensure that operators do not adopt anti-competitive practices such as locking of handsets and imposition of excessively long service contract periods. The regulator should also ensure that there is a mechanism for mobile number portability so that users can freely switch operators without worrying about losing the telephone number that has become personal to them.
Another very important player is the GSM Association (GSMA), a global trade association representing more than 690 mobile phone operators and more than 180 equipment manufacturers and suppliers. Their primary goal is to ensure that mobile phones and services work globally, creating business opportunities for their members. Ground-breaking initiatives launched by the GSMA include the 'Emerging Market Handset Programme' (EMH) designed to bridge the digital divide by catalyzing the development of affordable handsets. The programme seeks to achieve an ex-factory price of below USD 30 per handset. This is much lower than the price of handsets in the market today. EMH handsets have been supplied through 10 participating operators in countries such as India, South Africa, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Bangladesh, Turkey, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Yemen, Sri Lanka and Kenya. Other important programmes launched by GSMA include the GSMA Development Fund and studies on the impact of government taxes on the affordability of mobile phone services.
Mobile phone operators play a very important role in the mobile phone ecosystem. A savvy operator can extract maximum revenues from businesses and yet still provide affordable services to the masses with a well structured service offering. Some of the most important tools for developing the mass market include the availability of handset subsidies, prepaid service plans, Caller-Party-Pays (CPP) plans and discounted or free buddy call plans.
Studies by GSMA have shown that handset cost is one of the major impediments to mobile phone penetration in developing countries. This problem can be mitigated by an operator bundling a subsidized handset with a service plan and amortizing the cost of the handset over a service period of 24 or more months. Another very successful tactic is for the authorities to encourage the development of an orderly and active market for secondhand handsets. In many developed markets, handsets have become fashion items and they may be traded in for new models after only one or two years of use. These used handsets can be purchased at a fraction of their original price and they can be redeployed in the price-sensitive market segment.
The availability of prepaid or pay-as-you-go price plans is particularly important to stimulate growth of the price-sensitive market segment. This type of plan appeals to people with a limited or uncertain income stream and who may not be able to commit to any fixed monthly subscription plan. Prepaid plans also permit users to moderate their usage based on what they can currently afford. Prepaid plans have been so successful that in Africa, prepaid subscribers accounted for 87.4 per cent of all subscribers in the year 2004 and the global average for that year was 46.3 per cent (ITU 2005b).
Another very important tool for growing the price-sensitive market segment is a CPP plan. Under this settlement regime, it is the originating party that pays for the call while the terminating party is not charged at all. Operators have found that CPP appeals to the price-sensitive market segment, especially students, teenagers and blue-collar workers even though it may cost more on a per-minute basis compared to the Receiving-Party-Pays plan. This is because CPP subscribers can manage their telephone bills by controlling the amount of calls they make while freely accepting calls to their mobile number. A good example of how the introduction of CPP boosted user uptake is the case of Mexico: the number of mobile subscribers in the country grew by over 100 per cent to more than four million within a year from the introduction of CPP plans in 1998 (Petrazzini 2000).
The wireless local area network (WLAN) is a relatively new technology. Work to develop the WLAN standard (IEEE 802.11) was started in 1990 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., a US-based professional engineering society, to exploit the Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) frequency band for high-speed networking. Unlike most other radio frequencies which are tightly controlled and accessible only to specific licensed personnel, anyone with the appropriate equipment can use the ISM band. The IEEE completed the initial 802.11 standard in 1997 and this was followed in quick succession by an upgrade (IEEE 802.11b) which exploits new technology innovations to improve performance from two to 11 Mbps. Another upgrade (IEEE 802.11a) exploits the newly open ISM bands in the 5.3 to 5.8 GHz bands. To be released in 2007 is yet another variant (IEEE 802.11n) that exploits advanced digital signal processing technologies such as Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) algorithms to bring WLAN data rates up from 54 Mbps to 110 Mbps and beyond. Fortunately, when developing these upgrades, the IEEE standards workgroups have ensured that there is backward compatibility between the new and old. This means that infrastructure installed before the release of these new standards can still work with equipment made to the newer WLAN standards.
Unlike mobile phones where the equipment supplier base is relatively small, the number of manufacturers supplying WLAN equipment is much larger. Many of these manufacturers originate from the Far East and they have a reputation for bringing out very cost competitive products. Competition to supply WLAN equipment is very intense and prices have come down to a point where they have become quite affordable to the masses. For example, currently it is possible to purchase a WLAN PC card for under USD 25 and the price is still dropping. One of the main reasons why WLAN has taken off is that Intel, the US-based computer chip giant, strongly endorsed the technology with its Centrino campaign to put WLAN capability into every notebook computer that is manufactured. The trend to WLAN-enable portable devices is spreading to Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones. This trend points to a situation where sometime in the not too distant future, almost everyone will carry a WLAN-enabled end-user device everywhere he or she goes.
Recognizing the need to ensure that WLAN equipment from various WLAN manufacturers can work with each other, the leading players from the WLAN community set up a global non-profit organization called the Wi-Fi Alliance to drive the adoption of a single worldwide accepted standard for high-speed wireless local area networking. They created a logo 
which is affixed to products that have successfully gone through a rigorous certification programme designed to ensure inter-operability between products from different Wi-Fi manufacturers. Users have come to see the logo as a mark of quality and assurance that the product can work with Wi-Fi devices from other manufacturers that may be found in the home, at the office or in public hotspots.
The simplest Wi-Fi system is just a Wi-Fi card plugged or pre-built into a computer, establishing radio contact with a nearby Access Point (AP), which then provides onward connectivity to the global Internet. Because Wi-Fi operates in the unlicensed ISM band, regulators have imposed strict limits on the maximum permissible transmitter power3 for the Wi-Fi card and AP. This is so that the ISM band can be shared by as many people as possible and it is not monopolized by any one single user. The transmit power limitation in turn causes the maximum communication range between a Wi-Fi card and AP to be limited to about 100 metre. If there is no direct line of sight, say if there is a wall between the Wi-Fi card and the AP, the range may drop to below 10 metre. By default, all Wi-Fi cards and APs use omni-directional antennas because a user may approach an AP from any direction. In some special cases where it is desired to link two known fixed points together using Wi-Fi, it is possible to replace the omni-directional antennas with highly directional antennas and extend the range to tens of kilometres. In such situations care must be taken to align the two antennas for maximum effect and the user should note that the mobility capability of Wi-Fi is lost.
Wi-Fi has made major in-roads into the Office, Home and Public Hotspot markets. In the Office market, some technology-savvy companies have Wi-Fi enabled their offices so that their employees can be more productive. Their employees can access corporate resources such as databases, e-mail and the Internet and conduct business transactions even when they are away from their desks. Wi-Fi is also taking root in the Home market. In places where broadband penetration is high, it has become quite widespread to use Wi-Fi to create a wireless home network so that members of a household can share one cable or DSL connection to the Internet. The third market segment is the Public Hotspot market. Public Hotspots are places where Wi-Fi APs have been put up and made available to the general public, sometimes for a fee, or for free, or in exchange for patronizing a business. These Hotspots can typically be found at coffee outlets, fast food chains, shopping malls, libraries and community centres. The public can use their personal Wi-Fi devices to access the Internet at these Public Hotspots.
Because Public Hotspots are relatively cheap and easy to set up, many community leaders see the potential of using Public Hotspots to bridge the digital divide. The city of Philadelphia, working with Earthlink Inc., a commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP), is one noteworthy example of such an effort. Philadelphia is deploying over 4,000 APs on lamp posts all over the city. The capital costs of the infrastructure will be shouldered by Earthlink while the city contributes access to its lamp posts and takes responsibility for obtaining approvals from relevant city departments for the service. Through this public-private collaboration, Philadelphia will be able to offer Wi-Fi Internet access to its needy residents for half the cost of normal commercial Internet access using cable or DSL technologies. The service is also putting pressure on the traditional ISPs to either improve their service offerings or drop their prices to compete. Alarmed by this impending threat to their business, incumbent broadband providers in Philadelphia have responded by pushing for State legislation to prevent City administrations from using public funds to deploy such networks because they supposedly represent unfair competition. We can expect a repeat of this legal battle in many of the cities trying to deploy cheap and affordable community Wi-Fi systems in the United States and elsewhere around the world. Regulators should monitor the case closely for clues on how they may handle a similar situation within their jurisdiction.
Following on the heels of Philadelphia is the city of San Francisco where they approved a joint bid by Google and Earthlink to offer free and paid Wi-Fi Internet access to city residents. The service will be funded through location-aware advertisements based on the context of the users. In Asia Pacific, Singapore announced its Wireless@Sg programme in December 2006, which will see the number of Public Hotspots in Singapore climb from 600 to 5,000 within one year. Through this service, residents and visitors will get to enjoy free basic rate Internet access for a period of three years.
Wi-Fi Public Hotspots are not just meant for cities in developed countries. First Mile Solutions (2003), a Cambridge-based company with close links to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has developed and launched several innovative mobile Wi-Fi Hotspot solutions for developing countries. One solution uses a store-and-forward technique for emails to be dropped and picked up by Wi-Fi equipped motorcycles (called 'Motomen') or trucks as they move in a circuit around a central hub that has an external Internet connection. Villages along the circuit can send and receive e-mail through these roving Wi-Fi carriers, albeit with some delay. Villagers can also access the Internet through content that has been previously downloaded and stored locally. This technology has brought some form of basic communications to rural towns and villages in Cambodia and India for a fraction of what a traditional communication system would have cost. Recently, Goswami and Purbo (2006) published a paper reviewing the uses of Wi-Fi in less developed nations and they highlighted certain 'innovative' uses of Wi-Fi to overcome the hostile market and regulatory environment in Indonesia. These innovations included the use of Wi-Fi to provide last mile access and as a low capacity backhaul technique to overcome infrastructure limitations in Indonesia. Many users also resorted to becoming unlicensed re-seller ISPs to recover their own costs.
Although Wi-Fi came into existence some 20 years after the mobile phone and it does not yet enjoy the widespread adoption of mobile phones, it is nevertheless a technology with tremendous potential for development. As mentioned earlier, a mobile phone requires a complex supporting infrastructure in the background for it to work. Creating that infrastructure requires government licensing, extensive capital expenditure, and detailed radio and network planning. Only large companies with significant capital resources are able to undertake these tasks. In contrast, a Wi-Fi system is much easier to set up. Many countries have created regulations to permit systems to operate in a relatively unconstrained manner in the ISM band. Such ISM systems, which include Wi-Fi, can operate without a specific radio frequency allocation or an operating license.4 Wi-Fi would never have taken off if each and every user had to apply for a license from their home regulator! It is also much easier to set up a Wi-Fi radio network because Wi-Fi uses a much simpler though admittedly less efficient radio channel access method to manage multiple users attempting to access the base station. This makes radio planning for Wi-Fi systems much simpler at the expense of certain performance parameters. Because of these features, Wi-Fi systems can be set up in a much shorter time using relatively less skilled human resources compared to mobile phone systems.
Mobile phone base stations can cost up to USD 100,000 per unit, whereas a high-grade Wi-Fi AP can be purchased for only about USD 5,000 per unit. This is because the technology used in Wi-Fi is less complex and there is much greater competition in the Wi-Fi market. The severe competition has resulted in price wars and breakthrough innovations that bring better value to Wi-Fi users. In the 10 years since its introduction, Wi-Fi's data rate improved from 1 Mbps to 54 Mbps. During that same period, the mobile phone's data rate improved only from 40 Kbps to 384 Kbps.
Possibly because of these factors and the fact that there is much more competition for the supply of Wi-Fi services, Wi-Fi tends to offer much better value than mobile phones. With Wi-Fi, data rates tend to be much higher and prices much lower. For example, under Singapore's Wireless@Sg Wi-Fi service, users can connect at 512 Kbps for free, whereas a mobile phone call would cost SGD 0.20 per minute and a 40 Kbps GPRS data connection would cost SGD 0.0037 per kilobyte transferred. While it has become quite common for Wi-Fi operators to offer unlimited data plans, mobile phone operators tend to charge for the amount of data carried or by connection time. Both of these charging methods can expose the user to a very large bill at the end of the month.
On top of the endorsement by Intel and the emergence of Public Hotspots, several new developments have given Wi-Fi a further boost. These include the launch of Skype, a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology for making phone calls over the Internet. Skype managed to attract over 130 million registered users since its launch in 2003 because it offers free on-net telephone calls and very affordable off-net calls. On-net calls are calls between two people connected via the Internet using their Skype IDs. Off-net calls are calls between a Skype user and someone with a normal fixed-line or mobile telephone number. Equipment manufacturers are rushing to put Wi-Fi capabilities into devices such as notebook computers, tablet personal computers, game machines, cordless phones, PDAs and even mobile phones, to exploit use of Hotspots and services such as Skype. With the number of Public Hotspots growing, interesting new Wi-Fi devices being introduced and with the availability of services such as Skype, more and more people are acquiring Wi-Fi-enabled devices to take advantage of this trend. In time, Wi-Fi may come to challenge mobile phones as the dominant means of communication in the world.
However, some of the weaknesses of Wi-Fi systems should be noted. First, Wi-Fi is primarily a short-range system. Thus, building an infrastructure that can provide seamless coverage similar to that of a mobile phone system in a reasonably-sized city would require the deployment of tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of Wi-Fi Hotspots. The backhaul connectivity costs and maintenance requirements of such a system are not trivial and may come to dominate the operating expenses of the Wi-Fi service provider.
Second, Wi-Fi is not able to provide the seamless connectivity that mobile phones seem to do so well; it is able to provide only nomadic access capability. Once a Wi-Fi end-user device moves out of range of the AP it is associated with, connectivity is lost and the link is broken. It has to search for and establish a new connection with another AP whose signals it can detect. There is no automatic handover or mobility capability.
Third, unlike with mobile phones where there are only a limited number of operators per geographical region, there are usually many more smaller and independent Wi-Fi operators in a geographical region. Each of these may have a different sign-on mechanism and they are likely to issue a log-in identity that is unique to their system. Unlike with mobile phones where a single identity suffices for travel around the world, a traveller using Wi-Fi may pass through several of these Wi-Fi operators and thus end up with a whole bunch of different log-in identities and an assortment of bills at the end of his or her journey.
Fourth, many Wi-Fi operators have adopted simplified log-in processes that may have security weaknesses. In these implementations, data exchanges between the end-user device and the AP are unencrypted and unscrupulous people could eavesdrop on the data conversation and extract information that is private to the user.
The proponents of Wi-Fi are well aware of its limitations and have been taking steps to address them. One such effort led by Intel with the support of many leading players from the Wi-Fi space is the Wireless Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) Forum. The technical standards being developed by the WiMAX Forum include the ability to cover large distances of up to 30 miles, provide seamless handover from one base station to another and assure end-to-end security. In short, they are trying to eliminate the shortcomings of Wi-Fi by replicating many of the features of mobile phone systems while trying to deliver them at a much lower cost. In August 2006, the WiMAX camp got a big boost when one of the leading cellular phone operators in the US, Sprint Nextel, announced that it will be using the WiMAX platform to construct a fourth generation nationwide broadband network.
Wi-Fi equipment vendors are starting to build mesh networking capabilities into their products. Mesh networking connects several individual APs into an interconnected network that can share a backhaul link into the Internet. The sharing of a backhaul connection can reduce the operating costs of large Wi-Fi systems very significantly and make a big difference to the business case of city-wide Wi-Fi systems. Mesh networking also gives the system the ability to respond to isolated equipment failures by re-routing traffic to other paths unaffected by the failure. The WiMAX Forum is also looking into building mesh networking technologies to its standards.
The players in the mobile phone ecosystem are not taking the challenge from Wi-Fi and WiMAX lightly. Where previously they were able to introduce new improvements at their own pace, which is about one refresh cycle per decade, they are now deploying improvements at a much faster rate. These improvements include the launch of mini and micro-sized mobile phone base stations which are much cheaper, lower cost handsets that are more suited for developing markets and the expedited deployment of new technologies such as HSDPA (High-Speed Download Packet Access), the mobile phone's response to criticism that its data rates cannot compete with Wi-Fi.
Historically, development efforts have concentrated on providing basic voice communications to as many of the population as possible. However, given the state of communications technology today, one may be able to build a communication infrastructure that is capable of supporting both voice and data for the same cost as for a voice-only infrastructure. Data capability provides access to the world of the Internet and multimedia, making for a much richer experience for users. Technologies such as Wi-Fi are inherently data communications channels that can also support voice, whereas mobile phones are primarily voice communication channels with some limited data capabilities.
Beyond the realm of voice communications, the issue of language and literacy needs to be addressed. Over half of the world's population resides in the Asia Pacific region where over 2,000 languages are being used and English is understood by only about 20 per cent of the population. A related issue is the fact that most electronic devices are designed to support Romanized characters only, which means that it is not possible to input or display without modification pictographic languages such as Japanese, Chinese, Indian and Thai. Yet another difficulty is the fact that a large number of people in underdeveloped countries are illiterate. They not only lack the capability to understand a foreign language such as English, they also cannot read even in their own language, which means they cannot communicate using text-based applications such as email and SMS.
Several countries have shown that it is not necessary to use English to achieve success in getting their population to enjoy and benefit from advanced communication services. Countries like Japan, Korea, China and Thailand have shown that it is possible to develop comprehensive and innovative communications services using their native languages. For example, China Mobile, the world's largest mobile phone operator with about 300 million subscribers, uses the Chinese language, and Japan and Korea have built two of the world's most sophisticated mobile phone services using the Japanese and Korean languages, respectively. These facts point to the need to develop communications services and devices that support languages native to the target population.
Some noteworthy attempts to develop native language capabilities in Asia Pacific include Malaysia's Murasu Communications (M) Sdn. Bhd., which is developing software to enable sending and receiving text messages in the Tamil language. In Cambodia, a private company, iWOW Communications Pte. Ltd., has developed a system for keying in and reading Khmer characters for sending and receiving SMS. There are cross-country efforts, such as some Chinese companies developing Korean language (Hangul) capabilities for sending text messages from China to Korea. Similarly, Pock Translate (http://www.pocktranslate.com/) runs a service for translating English SMS text into the Thai language to help visitors to Thailand communicate with the local people. Finally, Microimage, a Sri Lankan company, won the prestigious GSMA Asia Mobile Innovation Award 2006 for their multilingual (Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Thaana) SMS software for mobile phones.
The Internet is a treasure trove of information that can be very useful for development efforts in Asia Pacific. Unfortunately, most of the information is in English and beyond the reach of the majority of people in the region. To bridge the language barrier, research organizations are developing automatic machine language translators to convert the information into a form that the local population can understand.
NECTEC (the National Electronics and Computer Technology Center) in Thailand has developed such a suite of software applications called Parsit, an English-to-Thai language translation engine that has an accuracy of over 90 per cent. Parsit automatically translates Internet content in English into the Thai language, making it comprehensible to most people in Thailand. Parsit can work in conjunction with Vaja, a text-to-speech conversion software that takes in Thai-language characters and generates human voice of that text. Using Vaja, one can overcome the literacy barrier because the information from the website can be 'read out' to interested parties who may not be able to read but who can comprehend the spoken word. The third component of the software suite is iSpeech, a speech recognition program using an isolated word recognition technique. It is designed to convert speech inputs into text—that is, the user can just talk into a microphone connected to his or her personal computer and iSpeech will convert the voice data into text. Parsit, Vaja and iSpeech can be combined to create a 'speech-to-speech' translation application with wide ranging potential for development, especially in the tourism industry. First, a spoken English sentence is fed through iSpeech which then generates text in English. The English text is then passed on to Parsit for translation into Thai language text. Finally, the Thai text is input into Vaja for conversion into audio sounds in the Thai language.
While NECTEC's efforts are focused on Thailand, the PAN Localization Project, which is supported by IDRC's Pan Asia Networking Program, the National University of Computer and Emerging Science, Pakistan and its Centre for Research in Urdu Language Processing, is a multi-agency, multi-country effort to solve language localization issues across countries in Asia Pacific, including Afghanistan (Pashto, Dari), Bangladesh (Bangla), Bhutan (Dzongkha), Cambodia (Khmer), Laos (Lao), Nepal (Nepali) and Sri Lanka (Sinhala, Tamil). It aims to develop character sets, fonts, lexica, spelling and grammar checkers, search and replace utilities, speech recognition systems, text-to-speech synthesis and machine translation for these languages. Different aspects of localization technology that will be addressed include linguistic standardization, computing applications, development platforms, content publishing and access, effective marketing and dissemination and intellectual property right strategies for the output products.
Other regional language translation activities include the English-to-Malay translator being developed by the University Sains Malaysia and the collaboration between NECTEC, Thailand and a private Japanese company on machine language translation. Globally, there are also Internet-based language translation tools such as Yahoo's Babel Fish (http://babelfish.yahoo.com/) and Google's language translation service (http://www.google.com/translate_t) that can be brought into service.
The Asia Pacific region is the home of some really innovative mobile applications that have captured the attention of the world. The Philippines is recognized as one of the heaviest and most innovative users of SMS in the world. Paul Budde, an Australian telecommunications analyst, noted that in 2006, some 250 million SMSs were sent in the Philippines every day accounting for about 10 per cent of the world's SMS. One reason for the popularity of the text service is the fact that it is much more affordable than the voice service. It costs only 1 peso per SMS while a normal voice call can cost up to 20 pesos per minute. One of the most innovative uses of SMS in the Philippines is for small-value financial transactions. It is possible to pay for goods and services, transfer money from person to person and even donate money using SMS. For example, many Filipinos working overseas use SMS to transfer money to loved ones at home. The SMS channel is also being used as an information network by fishermen and flower farmers in outlying areas to get the latest prices in the city so that they can match supply to demand and obtain the best prices for their products. The Philippine government is another heavy user of SMS: it uses the channel to broadcast information to certain targeted groups and to obtain feedback from citizens. Specific channels for people to lodge complaints on air pollution and corruption, for example, and to give feedback to key decision-makers, including the President of the country, have been created.
In Indonesia and Malaysia, an innovative mobile phone application is called 'Solat Times' or 'Prayer Times' to help the Muslim population get their timing for prayers accurately. To use Solat Times, a person sends an SMS to request the Muslim prayer time and he or she will be informed by a return SMS the officially sanctioned prayer times appropriate for his or her particular location. This unique application which makes use of SMS and location information has now been exported to the United Kingdom and South Africa.
The stance taken by a nation's telecommunications regulator has a big impact on the vibrancy of the communications ecosystem of the country. The policies the regulator adopts will have a strong bearing on the types of systems deployed, their affordability, and the take-up rate of services in that country. Some policymakers are more concerned with protecting the incumbent telecom provider, perhaps because the incumbent is a sister organization and is part of the government. Another reason could be that the incumbent is providing jobs to a large number of people and there could be political unrest if competition causes a large number of people to lose their jobs. In such cases, the policymaker might adopt policies that limit competition to the incumbent such as restricting the number of players and imposing terms that disadvantage other players with respect to the incumbent. With globalization, such practices have come under increasing scrutiny by world bodies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). But irrespective of WTO, policymakers should have seen by now enough examples of how nations moving away from a 'pro-incumbent approach' and taking the path of market competition, have met with tremendous success.
The telecommunications regulator is in a position to determine the degree of competition in the market through the number of licenses issued and the license conditions, such as the minimum quality of service for coverage, network up-time, fault response times, and any Universal Service Provision (USP) that may be imposed. All of these conditions affect the quantum of investment needed by the operator and ultimately the profitability of the service. However, given that mobile operators are among the most profitable companies around the world, there seems to be little danger that regulators are being too strict with their licensing requirements today even though mobile operators have been required to come out with very large sums of up-front money to roll out their networks.
For market competition to work there must be mechanisms to limit the market power of the incumbent. These include clear rules for local loop unbundling, establishing and enforcing Reference Interconnect Offers (RIO), transparent rules for radio spectrum allocation, and vigilance against practices that can unfairly lock in consumers such as leveraging on handset subsidies to lock down handsets or impose an unreasonably long contractual period. Other measures include introducing rules to permit number portability when a subscriber moves from one provider to another. In certain markets taxes can be a drag on development. By removing handset taxes and subscriber registration taxes, India and China, for example, have made the service much more affordable, which has given their markets a tremendous boost.
Besides creating an environment for market forces to work, policymakers need to consider issues that affect society in general. Asian societies tend to be more conservative than Western societies, which means that applications such as adult content, chat line services and gambling, which are very popular in the West, cannot be so readily deployed in Asia Pacific. If these applications were permitted, they could give rise to certain social ills and there could be vigorous objections from certain segments of society. Many regulators in Asian countries have chosen to prohibit such services.
The telecommunications regulator should also ensure that subscriber privacy is protected at all times through strict rules against unlawful tapping of phone conversations and disclosure of a subscriber's location information and personal information such as his or her home address, calling habits and circle of contacts.
Some forward-looking policymakers see their role to be larger than simply regulating for market competition: they take it upon themselves to stimulate the development of the telecommunications industry in their country. Some of the actions they have taken include the development of human resources through education and training, nurturing indigenous equipment and service providers, encouraging research and development of communication technologies to reduce dependency on external providers, and facilitating infrastructure-based competition in their country.
The last decade has been a period of rapid technological developments in the wireless and mobile space. Unlike the networks built a decade ago, these technologies are now sufficiently advanced and versatile that they are capable of supporting multiple applications such as voice, data and broadcasting simultaneously on one single network. Less developed nations have the opportunity to use these modern technologies to leapfrog and not be bogged down by legacy equipment installed earlier. Equipment standardization has also helped create a critical mass of users and providers, which in turn drives down the cost of equipment, making communications much more affordable than before.
While the provision of basic voice services was the initial driver, future communication systems should also support access to the Internet to maximize their development potential. In such cases, care must be taken to overcome any language and literacy challenges so that the people who most need the tools can exploit them meaningfully.
Finally, telecommunications policymakers have a very important role to play. They should not expect the rules that served them well in the past decade to be still appropriate for the new era. New technologies call for new rules, in particular forward-looking rules that permit rather than hinder these new technologies and services to flourish for the betterment of their people.
1. Taken literally, the terms 'mobile' and 'wireless' apply to products that are capable of functioning without a tethered connection. This definition would include MP3 music players, digital cameras, as well as communication devices such as mobile phones, Wi-Fi-enabled notebook computers and personal digital assistants (PDAs) with a built-in mobile and/or Wi-Fi connectivity. In this chapter, we shall take mobile and wireless to mean only those products designed for voice and/or data communications and which use radio frequency to connect back to a base station or network.
2. Mobile phones are also known as cellular phones.
3. The maximum transmit powers (EIRP) for WLAN at 2.4 GHz for point to multi-point applications are +30 dBm and +23 dBm for the US and Singapore, respectively.
4. Unfortunately, not all developing countries have opened up the ISM frequency band for general use.
Budde, P. (2006). Philippines—mobile communications—market overview. Retrieved from http://www.budde.com.au/Reports/Contents/Philippines-Mobile-Communications-Market-Overview-1530.html
First Mile Solutions. (2003). Internet village motoman project in Ratanakiri, Cambodia. Retrieved 2 June 2007 from http://www.firstmilesolutions.com/projects.php?p=ratanakiri.
Goswami, D. and Purbo, O. (2006). Wi-Fi 'innovation' in Indonesia: Working around hostile regulatory and market conditions. WDR discussion paper 0611. Available online: http://www.regulateonline.org/content/view/737/31
ITU. (2005a). Global main line telephone and mobile cellular subscriber data. Retrieved 2 June 2007 from http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/icteye/Indicators/Indicators.aspx#
ITU. (2005b). ITU world telecommunication indicators database. 9th Edition.
ITU. (2006). World information society report 2006. Retrieved 2 June 2007 from http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/publications/worldinformationsociety/2006/index.html
Petrazzini, B. (2000). Fixed-mobile interconnection case studies, slide 18/29 (Impact of CPP on cellphone subscribers). ITU Workshop, 20–22 September 2000.
In recent years, the Asia Pacific region has experienced a spate of crises that have brought untold misery to large sections of the populace. Two types of crises have received the most attention in the region in the past few years because of their adverse impact—natural disasters (the Asian Tsunami and earthquake in Kashmir) and public health emergencies (SARS and Avian Flu).2
Although natural disasters cannot be prevented, their adverse impact can be mitigated through effective risk communication. Likewise, effective risk communication can help avert or mitigate the adverse impact of public health crises. This chapter focuses on the use of ICTs in risk communication to help avert or mitigate the adverse impact of natural disasters and public health emergencies in the Asia Pacific region.
Lerbinger (1997) referred to risk as the 'probability that death, injury, illness, property damage… will stem from a hazard' (p. 267). In this chapter, the term crisis is used as a synonym for hazard. Seymour and Moore (2000) defined risk as 'the sensitive task of dealing with a latent or slowly advancing crisis before it breaks in full force' (p. 17). Fearn-Banks (1996) saw risk communication as 'an ongoing program of informing and educating various publics about issues that can affect… [them]' (p. 13).
Simply put, risks often are precursors to crises. A lack of, or inadequate, risk management may lead to a crisis with grave consequences. It is wiser to avoid a crisis, which requires that we pay attention to risk management. Effective risk communication underpins robust risk management. In essence, effective risk communication is often the best way to avert a crisis.
The importance of risk communication has received international recognition at the highest levels. Coordinating risk communication was one of three 'key policy areas for immediate attention' identified by the international meeting of health ministers held in Ottawa in October 2005 (Ottawa 2005). The ministers' communiqué was reinforced a couple of months later at the East Asia Summit when the Heads of State of ASEAN, Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand included in their declaration a statement (East Asia Summit 2005) calling for '[E]nhancing capacity building in coping with pandemic influenza, including establishing information sharing protocols among countries and multilateral organizations to ensure effective, timely and meaningful communication before or during a pandemic influenza outbreak.' The World Health Organization (WHO) recently published its third complementary strategy for Avian Flu aimed at 'rapidly detecting, and potentially stopping—or containing—an emerging pandemic virus near the start of the pandemic' (WHO 2006a).
Different types of media have been used for communicating risks to small and large audiences. However, there is a paucity of published literature on the use of new media for risk communication. In this chapter, we discuss the use of ICTs for effective risk communication vis-à-vis natural disasters and public health emergencies. We discuss risk communication vis-à-vis long-term planning before a crisis strikes, shorter term planning much closer to a predicted crisis, and during and in the immediate aftermath of a crisis. We then conclude by offering some recommendations on how ICTs can be better harnessed for more effective risk communication in the Asia Pacific region.
Long-term planning is crucial to effective management of public health and natural disaster mitigation efforts. In the preparedness phase, emergency managers develop plans of action to be carried out when the disaster strikes. Common preparedness measures include proper maintenance and training of emergency services, development and exercise of emergency population warning methods combined with emergency shelters and evacuation plans, stockpiling of supplies and equipment, and development and practice of multi-agency coordination. Traditional media such as television and radio, as well as modern ICTs like Internet and e-mail, can be used in these disaster preparedness activities.
Mathew (2005) highlighted the strategic role of ICT in managing disasters and public health emergencies, suggesting that effective health response to disasters will depend on three important prongs of action: (a) long-term disaster preparedness, (b) emergency relief and (c) management of disasters. He proposed that work in these three critical areas may be facilitated by communication and space technologies, especially the Internet and remote sensing satellites. Matthew presented a model that manages disasters through the Health and Disaster Information Network that operates in coordination with Internet community centres. 'The Model for Public Health Management of Disasters for South Asia' deploys ICT in a strategic manner to meet the unique and urgent requirements of personnel involved in disaster management. The infrastructure proposed is intended to serve governments, non-governmental organizations and institutions working in the areas of disaster and emergency medicine. The creation of such an infrastructure is intended to provide connectivity to support the rapid transfer of data, information and knowledge from senior government officials to grassroots organizations, as well as across national borders to other concerned organizations in the South Asian countries.
Mathew (2005) also presented a case study of the statewide ICT network for disaster management established by the Government of Maharashtra in April 2000, as part of the Maharashtra Emergency Earthquake Rehabilitation Programme following the Latur earthquake that left more than 10,000 people dead and 200,000 homes destroyed. The main role of the network is to facilitate and provide a rapid flow of information, online connectivity, response planning, and control and monitoring of the situation in disaster areas. The network comprises an emergency operations centre, a central control room, an alternative central control room, control rooms at each of the six divisional headquarters of the state and district control rooms at each of the 32 districts. The network is connected via VSAT telecommunication links. It is designed to provide data, voice and video teleconferencing facilities. All sub-districts in the state are linked through a VHF wireless network with nodes located at the district control rooms. The case shows that ICT has an important role in disaster preparedness, response, and coordination and control.
SOPAC: Another example of ICT use in long-term risk management is the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission (SOPAC) project which seeks to ensure vulnerability reduction in the Pacific Island Countries through the development of an integrated planning and management system. A key component of the project is GeoCMS, a Content Management System which facilitates the collection and sharing of geographical data among the stakeholders in the project. This was developed using two existing Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) based applications, MapServer and Tikiwiki. This system has made it possible for the Pacific Island states to publish their geographical data on the Internet and to receive contributions from all over the world. Countries involved in this project include Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu (Nah 2005).
AlertNet: Reuter's AlertNet is another example of the use of ICTs for long-term disaster preparedness. It was started in 1997 by the Reuters Foundation, an educational and humanitarian trust, as a humanitarian news network based around a popular website. It aims to keep relief professionals and the wider public up-to-date on humanitarian crises around the globe. Emergencies are categorized into four types: health-related, sudden onset, food-related and conflict. Some emergencies do not fit neatly into these categories, frequently overlapping in a complex manner that makes it difficult to separate cause and effect. AlertNet's presentation of emergency material aims to make clear these areas of overlap. Reuters is the main, though not the sole, source of information for AlertNet. It operates with a surprisingly limited full-time staff (Gidley 2005).
AlertNet tracks all emergencies for which it is possible to find reliable information, including those that receive only sporadic coverage elsewhere in the media, or the so-called 'forgotten' or 'hidden' emergencies. For example, the north-eastern Indian state of Assam has had massive floods several times, with thousands of people displaced and made homeless, but good warning and evacuation procedures have kept the death toll low. AlertNet highlights these types of disasters and attracts upwards of three million users a year. It has a network of 400 contributing humanitarian organizations and its weekly e-mail digest is received by more than 17,000 readers (AlertNet 2006).
ASEAN-Disease-Surveillance.Net: The ASEANSurveillance Net (ADSNet) is an Internet-based network established to improve ASEAN's long-term capability in detecting and responding to infectious disease outbreaks. It is sponsored by the Indonesian Ministry of Health and the ASEAN Secretariat and operated by the ASEAN Disease Surveillance Secretariat. The US Naval Medical Research Unit No. 2 (US NAMRU-2) and the South East Asia Foundation for Outbreak Regional Cooperation jointly support ADSNet. The network was established on the basis of a framework approved at the Regional Action Conference for Surveillance and Response: Infectious Disease Outbreaks in Southeast Asia held in Bali, Indonesia in September 2000. Consensus was reached at the conference, which was attended by 150 participants with Ministerial representation from 17 countries, to build systems to facilitate the exchange of outbreak information within Southeast Asia and the WHO-SEARO Grouping.
ADSNet was established to achieve several objectives: rapid dissemination of outbreak information within the region, establishment of a mechanism for sharing important information on epidemic disease transmission without compromising national sensitivity and confidentiality concerns, and provision of directory assistance in identifying regional expertise, including laboratory diagnostic capabilities that can support outbreak investigative activities. It also seeks to provide directory assistance in identifying outbreak causation, as well as training and educational opportunities within the region. ADSNet aims to accomplish its goals by undertaking the following activities which can be classified as examples of risk aversion and risk communication:
• Conducting outbreak response training workshops
• Developing laboratory diagnostic capabilities in identifying causative outbreak etiologies
• Facilitating outbreak investigations or interventions
• Establishing early warning outbreak recognition systems
ADSNet is a part of the Early Warning Outbreak Recognition System (EWORS) that currently maintains 18 surveillance sites in Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Nepal and South Korea are expected to join EWORS in the near future. Local clinics in the participating countries make use of simple EWORS technology to upload syndromic data on disease outbreaks to hubs located at hospital computers. Algorithms running on these hub computers assess whether the uploaded data indicate any disease outbreaks. The system alerts local public health personnel if it determines that an outbreak has occurred. EWORS applications are designed to run on desktop computers, laptops and PDAs. The network's website is hosted in Singapore and jointly maintained by the Singapore Ministry of Environment and NAMRU-2. Plans are underway to link ADSNet with the Pacific Disease Surveillance Network (PACNET), so as to effectively cover 16 time zones, and eventually to integrate it into WHO's global network of networks.
In epidemic intelligence and systematic case detection, WHO Global Alert gathers information from formal sources as well as rumours of suspected outbreaks in order to get a clear picture of the epidemic threat to global health. With the advent of modern communication technologies, many initial outbreak reports now originate from informal sources in the form of electronic media and electronic discussion groups. More than 60 per cent of the initial outbreak reports come from unofficial informal sources, including sources other than the electronic media, which require verification. The information thus gathered is categorized and disseminated to public health professionals. Regular updates are issued to a network of electronically-interconnected WHO member countries (192), disease experts, institutions, agencies and laboratories through an Outbreak Verification List. WHO also reports verified outbreaks on its website, Disease Outbreak News.
Some private schools in Singapore are teaming up with Apple Macintosh Asia to develop ways of delivering education over the Internet to provide continuity of education during a pandemic. A technology is being tested by which both video and audio content as well as Powerpoint presentations can be broadcast through the Internet using Apple's iTunes.
Various capacity building efforts have been implemented at both international and national levels to help prepare countries to respond to and manage a pandemic incident such as Avian Flu. To support member states in their efforts to build the capacity of health care facilities to manage communicable disease emergencies of different orders of magnitude from a small number of patients to a widespread pandemic, the WHO worked with the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC) to conceptualize the Health Care Facility Emergency Preparedness and Response to Epidemics and Pandemics (HCF-EPREP) Programme. The first phase of this programme culminated in the first training workshop in September 2006 in Bangkok attracting 39 participants from Bhutan, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam with facilitators from WHO, ADPC, Infection Control Plus (Australia) and the University of Texas School of Public Health. Associates from Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nepal, the Philippines, Syria, Thailand and the USA also participated. Most of the participants were directors of health care facilities; senior level specialists in infectious diseases, emergency medicine and infection control; and public health officials from national Ministries of Health and sub-national health authorities. The workshop paid special attention to using ICTs to disseminate information to both the public and health care professionals during the inter-pandemic phase (when the disease is spreading but has not yet become widespread) and the pandemic alert phase.3 Participants were also taught how to use official websites to educate the public about the pandemic.
Strategic Health Operations Centre: In the global arena, the WHO Department of Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response (EPR) is continuously monitoring and tracking evolving infectious disease situations, sharing expertise, sounding the alarm and initiating an appropriate response to protect the population from the effects of a communicable disease emergency. To provide a well-coordinated and systematic response, which is crucial in any public health emergency, the Strategic Health Operations Centre (SHOC) was established. It utilizes the latest ICT to support member states in managing health emergencies.
The SHOC was used effectively during the SARS epidemic when the WHO responded rapidly and effectively in collaboration with many key partners. The response was widely praised by the public health and infectious disease research community, especially the role of ICT in early detection and in fostering global collaboration and information exchange during the SARS epidemic. On 17 March 2003, the WHO called upon 11 laboratories in nine countries to join a collaborative multi-centre research project on SARS diagnosis. The network took advantage of e-mail and a secure WHO website to share outcomes of investigations of clinical samples, electron-microscope pictures of viruses, sequences of genetic material for virus identification and characterization, and post mortem tissues from SARS cases. Individual departments of affected hospitals also used websites and e-mail to rapidly disseminate clinical findings to health professionals. However, a review of the system revealed that it was not used to its full potential. This assessment led to the formation of the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN)4 by Health Canada and the revised International Health Regulation or IHR (2005)5 that requires governments to report public health threats—in particular, public health emergencies of international concern (PHEIC) or disease outbreaks and natural disasters that could have an international dimension.
Animal Health Management and Biosecurity: Since August 2004, Australia has been working with ASEAN on a project aimed at Strengthening Animal Health Management and Biosecurity in ASEAN (SAHMBA). Funded through the ASEAN Australia Development Cooperation Program (AADCP), the project seeks to enhance the capability of ASEAN member countries to manage risks to the biosecurity of livestock industries particularly those related to trade and impacting on the poor. The project focuses on strengthening capabilities in risk analysis, disease surveillance and animal health information management at the ASEAN regional level. It has four components. Component 1 aims to develop a consistent approach to risk analysis based on international best practices. Component 2 seeks to develop a consistent approach to wide-area disease surveys including the collection and analysis of information to substantiate reduction of disease in livestock populations. Component 3 expects to facilitate the development of a regional animal health information database that will (a) promote the trade of animals and animal products throughout the region by clearly establishing a country's disease status, (b) facilitate the sharing of animal health information within the region and (c) streamline production of disease reports required to meet international obligations such as those of the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE). Finally, Component 4 responds to project management and monitoring requirements for successfully implementing the technical components and keeping stakeholders advised of the project's progress and performance (AADCP 2005).
In public health, measures to control and prevent disease often rely upon timely and accurate information transfer. Thus, the Internet is increasingly becoming the preferred platform for agencies designing systems to protect public health. The WHO's Communicable Disease Cluster is spearheading a global partnership called the Global Atlas of Infectious Diseases (WHO 2006b), a Web-based system that brings together an interactive information system, surveillance data, reports and documents on the major diseases affecting developing countries, including malaria, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, as well as diseases that are close to being eradicated, such as guinea worm, leprosy and lymphatic filariasis. The global atlas also covers epidemic-prone and emerging infections like meningitis, cholera and yellow fever. It also provides information on essential support services such as the network of collaborating centres and the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network.
We next focus on the use of ICTs for shorter term risk communication—early warnings in the face of an impending disaster. In the last few decades, national level early warning systems have been used with varying degrees of efficacy during many natural disasters that have affected the Asia Pacific region. The powerful tropical cyclone that hit the Chittagong district of Bangladesh in 1991 is an example. Though not as devastating as the infamous 1970 cyclone that killed an estimated 300,000 in that country, the cyclone of 1991 recorded a death toll of 140,000 and left more than 10 million homeless. Although early warnings about the impending storm had been issued to some extent, the number of casualties was high because of a lack of adequate cyclone shelter facilities (ADRC 2005). The Kobe earthquake of January 1995 (7.2 on the Richter Scale) caused 5,000 casualties and displaced over 300,000. The damage caused to roads, houses, factories and infrastructure was estimated at about USD 120 billion (Geo Resources 2002). Apparently, there had been little or no warning, causing many Japanese citizens to lose faith in the technology behind forecasting. Forecasting crises is a key ingredient of risk communication.
Undoubtedly, it was the fateful Asia Tsunami in 2004 that caused a spurt in interest in early warning systems for natural disasters. The death toll was as high as 200,000 while a disaster of comparable magnitude the following year—Hurricane Katrina—recorded less than 2,000 casualties. The high death rate in the Tsunami was attributed to the absence of timely and effective warning systems. At the 2005 World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, Japan, it was found that most national early warning systems were rather simple alert systems with limited capacities to collect, analyze and distribute information. This prompted UNESCO to coordinate the activities to launch an early warning system for the Indian Ocean (UN/ISDR 2005). The Ministerial Meeting on Regional Cooperation on Tsunami Early Warning Arrangements held in January 2005 in Phuket, recognized the ADPC's readiness to serve as a regional centre or focal point for a multi-nodal Tsunami early warning arrangement in the region (ADPC 2006).
The Indian Ocean Tsunami warning system coordinated by UNESCO is currently being implemented. The Intergovernmental Coordination Group for the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System (ICG/IOTWS) serves as the regional body to plan and coordinate its design and implementation. For the interim period, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre (PTWC) and Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) are expected to provide Tsunami warnings to Asian nations. Australia, Bangladesh, Timor Leste, India, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Pakistan, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Thailand are among the 26 countries that have established official Tsunami Warning Focal Points (TWFP) to receive interim advisory information based on seismological and sea-level information from the operational centres serving the Pacific in Hawaii and Tokyo (UNESCO 2006).
Meanwhile, the regional Tsunami and multi-hazard observation and monitoring network for Southeast Asia is also being implemented by ADPC as a joint venture with the national governments of Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, China, the Philippines, Singapore, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. This system will be implemented in two phases. The first phase, covering the most vulnerable areas of Southeast Asia, involves the installation of five sea-level gauges and five seismic stations across Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. Phase 2 will see the proliferation of these technical components, in addition to several deep-sea buoys, across the region in order to provide a comprehensive network (ADPC 2005).
An earthquake near Indonesia in July 2006 tested the interim measure of early warning systems. Unfortunately the technology failed on that occasion too. More than 5,000 casualties were reported when two-metre high waves triggered by an undersea earthquake hit the island of Java. The 20 minutes scientists had to analyze data from 30 seismological stations and send out a warning were not sufficient. Furthermore, even if they were in a position to issue a warning, the scientists did not have the media needed to disseminate it to the isolated communities in the islands (BBC 2006).
The communication subsystem is an essential part of any early warning programme. In its most basic form, an early warning system is a communication channel between those who monitor the prospective disaster and the community for whom the messages collected from monitoring are intended. The disaster warning message should be reliable, authoritative, timely and clear to the target communities especially about what is expected of them. The anticipated response of a community differs according to the nature of the possible disaster. Incorrect responses can create additional problems.
In the Asia Pacific context, crossing the 'last mile' in the communication chain is a major challenge because ICT penetration in most countries in the region is still far below satisfactory levels. For example, the teledensities of Cambodia, Laos and Bangladesh are 38, 32 and 15 per 1,000 of the population (UNDP 2005). In rural areas, many households are not connected to any medium. Multimedia communication is sometimes needed for Early Warning Systems to be effective in this situation.
Of the available media channels, radio and television are most likely to be used for warning about impending disasters. However, television penetration is not high in many Asian societies, especially in rural areas. Radio is the preferred medium for the dissemination of disaster warnings. Bangladesh, for example, relies heavily on radio to issue warnings about impending disasters, effectively using it in several flood and cyclone related incidents since the early 1970s (UNEP 2001). However, neither radio nor television is interactive and they are of limited use if a warning is to be disseminated late at night when most stations in the region are not in operation.
Telephones, both fixed and mobile, overcome lack of interactivity and limited use at night, but they have their own limitations. One obvious disadvantage is potential congestion in the period immediately prior to a crisis. This limitation is applicable for both voice and SMS messages. To overcome this, mobile phone manufacturers have introduced a feature called 'cellular broadcasting' which helps disseminate a warning message to a selected group in a short period of time using a different band to avoid congestion. There are no additional costs as this feature is already available in most network infrastructures and phones. This combined geo-scalability and geo-specificity of mobile phones helps disaster managers to avoid panic and traffic jamming (MobileIN.com 2005).
There are many examples of how simple phone warnings helped save many lives in South Asian countries during the Tsunami in 2004. Perhaps the most famous example occurred in the small coastal village of Nallavadu in Pondicherry (India) where a timely telephone call about the impending Tsunami is said to have saved the village's 3,600 inhabitants as well as the people of three neighbouring villages. Nallavadu was part of the very successful M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation's Information Village Research Project. A former project volunteer who was working in Singapore heard the Tsunami alert issued there and immediately phoned the research centre in Nallavadu and asked that its early warning alert system be used to warn the villagers. His quick thinking and the swift and coordinated action in Nallavadu led to the evacuation of the four villages before the Tsunami hit the coast (Subramanian 2005).
First conceptualized in 1992, the Information Village Research Project under the aegis of the M.S. Swaminathan Foundation, is now being implemented in seven villages in Pondicherry. The objective is to test whether information technology can become an ally in poverty alleviation and whether it can be used as a tool in empowering the rural poor. Seven Village Knowledge Centres have been set up, each with a computer, a modem and a wireless system, backed by solar power since there is irregular power supply. The services provided by these centres include gathering and transmission of information such as commodity prices, weather, government announcements and the daily news. The centres also help in the generation of data (for example, surveys, library references, discussions, bulletins) and assist in the creation and maintenance of locality-specific databases on local hospitals/doctors, training programmes, high school/college course guidance, government welfare programmes/entitlements and soil agronomy/weather/cropping patterns (M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation 2006).
Amateur radio and community radio are two channels that can be used effectively for disaster management purposes. However, there is little evidence so far that these media have been used effectively except in rare instances. The Indian NGO, National Institute of Amateur Radio (NIAR) that promotes amateur radio or ham radio in the country as a scientific and socially useful activity used amateur radio for communicating with its team in Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman Islands, in the aftermath of the Asian Tsunami. Though this channel had not been used prior to the disaster, it served as a key communication
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Bridging the 'last mile' in warning about natural disasters When the Tsunami struck the costal areas and took nearly 40,000 lives, or one in every 500 Sri Lankans, the obvious question was why it was not forewarned. Arthur C. Clarke, author and long-time resident of Sri Lanka, remarked: 'The Asian Tsunami's death toll could have been drastically reduced if the warning was disseminated quickly and effectively to millions of coastal dwellers on the Indian Ocean rim. It is appalling that our sophisticated global communications systems simply failed us that fateful day' (IDRC 2006). Indeed there had been a warning. Scientists at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre (PTWC) in Hawaii who had detected the extraordinary seismic activity issued a local Tsunami warning one hour after the undersea quake. It was received in Sri Lanka but unfortunately not effectively communicated to the communities. History repeated itself on 17 July 2006 when a Tsunami caught Java island by surprise, in spite of PTWC disseminating a warning 17 minutes after the 7.7 magnitude undersea earthquake. A timely public warning could have saved many of the nearly 600 people who died. The 'weakest link' on both these occasions was the so called 'last mile'. The warning did not cross the last mile. And even if it had done so, there is no guarantee that the communities would have taken the correct action because they had not been given any training on how they should behave during such events. The Last Mile Hazard Information Dissemination Project is an attempt to address this critical issue. It is multi-stakeholder initiative to complement other actions being taken at national and regional levels. It involves four Sri Lanka-based entities that value the role of ICTs and community mobilization in disaster preparedness: Sarvodaya, an NGO with a presence in all Sri Lankan villages; LIRNEasia, a regional ICT research and capacity building organization; TVE Asia Pacific, a media organization specializing in communicating development; and Dialog Telekom, a leading telecommunications service provider. Financial support comes from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada. The action research project aims to study which ICTs and community mobilization methods will work most effectively in disseminating information on hazards faced by Sri Lanka's coastal communities. The research is not confined to Tsunamis alone; coastal erosion, cyclones, drought and floods are among the other hazards covered (LIRNEasia 2006). Focusing on the crucial 'last mile' dissemination, the project will test different ICTs in delivering timely warnings to the local people immediately at risk and build community capacity to respond to such warnings rapidly and systematically. In the first phase, the project involves 32 villages from the eastern, western, northern and southern coastal areas of Sri Lanka. The project will evaluate several factors that contribute to the design of an effective last mile hazard information dissemination system, such as the reliability and effectiveness of various ICTs as warning technologies, how community training influences effective warning responses, how the level of organizational development of a village contributes to an effective warning response, and gender-specific response to hazard mitigating action. Among the first and most important activities was training 30 youth leaders attached to Sarvodaya. The training, delivered by TVE Asia Pacific, covered such topics as understanding vulnerability and hazards, community-based hazard identification using Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) techniques, communicating risks and hazards, understanding and responding to early warnings and community response planning (TVE AP 2006). Different combinations of ICTs and community mobilization will be tested in the participating villages. These include fixed telephones, Sinhala/Tamil SMS (text messaging) with alarm for Java-compatible mobile phones, Very Small Aperture Terminals (VSATs), Disaster Warning Response and Recovery (DWRR) units based on addressable satellite radio developed by the WorldSpace Corporation under the WHO, and an Early Warning Network Remote Alarm Device developed by Dialog Telekom with the assistance of the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. While some ICTs have been in public use for years or decades, others are recent innovations whose utility in disaster warning communication is being tested for the first time through this initiative. The plan is to identify the optimum combinations of training, community mobilization, and technology tools that could help Sri Lankan communities to receive hazard warnings and disseminate them locally. Sources: IDRC. (2006). Bridging the 'Last Mile': Building grassroots capacity for disaster warning and preparedness in Sri Lanka. Retrieved 10 November 2006 from http://www.idrc.ca/uploads/user-S/11465104711General_intro.pdf LIRNEasia. (2006). Evaluating last-mile hazard information dissemination: A research proposal project document. Retrieved 10 November 2006 from http://www.lirneasia.net/wp-content/uploads/2006/05/HazInfo%20Proposal.pdf#search=%22Evaluating%20Last-Mile%20Hazard%20Information%20Dissemination%20%22 TVE Asia Pacific. (2006). Taking hazard warnings to the grassroots: New project to mix technologies and training. Retrieved 10 November 2006 from http://www.tveap.org/news/0605tra.htm |
channel between the mainland and the islands in managing aid for the displaced (i4d 2005).
Noting the potential impact that advances in ICT could have on health care and health-related activities, Resolution WHA58.28 urges WHO Member States to plan for appropriate eHealth services in their countries. eHealth activities at the global level fall into two broad categories:
1. access to reliable, high quality health information for professionals and for the general public; and
2. use of ICTs to strengthen various aspects of country health systems, such as eLearning for human resources development and support for delivery of care services.
The WHO launched the Health Inter Network Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) in 2002, in partnership with leading biomedical publishers, academic institutions and organizations of the United Nations system to provide free or very low-cost online access to 2,900 major journals in biomedical and related social sciences to local, non-profit institutions in developing countries. It is one of the world's largest collections of biomedical and health literature. At present, 1,400 institutions in 104 countries are participating in the network. In 2004, users downloaded over 1.7 million articles.
To cater to the needs of the general public, the WHO began the Health Academy in December 2003. This innovative approach to improving public health provides the general public with health knowledge through eLearning packages designed to help people make the right decisions for preventing disease and leading healthier lives. The initiative draws on the WHO's information resources and expertise in health and its access to health information worldwide.
Whereas risks are often precursors to crises and risk communication is important in averting or mitigating the effects of crises, different types of risks arise even after a crisis strikes especially in the aftermath a natural disaster. The most difficult period of a disaster is the immediate aftermath, when prompt and swift action is essential. Disasters cause significant numbers of deaths and injuries and displace even larger numbers of survivors. There are physical as well as emotional injuries such as witnessing the loss of loved ones. Essential items such as food and other supplies need to be delivered, temporary shelters need to be put up and medical attention needs to be provided. All these need to be simultaneously addressed and ICTs can play a critical role in connecting the diverse groups needed to manage effective resource collection and distribution during these critical situations.
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Think positive: The Asian face of HIV/AIDS ICTs are being used to create HIV/AIDS awareness in many Asia Pacific countries. Recently, the UNDP Regional HIV and Development Programme for Asia, UNDP Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (UNDP-APDIP), UNAIDS-Asia Pacific Leadership Forum, UNICEF, Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU), MTV International and the Kaiser Family Foundation joined hands for one such initiative—the production of a series of 'made for television' programmes to raise awareness of the global HIV/AIDS pandemic. Think Positive: The Asian Face of HIV/AIDS, as the programme is called, focuses on the impact of HIV/AIDS on the contributing producer's home country, with emphasis on the human or social dimension. Completed productions are available for exchange between the participating broadcasters and are made available rights-free to all ABU member broadcasters. Participating television producers from Bangladesh Television; China Central Television; PT Surya Citra Televisi, Indonesia; PT Indosiar Visual Mandiri Tbk, Indonesia; Sistem Televisyen Malaysia Berhad (TV3); Nepal Television; Media Niugini, Papua New Guinea; ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corporation, the Philippines; MediaCorp News, Singapore; National Broadcasting Services of Thailand (Channel 11); and Vietnam Television, each created segments for use by all participating broadcasters as individual short-form programmes. 'This was a first co-production initiative arranged by the ABU for its member broadcasters and in association with the Global Media AIDS Initiative', said Craig Hobbs of the ABU. 'It has resulted in strong interest and participation by our broadcasters, who moved very quickly to complete this project in time for World AIDS Day, and is one that is already stimulating many additional broadcast activities relating to the increasing awareness and changing behaviour for fewer HIV infections.' MTV International supported the co-production project with the contribution of an executive producer who provided technical and creative direction to the participating producers while drawing on the achievement of MTV's long-running Staying Alive campaign. The Kaiser Family Foundation, UNDP, UNAIDS and UNICEF lent substantive expertise based on their work in HIV/AIDS communication, while the ABU played a coordinating role in the production of the content by soliciting applications from its member broadcasters. Source: Asia Pacific Development Information Programme. (2006). Launch of HIV/AIDS TV programme—'Think Positive: The Asian Face of HIV/AIDS'. Retrieved from http://www.apdip.net/news/hivaidslaunch on 10 November 2006. |
In spite of its relatively low penetration in some societies, the Internet is an ideal tool for risk communication in the post-disaster period for many reasons: the interactivity of the medium, its ability to reach a large group of people within a short period of time, its multimedia character (making it possible to present information in different formats—text, image, audio, video) and its universality.
Perhaps one of the first instances where the Internet was fully utilized for post-disaster response, was the 1999 earthquake that devastated western Turkey. The earthquake caused extensive damage to the telecommunication infrastructure, rendering fixed-line telephones useless. Although some of the mobile phone networks were still working, they were operating with reduced bandwidth. Many of the microwave repeaters mounted on apartment buildings had been damaged. The Internet was the only medium connecting the affected areas to the outside world. The Internet was used primarily for collecting aid and finding information about missing people in order to link them with families and relatives. Many organizations formed 'Message Lines', which acted as a database of people found, their condition, or the degree of damage to the region in which relatives lived (Zincir-Heywood and Heywood 2000). In addition, NGOs used discussion lists to coordinate donations so that donors could identify where help was needed the most as well as the nature of help needed.
Kalemoglu et al. (2005) studied the consequence of the absence of an effective communication and information system in the aftermath of the Turkey earthquake. They found that hospitals were overwhelmed during the critical six hours immediately after the earthquake, due to the exceptionally large number of injured requiring medical care and 'failure of communication with the disaster area'. The communication problem was eventually solved through the deployment of 'wireless and military communication systems'. Kalemoglu et al. (2005) also identified lack of forward planning and preparedness as a contributing factor to the failure of emergency services immediately after the earthquake. They concluded that lessons learned from the earthquake suggest that emergency response teams should be established as part of a larger contingency plan. These teams should then make advance preparations 'that include general precautions, work schedule, hospital care, equipment, transport, registration [of patients admitted to hospitals for treatment], communication and security'.
The ICT deployed need not be sophisticated to make a difference in managing an emergency, according to Ochi et al. (1999) who studied the aftermath of the Cambodian flood of 1997. E-mail, a basic ICT service, helped the WHO Cambodian field office to respond to a medical emergency that occurred after extensive flooding in Cambodia in August 1997. Unusually large numbers of people were being bitten by venomous snakes that had been washed into populated areas by the rising floodwaters. The Cambodian health authorities made an urgent request to the national field office of the WHO for 100 doses of polyvalent type snake antiserum. The WHO had only a few types of monovalent antiserum on stock; in addition, the WHO field office lacked essential taxonomic information about the snakes in Cambodia which the organizations that could provide the required antiserum needed. The coordinator at the WHO field office subsequently sent an e-mail to a member of the Global Health Disaster Network (GHDNet) to seek help in obtaining the required taxonomic information. The GHDNet member in turn forwarded the email to three mailing lists at the network. Members of the mailing lists recommended that the WHO contact several specialists and institutes in the region, including the Japan Snake Institute and the Serum Institute of India. This information-sharing led to the speedy procurement of the required snake antiserum that was then airlifted to Cambodia, saving hundreds of lives.
In the immediate aftermath of a disaster, the traditional communication system is often overloaded, if not destroyed. This makes coordination of emergency response difficult especially in remote areas. To address the need for communication support in times of disaster especially in the Asia Pacific Region, Télécoms Sans Frontières (TSF), which specializes in emergency telecommunications, has established an Asian base at the ADPC. As soon as a catastrophe or conflict occurs, joint teams from ADPC and TSF are able to arrive anywhere in the world in less than 48 hours and install within minutes an operational telecommunications centre to provide communication support to enable NGOs, UN agencies and the affected population to connect with the outside world.
State-of-the-art satellite mobile telecommunication equipment, the miniaturization of components and the development of satellite networks make possible the rapid assembly of the telecommunication centre whatever the type of terrain. The group uses a network of four geostationary satellites whose 'spot beams' cover 98 per cent of the Earth's land surface. TSF has a number of Mini-M devices (Capsat Phone TT-3060A) which, in addition to digital phone facilities at 4,800 bps, allow fax, data transfer and e-mail at 2,400 bps. The main advantage of these devices is that they are small and light. The emergency telecommunications centres enable live reports, pictures and videos to be transmitted via broadband Internet connections.
Setting up a fixed centre with a permanent satellite Internet connection can prove to be a particularly effective tool for the organization of humanitarian work. Recently, TSF formalized an agreement with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) to provide telecommunications support for the UN Disaster Assessment and Coordination (UNDAC) teams. The team worked with the UNDAC team in operating the Disaster Operations Centre coordinating both local and international response during the landslide in the province of Leyte in the Philippines in February 2006. The team also operated in Thailand, Indonesia and Sri Lanka in response to the Asian Tsunami of 2004.
During the SARS outbreak in 2003, Singapore relied on ICTs as monitoring devices to enforce the quarantine law. For example, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) was used to trace individuals who may have come into contact with SARS victims. Hospital workers, visitors and other patients with the potential of coming into contact with SARS victims were given a card containing an RFID transponder that tracked their movements between different zones in the hospital, making it easy to detect who may have come into contact with a patient later confirmed to have contacted the disease, which had different incubation periods extending to a maximum of 10 days. The government also passed a law permitting the installation of surveillance equipment such as electronic picture (ePIC) cameras in the homes of quarantined individuals (the ePIC cameras were monitored by a private company contracted for the purpose). In addition, video facilities were often the only tools available to families to communicate with family members who were gravely ill with SARS in the hospital.
Blogging, although still a novelty in most areas of the Asia Pacific region, helped in many ways in the critical period following recent disasters. Sarvodaya, Sri Lanka's largest and most broadly embedded people's organization with a network of 15,000 villages, used blogs successfully in the immediate aftermath of the Asian Tsunami for fund-raising purposes. Two young volunteers started a blog on behalf of Sarvodaya that was later referred to by portals such as Google, Nortel and Apple, which helped to raise USD 1 million in a few weeks from donors around the world. The NGO used this money to provide much needed relief to the victims long before government agencies could react.
Hundreds of blogs emerged in the Asia Pacific region in the first few days following the Tsunami. These were used for information-sharing, locating missing persons, fund-raising and making donations to the needy. Some of these blogs are: http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com (regional), http://tsunamipenang.blogspot.com (focusing on Malaysia and Thailand), http://indonesiahelp.blogspot.com (Indonesia), http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4129521.stm (a journalists' blog hosted by the BBC), http://sltsunami.blogspot.com (Sri Lanka), http://consciouscitizens.blogspot.com (post-tsunami rehabilitation), http://phukettsunami.blogspot.com (Thailand), http://tsunamimissing.blogspot.com (regional) and http://tsunamihelpindia.blogspot.com (India). Many of these sites have remained active, helping in subsequent disasters. There were also many discussions about post-disaster help among e-groups, such as Bytes-for-all.
Indonesia effectively used radio to help reduce the trauma of the Tsunami victims. A weekly one-hour programme assisted by UNDP was launched after the Tsunami struck for the 13,000 internally displaced victims in Meulaboh, Aceh. The radio programme covered topics derived from interactions with the community, such as how to control emotions, family relations, worries about employment and income, housing conditions and establishing a community support network. A counsellor and a psychologist provided advice on how to cope with various forms of stress (UNDP 2006).
Wireless LAN technology is another ICT tool that has proven useful in post disaster periods. Ericsson implemented a WLAN solution in Pakistan during the recovery stage of the Kashmiri earthquake at the request of UNOCHA. The Ericsson response team was hosted in the Swedish Rescue Services Agency's camp in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan. As the affected population was scattered in remote and inaccessible locations, the major concern was to ensure that help reached those in need. Relief personnel were connected to an intranet through which information transfer, both within and across the relief organizations' own networks, could take place. The camp was connected via a VSAT connection to the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) in New York, where a connection to the Internet was provided. The benefit of this system is that all relief workers have access to a common network and can share the same local information (Ericsson 2006).
The importance of risk communication in averting many public health crises and natural disasters cannot be overstated. Yet risk communication has received attention only in recent years. Moreover, ICTs have not been harnessed to their full potential to mitigate risks from natural disasters and public health emergencies. For example, a review of risk communication case studies in the Asia Pacific region on issues such as earthquakes, flood, fire threats and disaster mitigation revealed that ICTs were rarely, if ever, used or even considered as a tool.
In order to be effective, risk communication, of which ICT should be an integral component, should be a continuous process that is integrated into the overall developmental scheme of every country. Objectives such as integrating the principles of sustainable development into country policies, building a healthy society and preventing loss of environmental resources cannot be achieved without placing due emphasis on effective risk communication strategies. Current development practices do not necessarily reduce the vulnerability of communities to disasters. Indeed, ill-advised and misdirected development practices may actually increase a society's vulnerability to the risks of disasters. A considerable challenge remains in raising awareness and capacity building so that communities can confidently meet any crisis situation.
We also recommend that national governments promote risk communication in local languages, given that English is spoken by a mere fraction of the close to three billion people who live in the Asia Pacific region. Localization of information about risks will make such content more useful to the population.
Political commitment by governmental and organizational policymakers and community leaders, based on an understanding of risks and disaster reduction concepts as well as the role of ICTs, is fundamental to giving risk communication its rightful place in disaster management. Some national governments fail to implement ICT-friendly policies despite the many benefits of ICTs, particularly in developing countries with poor infrastructures as noted by some cases in this chapter. ICTs can play a significant role in communication of risks arising from natural disasters and public health emergencies. They are not just commercial tools whose sole purpose is to increase corporate profits in the 'emerging economies' of Asia Pacific. ICTs can also contribute to social development.
Telecommunications regulators have a special role in promoting the media that are used in disaster warning systems. Whereas under normal circumstances, mass media such as television, radio, telephones and the Internet may compete with each other as commercial entities, regulation can encourage them to work in harmony during disaster situations for the public good. Thus, making disaster management a part of telecommunication regulation ought to be considered.
Ongoing ICT4D programmes should be made more comprehensive through the inclusion of risk communication. After all, developmental progress is severely curtailed when crises befall a community. Risk communication should be included as one of the dimensions of the activities of telecentres which are found in many rural Asian societies today. The use of an established channel such as telecentres in risk communication may be more economical and more reliable than using a system specially meant for the purpose. Similarly, risk communication can also be made a part of community radio programmes.
Finally, it is essential to give priority to regional efforts since natural disasters and health risks such as pandemics often cross national boundaries. It is prudent for national governments to invest in regional efforts while also focusing on national priorities. Regional and international organizations serve as critical allies in this task by sharing knowledge and creating a common platform that national governments can harness for the benefit of the populace.
1. The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of Mr Chin Saik Yoon to this chapter.
2. There are many types of crises: natural disasters ('acts of God'), malevolence (product tampering, kidnapping, rumors), technical breakdowns (software failures, industrial accidents, product recalls), human breakdowns (industrial accidents due to human error), activist challenges (boycotts, strikes, lawsuits), accidents (oil spills, radioactive contamination), pandemics (such as AIDS) and terrorism, which is relatively more recent in origin.
3. The WHO has developed different alert phases for pandemics. Each phase provides the status of the pandemic from a circulating strain, possible infection to humans and the full blown epidemic event.
4. The Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) developed by Health Canada in collaboration with the WHO is a secure Internet-based multilingual early-warning tool that continuously searches global media sources such as news wires and websites to identify information about disease outbreaks and other events of potential international public health concern.
5. The broadened purpose and scope of the IHR (2005) are to 'prevent, protect against, control and provide a public health response to the international spread of disease and which avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade.'
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The world Internet population crossed one billion users in 2005 (Computer Industry Almanac 2006). However, Asia Pacific continues to lag behind North America and Europe in diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Compared to 69 per cent of the North American population and 38 per cent of the European population, only about 10 per cent of the Asia Pacific population accesses the Internet (Internet World Stats 2006a), even though China, Japan and South Korea have comparatively high Internet penetration (Internet World Stats 2006b). Low Internet penetration in Asia Pacific's developing nations limits their potential to exploit the benefits of ICT.
Asia Pacific is lagging behind in the use of ICTs not only because of the unavailability of affordable hardware and connectivity, but also because computing is still primarily in non-Asian languages. The Asia Pacific region is home to about half of the world's spoken languages: more than 3,500 languages are spoken in Asia Pacific out of about 6,8001 languages spoken in the entire world (UNESCO 2004). These languages employ a variety of writing systems (Omniglot.com 2006). Twenty-one of the 30 most spoken languages in the world are also from this region (Katsiavriades and Qureshi 2006). Therefore, enabling ICTs in the local languages is necessary for effective access to information in Asia Pacific (Pimienta 2005). To cite one example, a recent study published in Korea Times reports that due to insufficient adaptation to local needs, Google serves only 1.5 per cent of the Korean Internet search market (Wagers 2006). Most Koreans use the Korean search engines which meet their requirements better.
The adaptation of ICT to local needs is called localization. Localization can be defined as the process of developing, tailoring and/or enhancing the capability of hardware and software to input, process and output information in the language, norms and metaphors used by a community. The localization process must also capture the variances in the use of a language. For example, English speakers in the United States spell words differently from English speakers in the United Kingdom, and Punjabi speakers use Gurmukhi script in India and Arabic script in Pakistan to write the same language. Even more challenging is enabling ICT for oral or unwritten languages like Jatapu and Koya in India (Daswani 1998), as it would be completely dependent on a localized speech interface.
The terms internationalization and globalization are also used in the context of local language computing but with subtle differences from localization. Internationalizing ICTs requires designing the technology in a generic fashion so that it has the ability to support multiple languages. However, internationalization does not enable any particular language. Enabling technology for a particular language is called localization. Globalization of ICTs in this context refers to first internationalizing and then localizing technology to support multiple languages.2
Localization is conventionally defined or understood in a narrow sense—that is, it is usually limited to interface translation and other basic changes in the computing platform. We suggest that localization has a broader scope that includes the entire range of script, speech and language technology to enable access to information for the end-user.
This chapter provides a brief overview of localization and the process required for enabling it. In addition, the role of regional and international organizations in localization is discussed and the level of localization achieved across different countries within the region is summarized. The chapter concludes with a discussion of policy and planning considerations to achieve wider localization in Asia Pacific, highlighting some of the issues and choices in making localization policy decisions.
Localization requires three steps: linguistic analysis, basic localization and advanced application development. Linguistic analysis is required to unambiguously define the language conventions and norms that are to be modelled by technology. As implied, basic localization caters only to the rudimentary needs of end-users, including input and output of text in a local language. However, to give comprehensive access to novice users and illiterate populations, or to assist in content development in a local language, more advanced applications need to be developed. Further details are given in this section.
Successful language computing is largely dependent on good linguistic analysis based on cultural conventions. Very precise definitions are required for all relevant linguistic phenomena. However, for many languages in Asia Pacific, linguistic details are either incomplete or unavailable. Moreover, relevant cultural conventions are rarely documented. This poses a significant obstacle to localization and requires the involvement of indigenous expertise.
The initial linguistic details, which have to be agreed and standardized for basic localization, include (but are not limited to) the following: the writing system3 and character set used by the language for its publishing needs; the ordering of these characters; cultural conventions for representing numbers, time and the calendar; and translation of common terms used in the software interface. This has to be done by the appropriate language or cultural authorities at the national level. Experience shows that debate4 is inevitable in this process of standardization. It is important that the discussions and solutions be based on linguistic merit and not be driven by technology constraints, although all discussions must involve both linguists and technologists, the latter to challenge any ambiguities in the proposals from a technical perspective.
In addition, a detailed linguistic analysis of the script, speech and grammar of the language is required for advanced application development. The analysis encompasses the sound system of the language and its acoustic details, word and phrase structures, and the representation of meaning in the language. These details need to be clearly documented for eventual implementation, as further explained in this section.
Once the discussions on the writing system and basic language details are finalized at the national level, the next step is to derive the relevant standards for computing and subsequently develop computer software and hardware to enable local language input and output based on these standards. At the minimum, encoding, keyboards (and input methods), fonts (and rendering engines), definition of cultural conventions (for time, calendar and numbers) and interface translation must to be enabled. Once defined, the keyboard, font and locale support must be incorporated in the operating systems (for example, Linux, Sun Unix, Microsoft Windows, IBM AIX, Apple Mac OS and others) and at least the basic applications, including word processors (for example, Emacs, GEdit, KEdit, Open Office, Word), e-mail clients (for example, Thunderbird, Outlook), Web browsers (for example, Firefox, Internet Explorer), chatting software, and the like, according to end-user requirements. These steps are briefly discussed below.
As computers can only manipulate numbers and not characters, to process a language each character in it has to be assigned a unique number.5 This process is called encoding. The process can be done in a non-standard way by arbitrarily assigning numbers to different letters in the language.6 However, non-standard encoding inhibits data sharing across multi-user applications, including Web access, e-mailing and chatting. Therefore, the encoding should be done through the international standard ISO 10646 or Unicode.7 If the Unicode standard does not support a language, or only partially supports it, this standard should be enhanced by submitting a proposal, channelled through appropriate national bodies, to add new characters.8
Even if standardization is achieved, there still remains a large repository of information based on arbitrary encodings. Thus, in addition to standardization, additional file-mapping applications need to be developed that will allow the legacy or concurrent content in other encodings to be converted to the standardized encoding.
Once the character set is standardized, keyboard mapping—that is, the placement of characters on the keyboard—needs to be defined. This mapping can be facilitated by extending existing keyboard layouts or doing character frequency analysis.9 Some languages require complex input methods. For example, because it is not possible to put the thousands of Chinese symbols on the keyboard, different methods based on strokes, Latin character transliteration, and handwriting recognition are used to input text in Chinese (Wikipedia 2006; Hussain et al. 2005). Input methods must be openly and consistently defined and openly standardized to allow users to type in the same way across all computing systems.
Fonts for languages are required for on-screen display and printing. Simpler writing systems like Latin and Cyrillic scripts (which are used for most languages spoken in the Americas and Europe) have been modelled by earlier font formats, such as the True Type Fonts (TTF). However, most scripts used for languages in Asia Pacific are more complex due to their cursive nature and context-sensitive character shaping and positioning (Hussain 2004) and therefore require the enhanced font formats, such as the Open Type Fonts (OTF).10 Once fonts are created for a language, computer software is used to display the fonts onscreen, in a process called rendering. Complex writing systems, such as the Nastalique writing style for the Urdu language (Hussain 2004), require a sophisticated rendering engine capable of displaying the font.
The locale for a language contains information about the local language and the cultural representation of time, calendar, numbers and other related information normally visible on computer screens—for example, in English the date stamp '4/1/2005' is usually included with e-mail messages. This represents '1st of April 2005' in the USA but '4th of January 2005' in the UK. Thus, to define and to interpret this information, the language and region of the locale must be clearly declared. In addition to time, date and digit conventions, the locale also defines the sequence in which the words in a language are ordered, which is very important for many applications, for example, to develop a voter list or to make a telephone directory.
The locale may be defined by filling in a given template and submitting it to the Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) managed by the Unicode Consortium. The locale for each language for each country is defined separately to capture cultural variations, such as bn-BG and bn-IN for the Bengali language (bn) spoken in Bangladesh (BG) and India (IN), respectively. Many Asia Pacific countries have not developed or registered their language locales with CLDR.
Imagine giving a Nepali speaker a computer that is configured for use in the Japanese language. Such a computer would be impossible for the Nepali speaker to operate because he or she cannot comprehend the words and phrases displayed on the screen. For majority of users in Asia Pacific who do not understand a foreign language, words and phrases like 'save', 'print', 'edit', 'file' and the like, need to be translated and displayed in the local language on the computer screen. About 5,000 words comprise the basic glossary to represent menu items for operating systems and basic applications. However, to completely localize all help files and error messages, careful translation of more than 300,000 phases may be required.
Translating a glossary is challenging because there are many words that do not have local language equivalents, such as the word 'cursor'. Either such words are transliterated or new senses of the existing local language words need to be formulated. This creative exercise requires language experts who are proficient in the use of computers, a rare combination of skills in the developing Asia Pacific region.
Once translated, the basic glossary should be verified by language authorities and published as a national standard (for example, DzongkaLinux Team 2007) and supplied to vendors and organizations (for example, Debian, Red Hat, Microsoft, IBM Apple) for incorporation within their platforms.
Once the basic linguistic analysis is completed and localization support is developed, this support will need to be integrated at two levels. First, the support must be included in the basic operating system being used, for example, Linux, Microsoft Windows, Apple MacOS, IBM AIX, Sun Unix. The operating system would enable the encoding, allow the locale of the language to be defined, and allow the input and output methods to be used effectively. Interface translation in the operating system must also be enabled. Second, once the operating system is enabled, basic applications must be localized. These applications include word processors, e-mail clients, Web browsers, chat clients and other general and customized applications. However, this only provides basic access to trained users. For wider, more effective access for general users, advanced local language computing applications will also need to be developed.
Basic localization should not be the final goal because it does not completely meet the objective of giving end-users meaningful access to computing. Advanced language technology is required to further facilitate access for end-users and enable them to generate local language content. Advanced language computing requires in-depth speech and linguistic analysis as well as complex programming for implementation, drawing from the fields of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, signal and speech processing, image processing, language processing, artificial intelligence and statistics. Moreover, a significant amount of local language resources is needed to develop these applications, as further explained in the following sections.
Language resources are required by advanced applications to create language models. These resources include first, a list of words in the language tagged with minimal linguistic information (for example, part-of-speech [POS],11 gender, number).12 These word lists (or lexicons) are needed to develop applications like spelling checkers. Many applications would also require a large amount of typed text in the language, called the language corpus. This is used to extract word frequencies, word collocations and other grammatical information for statistical language processing. A corpus of 10–100 million words from different text genres is required for different kinds of statistical modelling.
Part of the corpus must also be manually tagged with POS and other linguistic information to infer automatic models for processing text through machine learning13 techniques. For example, a text corpus manually tagged with POS is used to develop an automatic POS tagger. The POS tagger is used in almost all advanced applications, for example, to decide whether to stress the first or second syllable of a word like 'address'14 for a text-to-speech system. The Urdu language shows a similar variation, for example, for the word 
(ulta; 'upside down' vs. 'to turn upside down'). Another such critical system is for word segmentation, since in Asia Pacific, many languages like Chinese, Dzongkha, Khmer, Lao, Thai, Urdu and Burmese do not use spaces between words, which makes it difficult to determine word boundaries in typed text. The word boundaries have to be guessed based on advanced linguistic and statistical techniques. Solving this problem is fundamental for any further processing of these languages through machines, for example, doing line-wrapping in word processing or performing spell checking. In addition to tagging text corpora, the computational grammars of these languages need to be developed and documented.
Speech corpora are required for developing speech applications. These must be recorded for narrative and conventional speech over different channels, including microphone, telephone, mobile phone, and so on, for a variety of speakers and dialects, for the development of the speech applications. Finally, script corpora need to be developed for script processing applications. The corpora must include large samples of different types and handwritings and the corpora must be manually tagged for various linguistic dimensions.
Once the language resources are available, they can lead to the development of advanced applications, which can be broadly categorized into two sets: those which provide access to existing content and others which assist in generating new content in local languages.
As discussed, basic applications like word processors, e-mail clients, Web browsers and chat clients provide basic access to trained users, once they are localized. However, there are additional applications that can be used to further enrich the computing experience. Most of the population in developing Asia is illiterate and enabling computing in local languages still does not provide this population access to online information that is otherwise available to literate individuals. They need a speech interface, which reads out online text to users (text-to-speech systems or TTS), as well as technology to 'listen' to users (robust automatic speech recognition systems or ASR) and to interpret their requests (language understanding systems). Also needed are search engines and advanced information retrieval (IR) systems that can sift through existing online data and seek out and display requested information. All these must be possible in local languages. While there are generic software programs with open licenses which are already available, these programs have to be trained (and sometimes enhanced) for Asian languages.
Once core technology like TTS, ASR and IR is enabled, it has to be integrated into Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and other dialogue-based systems to 'communicate' with end-users. As the core technologies are developed by a variety of vendors, standardized ways of integrating these technologies will need to be developed. There are ongoing standardization efforts: for example, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is developing Speech Synthesis Mark-up Language (SSML) and Voice Mark-up Language (VoiceML) to allow voice browsing, in addition to the widely used text browsing standard called Hyper Text Mark-up Language (HTML). Voice browsing allows users to interact with a website to access content using speech interface. This can greatly enhance Web use in developing Asia, especially within the illiterate and visually impaired community.
Even if access is possible, it is still necessary to have relevant content available in local languages for end-users. At present very limited online content is available in the languages of Asia Pacific. There are three general ways to generate online content: (a) develop original content, (b) copy content from printed sources in local languages and (c) translate existing content in a foreign language. The localized common applications used for access, such as word processors, email clients, Web development tools and chatting software, may be used for content generation as well.
Although online content development is a slow process, script and language technology can accelerate it. And although there is little online content in Asia Pacific languages, there is a lot of printed content. Using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems, which scan printed documents and books and automatically convert the images to editable text, this printed material can be quickly transformed into searchable online content.
In addition to content in the local languages, there is also a large amount of universally useful content available in foreign languages, including English (35.2 per cent), Chinese (13.7 per cent) and Japanese (9 per cent) (Global Reach 2004). This content can also be translated to local languages quickly by developing automatic Machine Translation (MT) systems. Automatic translation, although not very accurate, provides access to content that is otherwise completely inaccessible. Automatic translation can be made more accurate with human assistance (where required) at a significantly lower cost compared to a completely manual translation.
TTS, ASR, OCR and MT are advanced applications that require considerable language resources and linguistic and computational analysis. These applications also require dedicated input from specialized human resources over a considerable period. An MT application could take a team of 10 linguists and computational linguists five years to develop.15 Usable TTS, ASR and OCR systems could take a team of 10 linguists, engineers and computational linguists three years each to develop. To mature and perfect these applications would require continuous focus for an even longer period.
Licensing is an additional problem with online content, even where technology may be available for accelerated online publishing. Much of the content available is normally copyright, which makes it difficult to disseminate. Newer regimes that allow much more open use of content, such as Creative Commons, are emerging. Wikipedia, which allows free-for-all information and is available in many languages, is an excellent outcome of these movements towards open content.
Development of local language computing applications and content requires a sustained effort. Many regional and international organizations have been contributing to this development across Asia Pacific. These organizations are involved in: (a) standards development and (b) technology development. Moreover, there are many funding agencies in the region that are supporting local language computing development, notably the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada, Center of the International Cooperation for Computerization (CICC) of Japan, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) of Japan, United Nations (through UNESCO and the UNDP-Asia Pacific Development Information Programme or APDIP) and Asia IT&C Grants by the European Union.
This section lists some of the major regional standards and technology development organizations supporting local language computing in Asia Pacific and explains the role they play in this context. National and regional initiatives need to develop liaisons with these organizations, for example by subscribing to the multiple online discussion forums that they maintain or by attending the regular meetings, conferences and special workshops organized by them. Where funds are required, the funding organizations listed provide such support.
The Unicode consortium develops the Unicode standard, which is the standard encoding scheme for the multilingual Internet and is the same as ISO 10646. The consortium aims to provide standard encoding schemes for all characters and symbols used in different scripts for all languages of the world (Unicode 2006). In addition, it provides guidelines for collation, bidirectionality, reordering and line-breaking, which are fundamental to text processing for many Asian languages based on the Unicode standard. Even though conventional national and proprietary encodings are still being used, most nations across Asia Pacific are now switching to Unicode. In addition to encoding, the Unicode consortium has recently collected and is now maintaining locales for all languages through the CLDR project.
W3C develops guidelines, standards and software to publish multilingual online content. Its Internationalization Working Group is tasked with keeping these specifications multilingual. W3C maintains the HTML standard which is used for creating multilingual Web pages. In addition, it is developing SSML and VoiceML standards which are used for voice browsing, that is, accessing the Internet through speech. This organization is also developing multimodal content publishing standards for more effective Web accessibility, including access by people with disabilities.
Currently Web access requires typing a Web address (also called domain name or URL) in English. For populations who do not understand English, this is one of the significant hurdles in accessing online content. Web addresses, which are the key to entering the multilingual World Wide Web, should also be in local languages. ICANN is responsible for the global coordination of Web addresses16 and it recently introduced Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) through reports RFC 3454, 3490, 3491 and 3492, collectively called the IDN Standards (ICANN 2006). IDN would allow Web addresses in local languages. However, due to the seven-bit ASCII-based domain name system, Unicode cannot be used and multi-lingual IDNs are converted to ASCII Compatible Encoding (ACE) before the address is resolved. Still being debated is how to enable Top-Level Domains (TLDs) in local languages and who will control them (Butt 2006; Huston 2006). Due to this continuing controversy, independent systems have also been developed, for example by the Chinese Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). ICANN and IDNs are bound to play a critical role in making the multi-lingual Internet accessible.
ISO jointly develops the ISO 10646 or Unicode standard with the Unicode Consortium. The technical committee TC37 develops standards for 'Terminology and Other Language and Content Resources', including specifications for lexica, corpora and other language content. The language resource standards are still being discussed and finalized and they are not currently in wide use. Some other related standards include ISO 3166 for country codes and ISO 639 for language codes, which are used for locale definitions by Unicode within CLDR and by other organizations including W3C and ICANN. For example, ur_PK represents the Urdu language locale as used in Pakistan.
Notable within software development initiatives for multilingual computing is the FOSS community which provides internationalized software applications that allow rapid localization covered under an open license.17 Most FOSS operating systems are based on Linux, are internationalized, and are being localized by different groups (for example, Debian, Red Hat and Ubuntu). Debian is currently being localized in more than 150 languages. Open Office, which provides a complete suite of document productivity software, is being localized into 70 languages. The Mozilla project distributes Firefox Web browser and Thunderbird email client. There are many more FOSS initiatives available online, including software for chatting, multimedia, Web development and database.
Academic research forums in linguistics and language processing have long existed in many countries in Asia. However, there have been limited regional discussions on Asian languages. The American Association of Computational Linguists (AACL) and European Association of Computational Linguistics (EACL) have been providing a common platform for the Americas and Europe. A similar platform in Asia was created recently by bringing existing national organizations and conferences under a single regional umbrella called AFNLP. The federation is helping organize language computing research and development across Asia by providing a collaborative platform to share academic research and exchange innovative solutions for Asian languages. AFNLP holds a regular conference called International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP). Two such conferences have been held so far.
Many organizations collect and distribute language resources that are essential to perform linguistic and computational research and to develop local language computing. The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) at the University of Pennsylvania distributes text and speech corpora, lexica and additional data for many languages, including Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Hindi, Vietnamese, Tamil, Korean and other languages. The European Language Resource Association (ELRA) distributes similar resources for many Asian languages. Similarly, the Global Wordnet Association is developing lexical-semantic resources for many languages and the South Asian Language Resource Center (SALRC) at the University of Chicago is developing a repository of lexical resources for South Asian languages. No formal centre for the collection and distribution of the language resources of Asia Pacific has been established. However, discussions for establishing an Asian Language Resource Network, similar to LDC and ELRA, are underway. Another language resource organization is the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), an organization of volunteers that has been documenting languages and populations for more than 50 years (see www.ethonologue.com).
The University of California at Berkeley has started the Script Encoding Initiative which is assisting individuals and groups to identify the missing characters, for example from lesser known languages, and helping them get these characters encoded in the Unicode standard.
Some corporations have also been involved in localization. IBM has developed a large repository of C++ and Java code which is called IBM International Components for Unicode (ICU). This library of code is available at http://icu.sourceforge.net/. Microsoft has restructured its localization policy and has started developing local language interfaces, called Language Interface Packs (LIP), which are currently available for seven Asian languages. These efforts will help develop basic localization at least in the languages that have official status in Asian countries or are otherwise commercially viable (for example, languages spoken by large populations).
There is growing interest in localizing the mobile platform, but the effort has mostly been taken up by the manufacturers themselves, for example, Nokia, Samsung, Sony and others. Text-based messaging is now increasingly becoming available through these systems for many Asian languages based on the Unicode standard. However, the localization is driven mostly by commercial interests focused on languages that promise revenues. It is not possible for independent developers to localize these platforms in other languages due to proprietary platforms and lack of open standards.18
Many of the basic standards and applications have already been developed for most of the national languages in Asia Pacific. Many of these standards have been reviewed over time and now align with international standards. However, language computing has matured to different levels in these countries. This section summarizes the status of localization of national languages in different countries in Asia Pacific. There are five levels of maturity that are at best qualitative as it is difficult to make a quantitative assessment (because each country is confronted with its own unique socio-economic, political and linguistic challenges, for example). The comparison is based on the level of work on the national language and research and development capacity in the areas of script, speech and language processing. A checklist of these applications for many national languages from the region is also provided in Table 1. For more
Table 1
Extent of localization for the national language of each listed country of Asia Pacific*
|
Encoding |
Collation |
Keyboard |
Fonts |
Locale |
Interface |
Lexicon |
Spell-checker |
OCR |
TTS |
ASR |
MT |
Afghanistan |
xxx |
x |
x |
xx |
x |
x |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Bangladesh |
xxx |
xx |
xx |
xxx |
x |
x |
xx |
x |
x |
|
|
|
Bhutan |
xxx |
xx |
xx |
xx |
xxx |
xxx |
x |
x |
|
|
|
|
Cambodia |
xxx |
xx |
xxx |
xx |
xx |
xx |
x |
x |
|
|
|
|
China |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
India |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xx |
xx |
xx |
xx |
Indonesia |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xx |
x |
xx |
x |
xx |
x |
|
xx |
Japan |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
Korea |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
Laos |
xxx |
xx |
xx |
xx |
x |
xx |
x |
xx |
x |
|
|
|
Malaysia |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xx |
xxx |
xx |
xx |
xx |
xx |
x |
xx |
Maldives |
xxx |
x |
xx |
xx |
xx |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Mongolia |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
x |
xx |
|
|
|
x |
|
|
Myanmar |
xxx |
xx |
xx |
xxx |
xxx |
x |
|
x |
|
|
|
|
Nepal |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xx |
xx |
|
|
|
|
Pakistan |
xxx |
xxx |
xx |
xxx |
x |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xx |
xxx |
x |
xx |
Philippines |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xx |
x |
|
xx |
xx |
|
|
|
Sri Lanka |
xxx |
xx |
xxx |
xxx |
xx |
x |
xx |
xx |
xx |
xx |
x |
x |
Thailand |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xx |
xx |
Vietnam |
xxx |
xx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
xxx |
x |
xx |
xx |
xx |
xx |
x |
Note: The table lists a comparison for some of the applications. The comparison is qualitative, not quantitative, and is based on the current information available to the authors through the Internet and other sources (for example, Sonlertlamvanich 2002; Tsujii 2005; Hussain et al. 2005). The information has not been independently verified and therefore has some margin of error. (blank—minimal work; x—initial work started; xx—some work completed; xxx—much work completed; for Year 2006)
information, see Sonlertlamvanich (2002), Tsujii (2005) and Hussain et al. (2005).
Leading the development and implementation of local language computing are the more developed countries in the region, including China, Japan and Korea. These countries are very active in international standardization efforts and participate in relevant platforms and discussions. Most software is already localized in Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Current research and development is focused on cutting-edge technology, including speech-to-speech translation, as basic localization and advanced applications, including TTS, ASR, OCR and MT, are already developed and available through the commercial sector. These countries have active academic bodies collaborating with the commercial sector, backed by governmental policy and support. Some of the organizations involved are the University of Peking, City University of Hong Kong, Academia Sinica in Taiwan, NICT and Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) in Japan, and Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) of Korea. Significant research and development is being performed by the commercial sector as well, including Sony, NEC, IBM, Nokia, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Systrans and so on.
Thailand and India are also very active in local language computing. The National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC) of the National Science Technology Development Agency (NSTDA), along with Thai industry and academia, is leading the full localization of the Thai language. A Thai OCR, text-to-speech system, and English-Thai MT are now available. The Thai Language Environment (TLE) project develops and maintains the Open Source Thai Linux distribution.
India also has a thriving and vibrant language computing development sector. The Ministry of Science and Technology has created the Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) department which supports and coordinates active research on Hindi and many other constitutionally recognized languages through research centres at Indian universities and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC). In addition, the IndLinux group localizes Linux distributions in many languages (MIT 2006) and has released the Hindi version. However, commercial-grade applications for end-users are not fully developed and not in wide use due to the complexity and language diversity (currently 22 official languages). Nevertheless, working models of TTS, MT, ASR and OCR for a few languages, including Hindi, Tamil and Marathi, are available. Other language resources, including lexica and corpora, are also available. Government focus and a dynamic language policy are providing the correct impetus and India is seeing an emerging localization and language computing industry.
Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Vietnam have fairly active academic research and development programmes and fairly mature standards and basic language applications, with reasonable work in advanced applications.
Research and development in Indonesia is being carried out by both the public and academic sectors. Basic resources and advanced applications are all being developed with advanced prototypes already released. Badan Pengkajian dan Penerapan Teknologi (BPPT) and the University of Indonesia are two organizations actively involved in this process. Most of the work is on Bahasa Indonesia.
Research in Malaysia started in 1987 through the KANTA project by CICC which developed an MT system for Japanese, Malay, Chinese, Thai and Bahasa Indonesia. Universities, including Universiti Teknologi Malaysia and Universiti Sains Malaysia, are actively involved in research and development.
Localization in Sri Lanka is being led by the University of Colombo School of Computing for Sinhala and Tamil, with support and guidance from the ICT Agency of Sri Lanka. The open source community is also reasonably active through Sri Lanka's Linux User Group (LkLUG), which has made some progress on the development of a Sinhala Linux distribution.
In Vietnam, localization is being led by the Ministry of IT and is also being carried out in some universities. VietKey is an open source office productivity software available in Vietnamese. Work is also underway on advanced applications, like ASR.
Pakistan has shown a promising focus on language computing (see the boxed case study below).
However, very limited development work is being carried out by the commercial sector in these countries, especially for advanced applications.
The national languages of countries like Bangladesh, Myanmar and Nepal belong to this category. In these countries there is an emerging realization of the importance of local language computing and focused public policy is starting to develop, integrate and align existing private initiatives. However, there is only limited work on advanced language computing applications.
Countries like Afghanistan, Lao PDR, Cambodia, Mongolia and Bhutan are also starting to develop basic localization standards and applications in their national languages.
Of the approximately 3,500 languages spoken in Asia Pacific, only about 30–40 languages are being localized. Small and developing language communities are left out due to very limited capacity to perform indigenous localization and lack of commercial incentives. This problem is especially severe for countries with exceptionally high linguistic diversity, such as Papua New Guinea (820 languages) and Indonesia (737 languages). Localizing these languages will only be possible through long-term policy initiatives and collaborative effort between national, regional and international organizations.
The goal of localization is to enable communities to share and exchange information through ICTs. Achieving this goal would require planning and executing a strategy that can address the entire spectrum of associated issues. This section presents the considerations and recommendations for national, regional and international organizations to plan the development of language technology, especially in the context of Asia Pacific.
National localization planning must strike a balance between the requirements of the majority and the minority. If the policy prioritizes localization based on the speaking population alone, minority languages may not be addressed. More rigorous criteria based on additional demographic and social factors need to be evolved to include minority languages in localization, as these languages present little incentive for commercial interests. Effective planning might even help preserve the linguistic diversity of the region and help protect endangered languages.
Due to multiple languages spoken in most Asia Pacific countries, resource allocation is a tricky task. Should multiple languages be taken up for basic localization or should fewer languages be taken up for more in-depth advanced application development? If focus remains only on basic localization due to the numerous languages, advanced applications might never be addressed even though it is necessary to provide access to information to a large part of the population in the region. On the other hand, if only advanced applications are considered, only a limited number of languages may be localized because advanced applications take a much longer time to develop.
Again, a complex socio-economic balance must be struck to determine the right formula for each national context.
In most Asia Pacific countries, there is very limited linguistic and technical capacity to develop standards, perform linguistic analysis and create language technology. Training and human resource planning is critical. Depending on the choice of applications and languages, expertise may be required in various branches of linguistics (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics), signal and speech processing, image processing, statistics, computational linguistics and advanced computing. Training for basic localization work could take about six months. To develop advanced applications, experienced linguists and computational linguists are required and dedicated training over many years is necessary. To address national needs and to keep the training process sustainable, diploma and degree programmes in speech, script and language processing should be developed at the universities, through collaboration of the linguistics, computer science and engineering departments. Scholarships dedicated to these areas for study abroad can also help accelerate the process. Regional and international cooperation can play a significant role in these efforts.
The best way to build capacity is to involve the technical development staff in actual hands-on localization work. This can be achieved by national and regional organizations funding language computing projects (see the case study on the PAN Localization Project below). Momentum for localization can also be triggered by governments if they create awareness of local language computing and generate market demand by requiring public information to be localized through e-governance initiatives. Regional organizations can organize national and regional training and seminars. Two recent initiatives are the Summer School in Asian Language Processing in 2006 organized by the PAN Localization project and Asian Applied Natural Language Processing for Linguistics Diversity and Language Resource Development (ADD) organized by the Thai Computational Laboratory.
|
PAN Localization: A regional initiative to develop local language computing capacity in Asia The PAN Localization Project is a concrete example of a cohesive regional cooperative project to develop and disseminate local language computing technology in Asia Pacific. In the first phase, from 2004 to 2007, the project focused on developing (a) human resource, (b) technology and (c) policy related to language computing across Asia Pacific. In the second phase, from 2007 to 2010, the project will look into social models for enabling local language content access and generation by training rural communities to use local language computing technology. Thus, the project addresses the immediate need for localization in developing Asia. The project is a collaboration among 11 countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, Laos, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines and Sri Lanka. It is coordinated by the Center for Research in Urdu Language Processing (CRULP, www.crulp.org) at the National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (NUCES, www.nu.edu.pk) in Pakistan and funded by the Pan Asia Networking (PAN) programme of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC, www.idrc.ca). The project has also developed formal and informal collaboration with other countries, including India, Iran, Japan, Korea, Myanmar, Indonesia and Thailand. The project supports a development team of about 100 people across the participating countries who are being trained and who are actively developing local language computing solutions in 15 different Asian languages. The project maintains a team at each collaborating country. The country teams decide the scope of work and the platform to localize based on level of localization and the capacity of the available human resources. Development targets help the teams focus their capacity building efforts. In most cases, the country components are hosted at universities and public sector organizations to ensure sustainability. Sustainability is also addressed by contributing towards the development of formal research groups on localization. The project has already helped establish the Center for Reseach in Bangla Language Computing at BRAC University in Bangladesh, the Research Division at the Department of IT in Bhutan, the Language Technology Research Lab at the University of Colombo School of Computing in Sri Lanka, the Nepali Language Technology Group at the Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya and the Language Technology Lab at the University of Kathmandu in Nepal, the Speech Lab at the Institute of Technology of Cambodia and language and speech technology labs at the National University of Mongolia and Mongolian University of Science and Technology, respectively. The project has arranged short and long-term national and regional training for its staff. For example, a mentor placement programme has allowed experienced personnel from Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka to be placed in Bhutan, Cambodia and Laos for two to six months. This has been noted as one of the most significant capacity building methods by the partner countries. A two-and-a-half month long Summer School in Asian Language Processing at NUCES, in 2006, addressed training in advanced language computing and helped build capacity in script, speech and language processing for 40 participants from 12 countries. Other training and workshops organized by the project are listed at the project website (see Activities link at www.PANL10n.net). The project has also been training end-users in local language computing applications, for example in Bhutan, Cambodia, Laos, Nepal, the Philippines and Sri Lanka. These have been on multiple platforms—for example, on Open Source platforms in Bhutan, Cambodia, Nepal and Sri Lanka, and on proprietary platforms in Laos, Cambodia and Sri Lanka. These efforts are being extended to all participating countries in the second phase of the project. In its first phase, the project also developed a variety of local language computing solutions, including Pashto script, keyboard and collation standards; Bangla collation, lexicon, morphological analyzer and OCR; DzongkhaLinux distribution, including Dzongkha fonts, collation, keyboard and localized applications for word processing, e-mailing, Web browsing, chatting and multimedia; Khmer collation, lexicon, word segmentation, spell checker and tagged corpus; Lao fonts, collation, keyboard, lexicon and corpus; Nepali Linux distribution including Nepali collation, keyboard, spell checker and localized applications for word processing, e-mailing, Web browsing, chatting, accounting and multimedia; and Sinhala TTS and OCR, lexicon, collation and corpus (see the project website for a detailed list of current outputs). The project has also developed training materials for these and other applications in the local languages. Open licensing allows these outputs to be shared between the partner countries. For example, the OCR software developed for Sinhala by Sri Lanka has been used by the Laos team to retrain it for Lao. Equally significant is the development of a network of researchers in the region through the project. Experts, practitioners and policymakers have been brought together to interact and guide development teams in the participating countries. The project has also developed a repository of training materials and links to local language resources. It disseminates research outputs with open software and content licenses. Aside from local language software for nine languages, the outputs include research reports specific to the target languages and general guides, such as the Survey of Local Language Computing in Asia 2005 (Hussain et al. 2005) and A Guide to Linux Localization. The project is helping research the challenges and solutions for creating localization awareness in the region; building sustainable human resource capacity; developing standards and basic and advanced localization technology; and forming a regional network of researchers. It has institutionalized localization in many of its partner countries and is directly and indirectly influencing relevant ICT policy. Thus, the project is addressing local language computing in a holistic fashion across Asia Pacific. |
It is redundant and usually expensive to localize independently for all languages. A better model is to reuse the same basic technology for different languages. Most open source software work on this principle. Innovative mechanisms must be put in place to share content, training and other localization work. Regional and international organizations must play a significant role in this context, funding avenues through which research, training, resources and best practices may be shared across nations. Many such initiatives are developing in the region, such as the AFNLP, International Open Source Network (IOSN), Asia Open Source Software (AOSS) and Asia Commons, which are nongovernmental organizations. Many other technology frameworks are also available and being developed in universities and other organizations across the world.
As discussed, many different licensing regimes are possible both for the software and content being produced. As much as possible, open licensing must be adopted to propagate the work in local language computing. Liberal licenses, such as GPL, MIT and BSD, can allow open source distribution of software for non-profit as well as commercial purposes (cf. Chen 2006). Content must also be made available with liberal licensing for convenient access (for example, Creative Commons). In addition, effective channels are needed to share content and training curricula, perhaps using models similar to the Wikipedia and Sourceforge initiatives.
Because effective coordination cannot be achieved only through virtual communities, there is also a need for face-to-face networking. Regional and international organizations dedicated to social development through ICTs need to play an active leadership role in this regard. For example, the Free and Open Source Software in Asia Pacific (FOSSAP) forum by IOSN has been discussing software licensing and Asia Commons has started addressing content licensing.
A very important aspect of localization is the choice of computing platform. Both proprietary and open source platforms exist and are currently being used. For end-users in Asia Pacific, the prevalent platforms include Microsoft Windows, Java Virtual Machine (JVM or Java) and varieties of Linux (for example, Red Hat and Debian). Windows is a proprietary software platform which is not free and has some security concerns.19 Java is a virtual platform and requires a physical platform like Microsoft Windows or Linux on which it can be installed. Linux is open source and free of cost.20
However, the choice is not as apparent as it seems. Though Windows is proprietary, closed and vulnerable to security threats, it is still the most widely used software with convenient plug-and-play hardware installation features, making it very convenient for end-users. The Linux platform requires more expertise to use and is more difficult to manage and maintain given the limited administrative and management capacity currently available. Deciding which platform to target for localization is a complex issue. For some languages which are already supported by Microsoft products, Windows may present a more viable short-term solution. For these languages, Linux may present a solution in the longer term, as there is a need to train more human resources to maintain Linux-based systems. For other languages that are not currently supported by Windows, open source platforms may be the only solution, as the localization plans of Microsoft may not align with national priorities.
With the growing need and demand for multilingual computing, there is increased standardization activity. Owing to the urgency and multiplicity of the tasks, there are very frequent meetings among the participating organizations across the world, as well as public requests for comments on the developing standards. However, due to lack of expertise and resources, it is difficult for many developing countries in Asia Pacific to participate in these discussions. Unfortunately, lack of participation is always considered to be tacit approval by these standards organizations.
From an academic point of view, assuming approval when there is lack of comment is not always the best strategy for the development of standards despite the operational ease of this process. When multilingual standards are finalized without indigenous feedback, there are bound to be problems (for example, as reported for the Khmer Unicode page) especially once many of these languages catch up to the newer standards. The process of standardization must be proactive from both ends. National bodies must try to actively participate in the process and the standards development organizations should have programmes to train participants from different countries and to proactively seek their feedback before proceeding to finalize multilingual standards. This requires significant financial investment which has to be raised in a sustainable way. For example, the Asian Forum for Standardization of Information Technology (AFSIT) and associated programmes by CICC have contributed significantly in the areas of multilingual computing and related standardization training. Such efforts must continue in the future.
National policy alone will not ensure the development of local language computing. The policy must be translated into action plans, which in turn must be realized into projects with explicit funding allocation. The first step would be to develop a national committee of experts to discuss and finalize basic standards. Once standards are developed, basic localization for a language is possible for as little as USD 200,000 within one to two years. Developing a complete set of advanced applications would require considerably more effort and time—about three to five years to develop functional models and about a decade to mature—even when using existing software toolkits.21 Building a complete suite of language technology for a single language could cost more than USD 5 million.22 Basic localization may be undertaken by the private sector. However, because there are few commercial incentives for advanced applications in developing countries, these would only be developed with explicit support and funding by the government and other organizations.
The great linguistic diversity in the Asia Pacific region presents a significant social barrier to widespread use of ICTs. If communities in the region are to cross over into the information age, ICTs must be enabled in their languages. Localization is necessary to give these communities the opportunity to use and benefit from the ICT revolution. However, most of these communities neither have capacity nor currently present the financial incentives for private investment in localization. There is no easy or short-term solution to this problem and a considerable and coordinated national, regional and international effort is required. The initial focus must be on sustainable human resource and technology development within these countries. In addition, a two-tier policy must be adopted—first to support localization through public funding and second to concurrently create enough demand for local language computing, for example through e-government initiatives, to trigger private sector interest.
In conclusion, localization should not be looked at as an obstacle, but as an opening for Asia Pacific to revitalize its IT industry and to develop its knowledge economy. Proper national and regional policy planning and execution can turn the challenges into opportunities.
1. The Summer Institute of Linguistics reports a total count of 6,912 languages at www.ethnologue.com
2. These terms are normally abbreviated by their first and last letter, infixed by the count of the remaining letters, as I18n, L10n and G11n.
3. For example, the Mongolian government recently decided to adopt Cyrillic script for writing the Mongolian language, abolishing the traditional Mongolian script.
4. The debate is normally between at least two groups: those who would like the language to remain 'pure' and those who would want to adapt the language to 'simplify' its use.
5. For example, 'A' is assigned a code of 65, 'B' 66, and so on, in ASCII and Unicode encoding.
6. Arbitrary assignment has been the traditional way of encoding languages across Asia. Multiple encodings exist for languages across Asia Pacific because each vendor has developed its own assignment (see Hussain et al. 2005).
7. The Unicode Standard is the same as the ISO 10646 standard and is co-managed by the Unicode Consortium and a dedicated Working Group of a Sub-Committee of the Joint Technical Committee of the International Standards Organization (ISO JTC1/SC2/WG2).
8. This process can take more than a year. It would normally take about six months for relevant ISO and Unicode committees to evaluate a proposal and another six months for vendors to provide support for these characters within technology, if the characters are approved and included in the standard.
9. Most operating systems allow users to define their own variation of the keyboard layout. 'Phonetic Keyboard Layouts', which map the [p] sounding character on the key with 'P' etc. on the regular QWERTY keyboard layout, are also popular among regular computer users.
10. OTF is an open standard jointly developed by Adobe and Microsoft. There are also other formalisms, including Apple's Advanced Typography (AAT), Postscript, etc. OTF is still an evolving standard, although it can now support the variety in Asian scripts fairly well.
11. POS indicates whether the word is a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc.
12. Advanced applications may require as many as 10 of such tags for each word. The following illustrates a sample entry: 'Boy: Common_Noun, Singular, Masculine, Human, Animate.'
13. Machine Learning is a branch of Artificial Intelligence in which a large amount of data is used to automatically train models to predict certain properties of unseen/new data.
14. The first syllable is stressed if it is a noun and the second syllable is stressed if it is a verb.
15. The estimates vary depending on the source and target language pair, the expertise of available linguists and computational linguists, and the techniques used. This estimate assumes availability of trained linguists and computational linguists. Systems may be developed within a shorter duration using statistical techniques.
16. Administered through the support of IANA and Regional Registries (RIRs), for example, APNIC for Asia Pacific.
17. Usage depends on the licensing schemes. Most software is available through a standard or limited version of the GNU Public License (GPL).
18. Further discussion of mobile applications is available in the chapter on Mobile and Wireless Technologies in this volume.
19. There is a backdoor to security of Microsoft Windows through _NSAKey. Refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY, http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19990906S0003 and http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9909/03/windows.nsa.02/ for related discussions.
20. Although the Linux platform is freely available, there is a cost for installation and maintenance.
21. Toolkits like Festival and MBROLA for TTS, HTK and Sphinx for ASR and XLE for MT are being developed and made available by academic and other organizations across the world, especially for non-commercial use.
22. These estimates are based on availability of human resources with a reasonable level of experience in localization work. If such a pool of human resources is not available, more time and/or funds may be required.
23. The table lists a comparison for some of the applications. The comparison is qualitative, not quantitative, and is based on the current information available to the authors through the Internet and other sources (e.g. Sonlertlamvanich 2002; Tsujii 2005; Hussain et al. 2005). The information has not been independently verified and therefore has some margin of error.
Butt, D. (2006). Internationalized domain names. Retrieved 15 December 2006 from http://www.apdip.net/apdipenote/9.pdf
Chen, S. (2006). Free/Open source software: Licensing. UNDP-APDIP. New Delhi, India: Elsevier
Computer Industry Almanac. (2006). Worldwide Internet users top 1 billion in 2005. Retrieved 10 October 2006 from http://www.c-i-a.com/pr0106.htm
Daswani, C.J. (1998). Language diversity and literacy in India. In Proceedings of the Second Asia Regional Literacy Forum-Innovation and Professionalization in Adult Literacy: A Focus on Diversity. New Delhi, India. Retrieved 10 October 2006 from http://www.literacyonline.org/products/ili/webdocs/daswani.html
DzongkhaLinux Team. (2007). Dzongkha computer terms. Department of IT and Dzongkha Development Authority, Royal Government of Bhutan. Lahore, Pakistan: PAN Localization Project Regional Secretariat.
Global Reach. (2004). Global Internet statistics by language. Retrieved 26 December 2006 from http://global-reach.biz/globstats/index.php3
Hussain, S. (2004). Complexity of Asian scripts: A case study of Nafees Nastalique. In Proceedings of SCALLA. Kathmandu.
Hussain, S., Durrani, D., and Gul, S. (2005). PAN Localization survey of local language computing in Asia 2005. Ottowa, Canada: IDRC.
Huston, G. (2006). Internationalizing the Internet. Retrieved 11 December 2006 from http://www.circleid.com/posts/print/internationalizing_the_Internet/
ICANN. (2006). Guidelines for implementation of internationalized domain names version 2.1. Retrieved 26 December 2006 from http://www.icann.org/general/idn-guidelines-22feb06.htm
Internet World Stats. (2006a). World Internet users and population stats. Retrieved 10 October 2006 from http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
Internet World Stats. (2006b). Internet world users by language. Retrieved 10 October 2006 from http://www.internetworldstats.com/index.html
Katsiavriades, K. and Qureshi, T. (2006). The 30 most spoken languages of the world. Retrieved 10 October 2006 from http://www.krysstal.com/spoken.html
MIT, India. (2006). Annual report 2005–2006. Retrieved 10 October 2006 from http://mit.gov.in/download/annualreport2005-06.pdf
NEC. (2006). NEC develops world's first Japanese<->Chinese automatic speech translation software operable on PDA. Retrieved 10 October 2006 from http://www.nec.co.jp/press/en/0601/0401.html
Omniglot.com Homepage. (2006). Available at www.omniglot.com
Pimienta, D. (2005). Linguistic diversity in cyberspace—Models for development and measurement. In Measuring linguistic diversity on the Internet. Paris: UNESCO.
Sonlertlamvanich, V. (ed.) (2002). Proceedings of the workshop on survey on research and development of machine translation in Asian countries. Thailand: NECTEC.
Tsujii, J. (ed.). (2005). AAMT journal (Special Issue). Thailand: Asia Pacific Association for Machine Translation.
UNESCO. (2004). Retrieved 10 October 2006 from http://www.unesco.org/education/languages_2004/languagesdistribution.pdf#search=%22unwritten%20languages%20of%20Asia%22
Unicode. (2006). Unicode 5.0, 5th ed. Addison-Wesley Professional
Wagers, L. (2006). Localization matters: Ask Nokia, Google, Carrefour, Domino's. In Multi-lingual #80, 17(4).
Wikipedia. (2006). Chinese input methods for computers. Retrieved 20 October 2006 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_computers
Intellectual property (IP) is acknowledged to be a key component of businesses, including those related to or based on information and communication technologies (ICTs) which today constitute a key growth area in Asia Pacific economies. The key forms of IP that impact ICT industries are usually copyright and patents. But increasingly, trademarks, industrial designs and integrated circuit designs are becoming significant focal points. Other key issues are indigenous knowledge, data protection and privacy, and competition policy issues. Thus, when legislating IP laws, policymakers will need to take account of ICT infrastructure, have a basic understanding of the nature of the new technologies, and review consumer protection, licensing and competition policy developments. They need to ensure that IP policies and laws address and reflect national, social and cultural requirements.
IP has had a chequered and contested history in most countries in Asia Pacific. In the early days of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), a number of developing countries felt that the linking of IP to trade and the standardization of IP laws was an agenda that developed countries in the north were attempting to impose on them (Correa 1997). TRIPS, which was negotiated in 1994 at the end of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), lays down the minimum global standard that has to be met by national laws on IP rights, such as copyright, patents and trademarks. The obligations under TRIPS apply equally to all WTO member states. However, developing countries were allowed extra time to implement the applicable changes to their national laws. The transition period for developing countries expired in 2005 while the transition period for least developed countries has been extended to 2016.
Many countries in the global south, including Brazil, India and Thailand, resisted many aspects of TRIPS on the grounds that they would benefit developed countries in the north far more than those in the global south as a result of the economic and technological imbalance between them (Drahos and Braithwaite 2002). Because developing countries are net importers of IP rights, there were serious concerns that the new IP regime would impose a heavy cost with respect to transfer of technology and the development of indigenous technological capabilities. Almost every region in Asia Pacific has at some point or other been accused of not providing adequate protection to IP rights. It is also a fact that most countries in Asia Pacific that have developed strong technological capabilities, including Korea, Taiwan, China and India, have built their capabilities on the basis of poor IP rights enforcement (Kumar 2003). As a recent anthology on IP in Asia (Thomas and Servaes 2006, p. 15) points out:
The Asian region is a site of numerous contestations over IP precisely because it is home to a variety of countries at different stages of economic development and levels of openness to IP reform despite pressures from multilateral trading system, and the USTR to standardize and harmonize national IP legislations with global requirements.
However, with most Asian countries having signed on to TRIPS and become members of the WTO, the current situation is slightly different. Although TRIPS has created a disconnect between the IP laws of non-industrial, developing countries and their social and economic conditions, since TRIPS did not emanate from the willingness or determination of these countries for forms of IP protection adequate for their needs (Endeshaw 2005), these countries are now obliged to ensure that their national legislations are in conformity with the minimum standards set by TRIPS. They are also required to enforce IP laws in accordance with global standards.
IP thus looms as a concern that poses serious dilemmas to policymakers in Asia Pacific who are attempting to balance their obligations in international law with their commitment to economic and social development. Economic development in many parts of Asia has been extremely lopsided. While a few countries, particularly in South Asia and East Asia, have been able to transform themselves into significant players in the information economy, there are many others that remain very much in the periphery of the knowledge economy. Even in countries like Malaysia, India and China, the digital revolution has reached only a very small percentage of the population. Thus, Asia Pacific countries cannot be treated as a homogenous set—an often-ignored fact. There are clearly marked differences, as well as inequalities, among these countries in terms of scientific and technical capacities, social and economic structures and distribution of wealth.
Even within the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), there is now recognition of the importance of harmonizing IP laws with national developmental goals. The WIPO General Assembly has established the Agenda for Development, a long overdue and much needed first step toward a new WIPO mission and work programme. The WIPO Agenda for Development declares that the WIPO Convention should formally recognize the need to take into account the 'development needs of its Member States, particularly developing countries and least-developed countries'. According to the Geneva Declaration on the Future of WIPO, WIPO's functions should not only be to promote efficient protection and harmonization of IP laws, but also to formally embrace balance, appropriateness and the stimulation of both competitive and collaborative models of creative activity within national, regional and transnational systems of innovation.1
This chapter maps out some of the key IP-related issues that policymakers in Asia Pacific will have to address in the coming years, namely:
1. Copyright and its impact on access to knowledge and technology
2. Exceptions and limitations within TRIPS
3. Non-proprietary models
4. Stronger enforcement of IP
5. The impact of IP provisions in bilateral agreements
6. Participation in regional forums
One of the justifications for a strong IP regime emerges from the argument of economic development. Economists argue that IP is needed for economic growth which is needed to reduce poverty. By ensuring innovation, creativity and productivity through IP development, countries can increase their agricultural and industrial production as well as financial investment.
The argument assumes that the system that has worked for developed countries will work similarly for developing countries. A counter-argument is that IP rights do very little to promote economic development in developing countries and in fact may end up hindering it where the necessary economic and technical capabilities are absent. For instance, the Commission on IPR maintains that IP regimes are ineffective at stimulating research that will benefit poor people because they will not be able to afford the products even if these are developed. Moreover, IP rules limit the option of technological learning through imitation and allow foreign firms to drive out domestic competition by obtaining patent protection and to service the market through imports rather than through domestic manufacture (CIPR 2002).
It is estimated that in 1999 nearly 1.2 billion people lived on less than USD 1 a day, and nearly 2.8 billion people lived on less than USD 2 per day. About 65 per cent of these people are in South and East Asia alone (World Bank 2001). Thus a key issue for policymakers is who to focus on when they consider IP and technology policies. Unfortunately, most IP policies focus on IP owners and producers and not the users. It is important to bear in mind that almost all countries in Asia Pacific, with the exception of Japan, remain net importers of IP. Even countries like India that produce a lot of IP rarely own the legal rights to the products developed locally, since these are created for companies in the northern hemisphere.
The asymmetry between developed and developing countries in relation to technology is further illustrated by the fact that low and middle income developing countries account for about 21 per cent of world GDP (World Bank) but less than 10 per cent of worldwide research and development (R&D) expenditure.2 The OECD countries spend far more on R&D than India's total national income.3 Tables 1 and 2 contrast the level of investment and activities with respect to R&D expenditure and patents in developed and developing countries. They provide an insight into the sharp inequalities in the knowledge economy. Table 1 shows that the R&D budgets of developed countries far exceed those of the developing countries. Table 2 shows that the patent share of developing countries is miniscule in comparison to that of the developed countries.
Table 1
Major source countries of technologies in the World, 2000
|
|
|
US patents taken, |
Technology |
|
|
||
|
R&D expentiture# |
1977–2000 |
fees received# |
FDI outflows |
||||
|
$billion |
Percentage |
|
Percentage |
|
Percentage |
|
Percentage |
Country |
ppp $ |
of total |
'000 |
of total |
$billion |
of total |
$billion |
of total |
US |
212.8 |
40.8 |
1,337.0 |
57 |
33.8 |
42.2 |
139.3 |
12.1 |
Japan |
90.1 |
17.3 |
429.4 |
18 |
6.9 |
8.9 |
32.9 |
2.9 |
Germany |
42.0 |
8.0 |
173.8 |
7 |
11.9 |
14.9 |
48.6 |
4.2 |
France |
28.1 |
5.4 |
68.2 |
3 |
2.2 |
2.7 |
172.5 |
15.0 |
UK |
22.6 |
4.3 |
67.4 |
3 |
5.8 |
7.2 |
249.8 |
21.7 |
Italy |
12.1 |
2.3 |
29.0 |
1 |
1.6 |
2.0 |
12.1 |
1.1 |
Canada |
11.4 |
2.2 |
48.4 |
2 |
1.3 |
1.6 |
44.0 |
3.8 |
Netherlands |
7.5 |
1.4 |
22.0 |
1 |
6.2 |
7.7 |
73.1 |
6.4 |
Sweden |
7.1 |
1.4 |
22.9 |
1 |
0.4 |
0.5 |
39.5 |
3.4 |
Switzerland |
4.8 |
0.9 |
31.0 |
1 |
2.8 |
3.5 |
39.6 |
3.4 |
Subtotal 10 |
438.5 |
84.0 |
2,229.1 |
94 |
72.8 |
91.0 |
851.3 |
74.0 |
World |
552.0 |
100.0 |
2,364.9 |
100 |
80.1 |
100.0 |
1,149.9 |
100.0 |
Source: Kumar (2003).
Note: #Belongs to 1997.
Table 2
Emerging sources of technology in terms of ownership of US patents, 1977–2000
|
|
|
Patents granted during the period and percentage share |
|
|
|||
|
1977–87 |
1987–90 |
1991–95 |
1996–2000 |
||||
Country |
Numbers |
Per cent |
Numbers |
Per cent |
Numbers |
Per cent |
Numbers |
Per cent |
Taiwan |
1,039 |
0.15 |
2,496 |
0.66 |
7,760 |
1.41 |
19,153 |
2.54 |
South Korea |
236 |
0.03 |
704 |
0.19 |
4,113 |
0.75 |
14,045 |
1.86 |
Israel |
1,302 |
0.19 |
1,156 |
0.31 |
1,849 |
0.34 |
3,550 |
0.47 |
Hong Kong |
577 |
0.08 |
480 |
0.13 |
1,018 |
0.18 |
1,842 |
0.24 |
South Africa |
827 |
0.12 |
485 |
0.13 |
549 |
0.10 |
614 |
0.08 |
Mexico |
393 |
0.06 |
174 |
0.05 |
234 |
0.04 |
374 |
0.05 |
Brazil |
245 |
0.04 |
156 |
0.04 |
299 |
0.05 |
435 |
0.06 |
China Pub. Rep. |
25 |
0.00 |
171 |
0.05 |
257 |
0.05 |
464 |
0.06 |
Argentina |
206 |
0.03 |
78 |
0.02 |
136 |
0.02 |
225 |
0.03 |
Singapore |
40 |
0.01 |
58 |
0.02 |
224 |
0.04 |
727 |
0.10 |
Venezuela |
105 |
0.02 |
88 |
0.02 |
142 |
0.03 |
156 |
0.02 |
India |
111 |
0.02 |
64 |
0.02 |
144 |
0.03 |
424 |
0.06 |
East and Central |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Europe |
4,684 |
0.69 |
1,207 |
0.32 |
994 |
0.18 |
1,143 |
0.15 |
Subtotal |
9,790 |
1.43 |
7,317 |
1.95 |
17,719 |
3.21 |
43,152 |
5.72 |
Others |
1,473 |
0.22 |
652 |
0.17 |
902 |
0.16 |
1,731 |
0.23 |
Total |
682,639 |
100.00 |
375,946 |
100.00 |
551,902 |
100.00 |
754,391 |
100.00 |
Source: Kumar (2003).
Note: Based on data presented in US Patents and Trademarks office (2001), TAF Special Report: All Patents, All Types—January 1, 1977–December 31, 2000, Washington, DC.
Given this asymmetry, policymakers in Asia Pacific will have to consider the impact of IP on the following four factors: (a) the costs of acquiring technology, (b) the opportunity costs in terms of developmental funding for key areas such as education, health and infrastructure, (c) the need to consider alternatives to paying high royalty costs and (d) the need to focus on developing indigenous technology instead of relying on importing foreign technology. By shifting focus away from protecting IP producers and owners, towards viewing IP through the prism of human rights and development, policymakers will be able to determine what would constitute the best model of IP laws within their economic and cultural context, keeping in mind their obligations under TRIPS.
The ICT revolution of this era promises a radical shift in the paradigm of how information, knowledge and culture are produced, disseminated and accessed (Rifkin 2000). Yet this promise must overcome the challenges posed by severe restrictions that make access to knowledge and culture more difficult for people, especially the poor and underprivileged. Stricter IP laws that raise information costs constitute grave impediments to a more democratized information environment. This is illustrated in the case of partially sighted and blind people whose already limited access to digital content is further curtailed by traditional as well as new copy protocols (see boxed article).
The case highlights the broader issue of the relationship between copyright and access to knowledge. Copyright was intended as a system of balances to provide incentives to creators while also ensuring free circulation of copyright works in the public domain for all other creators to build on. This balance has shifted aggressively and it has expanded drastically in favour of
|
ICT, visual disability and copyright It is estimated that there are about 180 million people in the world who are blind and partially-sighted and who thus are disadvantaged in their ability to access content. Developments in text recognition software have improved their situation somewhat, although proprietary versions of such software, such as Jaws, still cost up to USD 1,000 per licensed copy. In India, many people with visual disabilities have started using what would be illegally obtained versions of Jaws. The only reason there is no enforcement of IP laws in this case would be the very bad press that a copyright infringement claim against an association for the blind would get if it were pursued. People who are blind or partially-sighted can only access the written word, whether originally displayed on paper or on computer screen, if its presentation is adapted in some way. Adaptations include enlarging, altering features such as colour or font, and transferring to a tactile code or into an audio format. The result may be hard copy Braille, large print, tape or CD or a temporary output from computer peripherals such as synthetic speech or enlarged screen display. Thus, providing access to content for those who are blind or partially-sighted would include granting them the rights of reproduction, adaptation and perhaps communication, which in turn would mean granting this set of users an exception to copyright. However, even if exceptions are provided, there could be additional restrictions, such as in the form of digital rights management (DRM). Kerscher and Fruchterman (2002) describe the impact of DRM on the ability of people who are blind to access digital content thus: The personal computer is the information access tool of choice for many persons who are blind. The computer is made accessible through a screen reader program. Screen readers use a text-to-speech synthesizer (TTS) to speak aloud the information that a sighted person would visually read on the computer screen. These screen readers intercept the text being written to the display and keep track of it, so that it can be vocalized in response to the user's control. For example, pressing certain keys will cause the screen reader to read the current word, line or paragraph. Screen readers also permit the use of dynamic Braille displays instead of, or in addition to, the TTS. The screen readers are external applications to the PC-based eBook reading software. The DRM wrappers are designed to work with reading applications that present the text visually without allowing the text to be copied, to prevent the illegal distribution of the book. Unfortunately, these anti-copying provisions also prevent the screen reader from providing access with TTS or Braille. The secure reading application views these external applications as security threats and blocks their access. As a result, people persons who try to use their screen reader with eBook reading systems find that their screen reader is not allowed to do its job… [which] leaves the person who is blind with no access to the ePublication, unless the reading application builds access directly into the user interface. |
content owners such as large publishing houses and media conglomerates. It is imperative for policymakers to consider what kind of exceptions or compulsory license mechanisms can be devised to enable greater access to content and information for all of their citizens. In spite of their relatively weak bargaining power in the new global order, policymakers from developing countries in Asia Pacific must consider the best options available to them under the current paradigm.
TRIPS provides for exceptions and limitations that may be included in national IP legislation. These exceptions may take two forms: (a) fair use or fair dealing and (b) statutory or compulsory licenses. Fair use refers to use of material without the copyright owner's permission that would not amount to an infringement—for example, using extracts of a book in teaching materials. The statutory or compulsory license approach envisages a specific scenario where a work may be freely reproduced after payment of a fixed royalty—for example, publishing a textbook not otherwise available in a country.
The Berne Convention, TRIPS and WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) stipulate that limitations or exceptions to copyright shall be confined to certain special cases; that they shall not come in conflict with normal exploitation of the copyright work and that they shall not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the copyright holder. This is known as the 'three-step test'. Each step makes it more difficult to grant limitations or exceptions to copyright. Historically, the three-step test was inserted into the Berne Convention only in relation to reproduction rights. However, TRIPS widened it to be applicable to all exclusive rights granted by the Berne Convention and TRIPS (Ryan 1999).
TRIPS provides only general parameters for exceptions. For example, Article 10(2) states:
It shall be a matter for legislation in the countries of the Union, and for special agreements existing or to be concluded between them, to permit the utilization, to the extent justified by the purpose, of literary or artistic works by way of illustration in publications, broadcasts or sound or visual recordings for teaching, provided that such utilization is compatible with fair practice.
Thus, the question of what constitutes 'utilization… [of works] for teaching' is to be determined by national legislation, or by bilateral agreements between Union members. Article 10(2) sets the outer limits without stipulating quantitative limitations for instance. It is up to each country to interpret the provision to enable it to formulate essential exceptions for educational uses of material.
Since Article 9(2) of the Berne Convention and Article 13 of TRIPS allow nation states to determine the extent of the exceptions and limitations to copyright, policymakers must make optimal use of this available flexibility, keeping in mind the wider public policy consideration of making information and technology available to the public. This is particularly useful for educational materials which, with recent and ongoing revolutionary ICT changes, can be produced and accessed in a variety of modes. In many Asia Pacific countries where availability of educational infrastructure and educational materials of a high standard is a problem, distance learning and digital content are useful alternatives. However, as a recent study indicates, 'among the most important obstacles to realizing the potential of digital technology in education are provisions of copyright law concerning the educational use of content, as well as the business and institutional structures shaped by that law' (Fischer 2006). Librarians and educationists argue that governments should use the greatest flexibilities available within the TRIPS agreement to ensure that national copyright laws make adequate provisions for educational use of information (Wong 2004).
In determining optimal use of exceptions and limitations for greater access, policymakers should undertake exhaustive surveys of the best global practices on copyright exceptions and limitations for use as models in the drafting of national copyright policies and laws. With respect to software for example, one good practice is to reserve the right to allow reverse engineering for the purposes of studying the software's functionality and for research and development. Moreover, policymakers should be well versed in the debates surrounding emerging practices in IP protection that have a huge impact on technological development and innovation, such as software patents and digital rights management (DRM) (see boxed article, next page).
Along with the current trend of aggressive expansion of IP4 regimes is a parallel movement rearticulating the importance of the commons of knowledge and cultural production. The idea of a knowledge and cultural commons borrows from the environmental movement and is based on the belief that a vibrant public domain of freely available knowledge and culture is vital for future innovation and creativity (Boyle 2002). Thus, even as copyright, patent and trademark systems are being promoted as the primary mode of understanding the production of knowledge and culture, another paradigm has emerged as a response to this regime of proprietary knowledge—a paradigm that proposes
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Copyright, fair use, and digital rights management DRM refers to technologies that define and enforce parameters of access to digital media or software. There are extensive arguments both for and against the use of software patents and DRM and it is beyond the scope of this article to examine either position in significant detail. However, it makes strategic sense for policymakers to understand the scope and implications of both software patents and DRM. Even Bill Gates, the most fervent supporter of copyright, has recognized the adverse impact software patents can have on the development of software. In 1991, Gates argued: 'If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors' (qtd. in Stallman 2005). The ostensible reason for the deployment of DRM is to 'enforce' the copyright of the manufacturer or the copyright holder, as the case may be. It should be noted, however, that DRMs are not envisaged under TRIPS and they are included only in an additional treaty, the WCT. DRM effectively grants to the copyright owner protection that is not available to him or her under traditional copyright law. Take for example a publisher who compiles a database of materials legally in the public domain, such as Supreme Court cases, and then locks the CD under a DRM. Under traditional copyright law, users can access these cases for free. However, with DRM, any attempt to break the technology lock to access the database, even if it does not infringe any copyright, may render users liable under an 'anti-circumvention' provision. Effectively, DRM allows the copyright holder to restrict access to content simply because it is in digital format, even if that same content would be easily accessible under traditional copyright law. Another example is a person wishing to make a copy of a legally purchased media file for personal use or for backup, utilizing the flexibility sanctioned under a fair use provision. This person would not be able to make a copy if anti-circumvention laws under DRM exist. Such laws could also prevent private screenings of digital media, which would otherwise be perfectly legal. We envisage DRM to have a significant impact on innovation. This is particularly significant for countries where the fruits of innovation need to be accessible to both the innovator and the consumer. An example is the Simputer, a low-cost handheld computer developed in India that would have been more difficult to invent if DRM laws existed in India. With the introduction of DRM and the criminalization of its circumvention, low-cost, locally relevant and contextually appropriate computer hardware and software may never become available to those who can least afford them. DRM exceeds TRIPS minimum standards and amounts to a TRIPS-plus provision that is neither a necessity nor an obligation. Since TRIPS does not mandate anti-circumvention provisions, there is no legal obligation to enact them as law. As for the WCT, a country that is not a signatory to it is not obliged to enact such provisions into the national law. Nevertheless, it is imperative for developing countries to consider all of the implications of failure to resist pressures from the US and Europe to become signatories to the WCT, to introduce DRM or anti-circumvention laws into their IP law, or to take on equivalent commitments under a bilateral agreement. For the reasons cited above, it seems premature for developing countries to be required to go beyond TRIPS standards and endorse the WCT. Developing countries should decide for themselves the level of protection their laws should afford to technological locks on copyright work and they should adopt anti-circumvention measures that are sensitive to their domestic situations (Garlick 2004). They should retain the freedom to legislate on the regulation of technological measures, in the interest of safeguarding access to knowledge and information and achieving broad socio-economic development, among others. Should any Asia Pacific government decide to introduce DRM into its copyright law, it must introduce safeguards to protect users from corporate abuse of the anti-circumvention provision, that is, safeguards to allow users to exercise all of the fair dealing clauses specified within their existing law. This is particularly important given that DRM can affect legitimate research, such as use of copyrighted technical journals, educational materials and software by researchers and students in developing countries. Introducing DRM without adequate safeguards could seriously undermine the developmental goals of a country. |
'openness', 'collaboration' and 'freedom' with respect to information goods, cultural production and participation in the information economy. This new paradigm has been enabled to a large extent by the success of the free open source software (FOSS) movement and the GNU Linux operating system that has been hailed as a viable alternative to traditional copyright (Wong and Sayo 2004).
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FOSS Free and Open Source Software is an alternative to proprietary software. FOSS grants users the right to use, distribute and modify source code freely. Open access Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Open content Similar to FOSS, but in the domain of non-software content, such as learning materials, literary works, music, film and the like. |
The Copysouth Group argues: 'For the purposes of access to computer technology throughout the global south, both open source software and free software can offer substantial advantages over the proprietary model. Furthermore, these movements offer an alternative to the proprietary model that is important in staking out an independent future for countries in the global south' (Story, Darch and Halbert 2006).
For developing countries, using FOSS significantly reduces the costs of acquisition of technology. As Ghosh (2003) points out:
…in developing countries, even after software price discounts, the price tag for proprietary software is enormous in purchasing power terms. The price of a typical, basic proprietary toolset required for any ICT infrastructure, Windows XP together with Office XP, is USD 560 in the US. This is over 2.5 months of GDP/capita in South Africa and over 16 months of GDP/capita in Vietnam. This is the equivalent of charging a single-user license fee in the US of USD 7,541 and USD 48,011 respectively, which is clearly unaffordable. Moreover, no likely discount would significantly reduce this cost, and in any case the simple fact that a single vendor controls any single proprietary software application means that there can never be a guarantee that any discount offered is intended to be sustained for the long term, rather than as a temporary measure used to tempt consumers into a lock-in situation….
Developing countries can customize open source software to suit their needs, and thereby also develop local skills. According to Ghosh (2003) in a 2002 study of FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) developers and users, 'the most important reason for developers to participate in open source communities was to learn new skills—'for free'. These skills include programming as well as 'skills rarely taught in formal computer science courses, such as copyright law and licenses', teamwork and team management—skills which 'help developers get jobs and can help create and sustain small businesses'.
Because governments are one of the largest consumers of software, it is critical that they start weighing the costs of using proprietary software for example in comparison with the funding requirements of other developmental priorities. However, most Asia Pacific countries have no official policy with respect to FOSS, open content or open access. One reason is that most of these models work primarily within the domain of private contracts and are completely voluntary. Also, many governments claim vendor neutrality as the reason for not having a policy on FOSS. But given the kind of advantages FOSS can bring to governments, it is time to rethink the idea of vendor neutrality. According to the UK Commission on Intellectual Property Rights,
Given the considerable needs which developing countries have for information and communication technologies and the limited funds which are available, it would seem sensible that governments and donors should certainly consider supporting programmes to raise awareness about low-cost options, including open source software, in developing countries. Developing countries and their donor partners should review policies for procurement of computer software, with a view to ensuring that options for using low-cost and/or open source software products are properly considered and their costs and benefits carefully evaluated.
Besides the FOSS and open knowledge movements, there are also processes like the proposed Access to Knowledge (A2K) Treaty5 which is tied with the WIPO Development Agenda. Policymakers need to evaluate how they can integrate the promotion of open models as part of the larger framework of IP and development (Hahn 2002).
With reference to open content, one challenge that policymakers must address is how to deal with two policy questions within the open content movement, namely (a) existing content under copyright and (b) content that may be produced in the future using or with the support of public funding. On the first question there may be little that can be done within an open content framework and some questions are best addressed through a combined strategy of copyright reform and perhaps the use of national right to information laws, wherever they exist. On the second question, however, there may be some interesting possibilities. The demand that IP created using public money should remain within public control is not novel and it can be combined with the normative goals of the open content movement. Furthermore, the success of the open content movement in particular areas can become the basis for strengthening the claim of a direct linkage between open content and greater access to information and knowledge.
Open content has many synergies with existing campaigns and policy reform efforts, including the open access movement. The demand for open policies that would facilitate greater access could be advanced towards public universities, towards publicly funded research and also partially towards privately-owned content for specific uses, including access for visually disabled people. For example, traditional publications can be required to convert their material to open content after a few months of enjoying exclusive publication rights.
Demands for more stringent enforcement of IPR are coming in from all quarters, particularly the US content industries, as piracy has increasingly come to be associated with Asia Pacific economies. However, while TRIPS signatories must provide adequate enforcement of IP, it should be acknowledged that many Asia Pacific countries that have reached an admirable stage of economic and technological development have done so even with relatively weak levels of IP enforcement and through a judicious use of imitation. For example, Taiwan and Korea, which experienced massive transformations from the 1960s to the 1980s, used imitation and reverse engineering to overcome the technological divide and create a strong national capacity in ICTs. Similarly, the Indian pharmaceutical industries benefited for many years from the absence of a pharmaceutical product patent and India is at present one the most significant exporters of generic low costs drugs to many parts of the world.
In 1947, 80–90 per cent of the pharmaceutical patents in India were held by multinational companies and more than 90 per cent of these drugs were not even being produced in India. India changed its patent laws to allow only for 'process patents' and not patents for the end product itself. This essentially meant that an Indian pharmaceutical company could make an existing drug through the process of reverse engineering. During this period, Indian pharmaceutical companies were able to reproduce existing drugs rapidly and at a low cost, thereby making them competitive in both foreign and domestic markets. By 1991, Indian firms accounted for 70 per cent of the bulk drugs and 80 per cent of formulations produced in the country. In 1996, six of the top 10 firms by pharmaceutical sales were Indian firms rather than the subsidiaries of foreign multinationals. Domestic firms (Indian-owned firms based in India) produce about 350 of the 500 bulk drugs consumed in the country. There are over 250 large pharmaceutical firms and about 9,000 registered small-scale units while the Indian Drug Manufacturers' Association (IDMA) estimates about 7,000 unregistered small-scale units producing drugs. The generic drug industry has been vital in ensuring that drugs are available at an affordable price.
Thus a 'weak' IP regime may actually promote local industries and help develop self-reliance in the field of technology (Thomas 2006). As the Copy South Group argues, lower levels of copyright enforcement enable greater circulation of knowledge, culture and technology throughout the developing world, while 'stronger protection and enforcement of copyright rules may well reduce access to knowledge required by developing [countries] to support education and research, and access to copyrighted products such as software'. This in turn could have potentially negative consequences on their ability to develop their human resources and technological capacity.
Policymakers must rise to the challenge of striking a balance between copyright and the need to facilitate affordable technological transfer to enable the emergence of a sustainable indigenous technological sector. To do otherwise would mean perpetual dependence on imported technology and know-how.
Over the last decade, developed countries such as the US and the European Union have hotly pursued bilateral and regional free trade agreements (FTAs). US trade policy has been to promote IP rules that reflect a standard of protection similar to that found in US law. Asia Pacific trade partners considering and committing to these more stringent IP rules allegedly do so in exchange for other concessions, such as preferential access to US markets for manufactured and agricultural products. However, such FTAs go beyond TRIPS in terms of protection of patents and pharmaceutical test data, ICT-related areas, copyright protection and enforcement of IP rights. It is also important to note the manner in which FTAs are used by the US as part of a strategy to push for TRIPS-plus standards at a multilateral level. When the US has a whole range of FTAs with small developing countries, it can then claim that these standards are accepted worldwide and should become a global standard.
What follows is a briefcase study for the Asia Pacific region—the Singapore approach to FTAs. The discussion highlights some key implications of the IP provisions Singapore committed to under its FTA with the US (hereafter USSFTA).
Singapore is a trade-dependent nation with a cumulative trade volume presently accounting for about thrice its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). While maintaining its commitment to the WTO as a route to global trade liberalization, Singapore actively pursues trade liberalization through regional platforms, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Asia Pacific Economic Community (APEC). The East Asian crisis of 1997–98 and the consequent slowdown in trade and investment liberalization are allegedly the impetus for Singapore's foray into bilateral FTAs with key and strategic trading partners. This strategy aims to increase economic ties and garner 'first-mover' advantage with key and strategic trading partners, enhancing market access opportunities beyond the region and in emerging market economies similarly committed to trade and investment liberalisation in the goods and services sectors.
The USSFTA is ranked as the most comprehensive that the US has achieved with an ASEAN economy and is considered a 'landmark agreement' for its WTO-plus and NAFTA-plus [North American FTA] commitments' (IES 2007). The provisions on IP are particularly remarkable. As described in Singapore's FTA Network,6 'stronger IPR protection set[s] [the] ground for knowledge-based industries' and is a means for securing and maintaining competitive advantage on innovation and capability development in fields such as the creative industries, information technology (IT), pharmaceuticals, science and other high-technology industries.
In the trademarks arena, the key provisions are Singapore's commitment to enhance its trademarks regime to register 'unconventional' or non-visually perceptible marks, such as sound or scent marks, and to accord stronger protection for well-known marks to prevent dilution.7 On patents, commitments were secured to strengthen existing patent regimes of both countries to protect bio-inventions. Singapore was to accede to the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) to provide a system for better protection of new plant varieties,8 and both countries agreed to maintain the current regimes that would allow all inventions to be patentable, subject to the condition that they are not contrary to morality or public order. Also crucial was the commitment to limit the use of compulsory licences to safeguard against anti-competitive practices, public non-commercial use, national emergencies and other circumstances of extreme urgency. All commitments relating to trademarks and patents were implemented by Singapore on 1 July 2004.
On copyright, Singapore and the US agreed to align their terms of protection for copyrighted works, performances and phonograms. Thus the term of protection in Singapore, effective 1 July 2004, is the period of the 'life of the author plus seventy years' or, as applicable, 'seventy years after first publication, broadcast or performance'.9 A further commitment was the adoption of additional protection standards in relation to the digital environment and the World Wide Web. Effective 17 January 2005, Singapore acceded to the WCT and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (WPPT). Singapore incorporated substantive anti-circumvention provisions to prohibit tampering with technological protection measures and to prevent piracy of copyrighted works over the Internet in view of activities such as online distribution of software, music and publications. Thus, these unlawful acts now carry both civil and criminal liability, independent of any liability for copyright infringement. Provision was made for immunity for Internet (Network) service providers that comply with notification and take-down procedures when suspected infringing material is hosted, stored or transmitted on or through their servers or networks.
To complement these commitments on enhanced IP standards, specific obligations on IP enforcement were entrenched, including anti-piracy enforcement aligned with closer industry consultation and collaboration. Effective 1 January 2005, Singapore incorporated enhanced criminal sanctions to penalize any entity (whether a business or an individual) not only for copyright-infringing activities wilfully carried out for profit or in a commercial setting, but also where the impact of the activities are significant. Effectively therefore, certain forms of end-user infringement or piracy now amount to criminal offences. Another provision worth mentioning is that Singapore agreed to stronger rights for copyright owners in providing, for example, that in trademark and copyright infringement actions, the owners could, where they find it difficult to calculate the actual damages suffered, opt instead, as provided to owners under the US regime, for the remedy of statutory damages (compensation based on a preset range).
Both Singapore and the US resolved on measures for prevention of and enforcement against illegal manufacture, import and export of counterfeit and pirated goods, and in regard to optical disc manufacturing activities, Singapore committed to formalize its regime of regulating these activities through the imprint of Source Identification Code on optical discs (unless specifically exempted by the rights' owners) and to criminalize businesses that make pirated copies from legitimately purchased products.10 Overall, the Singapore perspective on the IPR measures incorporated in the USSFTA is that they are relevant and necessary to 'encourage more R&D and knowledge-intensive activities to be located in Singapore' and raise IP 'protection levels to US standards' (Sen 2004).
It is not easy to assess the substantive social and economic implications of these IP commitments. The underlying principle seems to be that a strong IP regime 'provides an incentive for research and development and a ladder on which industry can climb up the value-chain'. Efforts are ongoing to effectively monitor the social and economic effects of the implementation of these provisions through consultations with industry and all relevant stakeholders. According to commentators, the objective of the monitoring efforts is to secure 'a balance between granting exclusivity and allowing for the free flow of ideas and knowledge sharing' (Koh and Lin 2004, p. 133).
Singapore authorities went through public consultation exercises in formulating legislative amendments to its IP laws. One example is obtaining industry feedback11 to determine what copyright material should be excluded or exempted by the Minister for Law from the prohibition against circumvention of technological access control measures.12 This highlights the measures that sophisticated Asia Pacific governments must consider for implementation after committing to far-reaching IP provisions in its FTAs.
There are some general advantages and costs that come hand-in-glove with the new IP standards. Generally, the empirical studies do not indicate that countries that strengthen their IP regimes are likely to 'experience a sudden boost in inflows of foreign investment' although it is generally believed this could stimulate cross-border licensing activity and technology transfers. Policymakers must address the growing concerns that rules relating to copyright term extension, technological protection measures, liability of Internet service providers, end-user criminal liability for copyright piracy and the shift of the burden of proof for copyright infringement cases will endanger the rights of local consumers.
The overarching question has been to what extent these rigorous commitments were imperative to Singapore, the extent to which reviews and benchmark studies had been carried out and/or evaluated on necessity and scope and the extent of local and non-governmental involvement in available reviews during the negotiations. In addition, neighbouring Asia Pacific countries13 have been confronted by the rigour of the Singapore commitments in their own ongoing negotiations with the US (Endeshaw 2005). Thus, it must be acknowledged that the USSFTA could have a disempowering effect on other policymakers in developing countries in Asia Pacific who are dealing with powers such as the US and the EU which are slow to and effectively need not take it on themselves to evaluate the full impact of rigorous IP provisions.
Asia Pacific countries can take away several lessons from the USSFTA TRIPS-plus obligations specifically in relation to ICT-related areas, copyright protection, software protection, indigenous knowledge and enforcement of intellectual property rights. First, in negotiating IP issues in bilateral agreements, each Asia Pacific country should strive to anticipate provisions that their trading partner will propose and be the one to take the bold stance to table novel rules, related incentives and alternative mechanisms on policy areas where there are clear and significant interests. Some important examples are proposals that relate to data protection and cultural heritage or traditional knowledge.
Second, cognizant of the political stakes in these negotiations, policymakers should take measures to secure decisions that are clearly both open and transparent. This will mean that prospective options on policies and negotiating positions should be made accessible to the public to obtain feedback from relevant key local corporations and industry sectors and reconcile differing viewpoints or concerns via transparent processes.
Third, to secure maximum local understanding and participation on issues, policymakers need to foster public awareness. This may require tasking and collaborating with the local media to send clear and consistent messages on these issues to the general public.
Fourth, policymakers of developing countries in Asia Pacific should diligently consider the fact that enhanced enforcement will translate to additional costs in terms of expenses for budget outlays and training of enforcement officers. They should question whether stronger enforcement of IP rights will take away resources from other development priorities and the extent to which this is acceptable.
Finally, policymakers should assess, (a) the need to promote non-proprietary IP, (b) the need to provide a commons to promote innovation and economic development and (c) the need to provide public subsidies for development of free and open source software.
Member countries of APEC agree that the ongoing increase in the number of FTAs14 adds impetus to their efforts to liberalize trade and investment throughout the region. However, the APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC) has rung a warning bell that Asia Pacific countries need to ensure that these agreements do not compromise the regional trading environment for governments and commercial entities. APEC's specific response has been to propose the development of a range of trade and capacity building moves for the region. We see some of these as laudable, such as developing a best practices guide and an FTA/RTA (Regional Trading Agreement) database, and advocating sharing of negotiating approaches and measures. However, these measures must include a review of possibly inconsistent provisions in multiple FTAs that could impact businesses. Some APEC initiatives worthy of mention that policymakers must ensure result in substantive available material are the APEC Intellectual Property Experts Group (IPEG) projects on Public Education and Awareness, the implementation of the APEC Model Guidelines on Anti-counterfeiting and Piracy and the proposal for sharing experiences in negotiation to promote 'High Quality' FTAs and RTAs.
As APEC works on ICT cooperation to increase the capacity of member countries to reap the benefits of the digital era,15 policymakers particularly from developing countries should closely monitor action on these proposals to ensure close collaboration on both the IP and the ICT front, to avert the danger of 'all sound and fury, signifying nothing'. We propose that a clear message be sent to business and governments in the region on the significance of the role and reach of IP intertwined with ICT, by incorporating IPR activities under the APEC IPEG in APEC's ICT agenda. In the same vein, the APEC IPR Service Centres set up or to be set up in each country and the IPR Education and Awareness programmes should be merged or closely affiliated with APEC Digital Opportunity Center activities.16
The ASEAN IPR Action Plan 2004–10 identifies the key objectives of increasing IP asset creation and commercialization in research, science and technology; harmonizing IPR registration, protection and enforcement in the region; promoting public awareness; and empowering national IP offices to collaborate on development of services to business. Progress appears far from swift, one example being that copyright was included for discussion as a specific form of IPR only as recently as 2003. Thus, a review of issues related to the digital environment and ICT and how cultural copyright may better be protected is at an early stage. For a start, policymakers could address a fundamental interplay between IP and ICT by closely reviewing the ICT infrastructure and facilities within each national IP office.17 Taking steps to enhance what is available within local IP registration regimes would boost ongoing promises to the public that the country will work towards harmonization of IP laws, regional IP registration and business development services to allow for genuine benefits for investors within the region.
Over the last few years, ASEAN has taken on the task of negotiating with other countries, including those in Asia Pacific such as India and China. Policymakers should seriously consider the value of throwing in their lot wholeheartedly with regional groups such as ASEAN or APEC, on the premise that the cumulative negotiation process in any trade agreement with giants such as the US and EU is likely to result in commitments that are of general value and impact, unlike the often overly rigorous IP provisions of bilateral FTAs.
This chapter has sought to highlight some of the key issues with respect to IP and ICT that policymakers in Asia Pacific should bear in mind. The primary policy consideration should emanate from a public interest approach to IP. Treating IP merely as a matter of private property or private interest rights can be seriously detrimental to access to knowledge, culture and technology.
Moreover, policymakers in Asia Pacific must take a close and hard look at moves in their direction that seek to bait them into taking on TRIPS-plus commitments under any guise, whether via a bilateral agreement or a regional multilateral agreement. The overall interests of their public and national social, economic and developmental goals must be carefully guarded and decisions made only after detailed reviews and analytical studies that would enable a reasonable assessment of the necessity and scope of any potential commitment in the fields of IP and ICT.
1. For more information on the WIPO Development agenda, see http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/da.html
2. In 1994, China accounted for 4.9 per cent of global R&D expenditure, India and Central Asia for 2.2 per cent, Latin America for 1.9 per cent, the Pacific and Southeast Asia 0.9 per cent (excluding newly industrialised countries) and sub-Saharan Africa 0.5 per cent (UNESCO 1998).
3. OECD R&D Expenditure in 1999 was USD 553 billion (OECD 2001) while India's national income was USD 440 billion (World Bank Data).
4. A number of activists and scholars have argued that we need to avoid using the phrase 'intellectual property' since it conceals more than it reveals. The phrase covers a range of property claims—trademarks, copyright, patents, geographical indications, etc.—all of which belong to distinct domains. We acknowledge this to be a serious question, and use the phrase in reference to its global usage but with a certain degree of agnosticism.
5. The A2K treaty is a multilateral treaty initiated by Consumer Project on Technology (Cptech) and it attempts to carve out global exceptions to copyright for education and other uses. For a full text of the draft treaty, see http://www.cptech.org/a2k/a2k_treaty_may9.pdf
6. See the FTA Network website at http://www.iesingapore.gov.sg/wps/portal
7. Section 55(4)(b)(ii), Trade Marks Act, Cap 332, 1999 Rev. Ed. (available at http://statutes.agc.gov.sg). This provision provides a remedy to proprietors of well-known marks against persons who have business identifiers that are either identical or have an essential part that is identical to the well-known mark. The remedy is available where there has been dilution in an unfair manner of the distinctive character of the well-known mark, or where the said business identifier would take unfair advantage of the distinctive character of the well-known mark.
8. Singapore's obligations as a signatory of the UPOV 1991 Convention have been enacted into law as the Plant Variety Protection Act 2004, Act 22 of 2004 (available at http://statutes.agc.gov.sg).
9. For the duration of copyright where the copyright subsists in a literary, dramatic or musical work, or in an artistic work other than a photograph, see Section 28(2), Copyright Act, Cap 63, 1999 Rev. Ed. For the duration of copyright in other works like sound recordings, cinematograph films, television broadcasts and sound broadcasts, cable programmes and published editions of works, see Sections 92 to 96, Copyright Act (available at http://statutes.agc.gov.sg).
10. For provisions on optical disc manufacturing, please see Manufacture of Optical Discs Act 2004, Act 25 of 2004 (available at http://statutes.agc.gov.sg).
11. Feedback was obtained from copyright owners, educational institutions, archives, scholars, researchers and the general public.
12. For example, the Copyright (Excluded Works) Order 2005, which excludes any literary work in eBook format and for which a technological access control measure was applied to all editions including digital text editions made available by an institution assisting handicapped readers.
13. For example, Thailand and Malaysia.
14. APEC trade agreements include those between Singapore and New Zealand, Singapore and Japan, Singapore and the United States, Singapore and Australia, Chile and five other APEC Member Economies, and the European Free Trade Association and China and Hong Kong. Thailand has signed FTAs with Laos and Australia, while ASEAN signed an agreement with India.
15. See the APEC Action Agenda for the New Economy (2000) and the e-APEC Strategy (2001) for the region to have community-based access to the Internet by 2010 and to increase learning and employment opportunities, improve public services and promote universal for ICT and information services.
16. Set up by Chinese Taipei in 2000, it has led camps and workshops on technology.
17. Examples of IP offices that are state-of-art are those of Singapore, Japan, Korea, Chinese Taipei, Thailand and Malaysia. Such an IP office is also being created in Brunei Darussalam.
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This section provides a quantitative overview of the state and relative progress of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the Asia Pacific region, and it is intended to complement the work in this volume, including the individual country chapters. It must be borne in mind that the figures on ICT diffusion and use are affected significantly, if not determined outrightly, by the multitude of developments concerning the new technologies or their applications, government policies or their absence, regulation and business initiatives described in this publication. Therefore, the analysis that follows aspires to offer a realistic perspective against which to assess the combined reach and effects of these developments as they are reflected in the figures at any given time.
Following the merger of the work of Orbicom and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in the area of international benchmarking for the information society,
this quantitative analysis is based on ITU's ICT Opportunity Index (ITU 2007) and it uses Orbicom's Infostate conceptual framework, which is based on the quantifiable notions of Infodensity and Infouse. This framework enables analysis both across and within countries over time, as well as the monitoring of progress with regard to specific ICTs (Orbicom 2003, 2005).
The ICT Opportunity Index is the aggregation of the following components and indicators:
ICT Opportunity Index |
|
|
Indicators |
Infodensity |
Networks |
|
Main telephone lines per 100 inhabitants |
|
Mobile cellular subscribers per 100 inhabitants |
|
International Internet bandwidth |
|
(kbs per inhabitant) |
|
Skills |
|
Adult literacy rates |
|
Gross enrolment rates |
|
primary |
|
secondary |
|
tertiary |
Infouse |
ICT uptake |
|
Internet users per 100 inhabitants |
|
Proportion of households with a TV |
|
Computers per 100 inhabitants |
|
Intensity of use |
|
Total broadband Internet subscribers per |
|
100 inhabitants |
|
International outgoing telephone traffic |
|
(minutes) per capita |
The Foreword to the 2005/06 edition of the Digital Review of Asia Pacific notes that '[w]hile other regions of the world, such as Europe and the Americas, shift progressively towards regional integration, the Asia-Pacific region faces the threat of fragmentation. This challenge is so important that it will continue to be present in the dynamics of development well beyond the Tunis phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)' (p. ix). Indeed, if the group of Asia Pacific countries featured in this publication is perceived as a region, one manifestation of the fragmentation can be seen immediately in the latest published figures. There continues to be a massive digital divide within the region as shown by the ICT Opportunity Index for 2005 (Figure 1). Economies such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, Taiwan, Macau and South Korea are not only at the top of the scale for the region, but also among the top countries worldwide—together with Scandinavian, North American and Western European nations. They help pull the regional average higher than the global. Some countries in Asia Pacific form a second tier, with Brunei and Malaysia above the global average and China, Thailand and the Maldives somewhat behind. At the other extreme, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Nepal, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Laos and Pakistan are at the bottom, both in the region and internationally, together with many African states. Afghanistan has been facing extraordinary circumstances and challenges for some time now, but all the other countries have their own unique stories as well. In any case, the digital gaps in these countries are among the largest in the world.
The magnitude of the gaps among the Asia Pacific economies becomes even more pronounced when we focus on the 'networks' component of the overall ICT Opportunity Index (Figure 2). The divide clearly intensifies, with the top countries achieving higher values and the countries at the bottom assuming lower values. Only minor differences are observed in the composition compared to the overall index, such that Malaysia is now below the global average. This underscores the close relationship between the available ICT infrastructure in the country and the uptake and use of ICTs.
Moving beyond the aggregate benchmarks, many additional insights can be gained from the examination of the most recent data for specific ICTs and individual countries.
Even in 2005, several countries, including some in the Asia Pacific region, continue to have precious little fixed-line infrastructure. The penetration of wireline telephones, as measured by the main lines-per-100-inhabitants indicator, barely registers in Afghanistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos. Moreover, it continues to be at very low levels in Bhutan, India, Indonesia, Mongolia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Sri Lanka (Table 1). In all, 17 of the 28 economies examined here have penetration rates below the global average.
Similar findings hold true for PCs and Internet use, which are still at an embryonic stage in most countries of the region. The availability of bandwidth is also quite limited. Thus, it is not surprising that broadband Internet use is a rarity. At the same time, the 10 countries that exceed the global average in PCs and Internet use do so by wide margins. South Korea and Hong Kong, in particular, are among the world leaders in broadband, highlighting once again the huge developmental disparities in the region.
Figure 1
ICT Opportunties Index in Asia Pacific, 2005
Figure 2
Networks Index in Asia Pacific, 2005
In a few countries, even the diffusion of TVs among households is quite low, both by regional and global standards. (On average, about two in three households in the world have a TV set.) Myanmar and Afghanistan have particularly low TV penetrations among households, at 3 per cent and 6.3 per cent, respectively, while Nepal fares only somewhat better at 13.2 per cent. In Bangladesh, fewer than one in four households have a TV, while the corresponding figure in India and Sri Lanka is less than one TV in three households.
The situation is comparatively much better and more promising when it comes to cellphones. It is by now well documented that the cellphone represents the bright spot in the
Table 1
ICTs in Asia Pacific, 2005
|
Main lines |
Cell phones |
Internet |
PCs |
TVs (% of |
Bandwidth |
Broadband |
|
(per 100) |
(per 100) |
(per 100) |
(per 100) |
households) |
(kbs/inhabitant) |
(per 100) |
Afghanistan |
0.3 |
4.0 |
0.0 |
0.1 |
6.3 |
0.0 |
0.0 |
Australia |
50.2 |
91.4 |
70.4 |
76.6 |
99.0 |
595.4 |
10.4 |
Bangladesh |
0.8 |
6.3 |
0.3 |
1.6 |
22.9 |
0.0 |
0.0 |
Bhutan |
3.9 |
4.6 |
3.0 |
1.6 |
57.7 |
1.2 |
0.0 |
Brunei |
22.4 |
62.3 |
36.1 |
8.8 |
98.3 |
148.4 |
2.2 |
Cambodia |
0.2 |
7.5 |
0.3 |
0.3 |
42.8 |
0.1 |
0.0 |
China |
26.6 |
29.9 |
8.6 |
4.2 |
89.2 |
10.3 |
2.9 |
Hong Kong |
53.9 |
123.5 |
50.1 |
59.3 |
99.0 |
932.0 |
23.6 |
India |
4.5 |
8.2 |
5.4 |
1.5 |
32.0 |
1.8 |
0.1 |
Indonesia |
5.7 |
21.1 |
7.2 |
1.5 |
65.4 |
0.7 |
0.0 |
Iran |
27.3 |
10.4 |
10.1 |
12.5 |
76.6 |
1.4 |
0.0 |
Japan |
45.3 |
75.3 |
51.5 |
67.4 |
99.0 |
103.5 |
17.5 |
Laos |
1.3 |
10.8 |
0.4 |
1.7 |
30.3 |
0.3 |
0.0 |
Macau |
37.9 |
115.8 |
37.0 |
34.8 |
94.0 |
347.8 |
14.8 |
Malaysia |
16.8 |
75.2 |
42.4 |
21.5 |
95.2 |
12.3 |
1.9 |
Maldives |
8.6 |
53.9 |
5.4 |
12.0 |
92.0 |
14.1 |
0.9 |
Mongolia |
5.9 |
21.1 |
10.1 |
12.8 |
63.0 |
1.5 |
0.1 |
Myanmar |
0.9 |
0.3 |
0.1 |
0.7 |
3.0 |
0.2 |
0.0 |
Nepal |
1.8 |
0.8 |
0.8 |
0.5 |
13.2 |
0.2 |
0.0 |
New Zealand |
42.9 |
87.6 |
68.4 |
51.6 |
98.0 |
113.6 |
8.2 |
Pakistan |
3.4 |
8.3 |
6.8 |
0.5 |
46.5 |
0.5 |
0.0 |
Philippines |
4.0 |
41.3 |
5.5 |
5.4 |
63.1 |
3.8 |
0.1 |
Singapore |
42.4 |
100.8 |
40.2 |
93.3 |
98.6 |
703.7 |
15.3 |
South Korea |
49.2 |
79.4 |
68.4 |
53.2 |
99.0 |
103.0 |
24.8 |
Sri Lanka |
6.0 |
16.2 |
1.3 |
3.5 |
31.6 |
2.4 |
0.1 |
Taiwan |
59.8 |
97.4 |
58.0 |
57.5 |
99.0 |
478.5 |
19.1 |
Thailand |
11.0 |
53.3 |
11.0 |
6.9 |
91.9 |
10.6 |
0.2 |
Vietnam |
18.8 |
11.4 |
12.7 |
1.4 |
82.8 |
4.3 |
0.2 |
Global avg. |
19.6 |
45.4 |
18.2 |
16.0 |
65.5 |
133.2 |
3.7 |
Regional avg. |
19.7 |
43.5 |
21.8 |
21.2 |
67.5 |
128.3 |
5.0 |
ICTs-for-development scene. It has made the most inroads among poor populations compared to other ICTs and its penetration has surpassed the availability of fixed telephone lines in most countries. Moreover, this is true both among developed and developing economies, as can be observed in the 2005 data contained in Table 1, with the exception of Iran, Myanmar, Nepal and Vietnam. In some developing countries in particular, cellphones are the only significant telephony option (Bangladesh, Cambodia and Laos), while in others they exceed fixed-lines by a sizeable factor.1 This is the case in Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Maldives, Mongolia, Thailand and Sri Lanka, and perhaps nowhere more dramatic than in the Philippines. However, in Myanmar and Nepal, even the cellphone still did not amount to much in 2005 (at a time when in Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore there were more cellphones than people).
The huge gaps in ICT development among countries accentuate other existing gaps. To the extent that ICTs represent powerful tools for development, it is of policy interest to know how their diffusion and use is progressing. The data allow us to examine growth within the region, as well as in a comparative sense vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Aggregate growth, as captured by the ICT Opportunity Index, is shown in Figure 3.
Clearly, much of the progress made in recent years worldwide is due to cellphones and the Internet. In the 2001–05 period, cellphones more than doubled and Internet use nearly doubled. The penetration of PCs increased by 60 per cent, while that of TV increased only marginally, which is not surprising given that in most countries TV reached saturation levels some time ago. On the aggregate, penetration of main lines was stagnant. These trends can be seen in the evolution of the global average (Figure 4). Moreover, bandwidth increased and significant progress was made in the deployment of broadband (virtually non-existent in 2001), as the focus has shifted there for value-added applications.
While similar movements to those encountered globally characterize Asia Pacific economies, the interplay between
Figure 3
Evolution of ICT Opportunity Index, Asia Pacific
Figure 4
Average Evolution, 2001–05
levels and growth of ICTs must always be placed in its proper perspective. As explained in previous studies (Orbicom 2003, 2005), typically developing countries have much higher growth rates than advanced countries. This is largely the result of insignificant initial levels of ICTs and is not necessarily indicative of catching up—and therefore of a closing divide—as the bar is set higher and higher by advanced countries, which also continue to progress.
The gaps among Asia Pacific economies, discussed earlier, are coupled with asymmetries in the progress made. Some countries made significant strides across various ICTs, while progress in other countries was for the most part limited to cellphones. In the ICT Opportunity Index, for instance, we see that the values for Afghanistan, Bhutan and Myanmar increased much more than others, but above-average growth also took place in Australia, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, among others. Cambodia and Nepal had growth approaching the average; Malaysia, Thailand and South Korea grew below average; while the smallest aggregate growth in the region was recorded by the Philippines.
Vietnam made significant advances in main lines, contrary to the general stagnation. Sizeable increases in main lines also occurred in China, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Iran, Myanmar and Pakistan. Cellphones increased everywhere, but growth was more spectacular in some countries. Indonesia's penetration rate for instance jumped from 3.1 per cent to 21.1 per cent between 2001 and 2005, while marked increases were also noted in Laos, India and Pakistan (from around 0.5 per cent to 10.8 per cent, 8.2 per cent and 8.3 per cent, respectively). Cellphones increased the least among countries with very high penetration levels (for example, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Singapore). Vietnam experienced impressive growth in Internet use (from 1.3 per cent to 11.7 per cent), while considerable gains were also made by Pakistan, Mongolia and India. Bangladesh and Mongolia led the growth in PCs, whereas Sri Lanka had a noticeable increase in TV penetration.
The detailed data for 2001 are contained in Annex Table 1 and they can facilitate detailed comparisons with the 2005 data shown in Table 1. What follows are individual country charts, where indicators in index form offer visual comparisons of the evolution between 2001 and 2005,2 as well as benchmarking against the 2005 global average.
A cursory look at the geography of the Pacific Island States would suggest that any technology that could enhance communications among these island states and with the rest of the world would be critical. The situation, however, is far from rosy. In terms of the ICT Opportunity Index, they all fall behind the Asia Pacific average and only French Polynesia and New Caledonia hover around the global average—the former slightly ahead, the latter slightly behind. All other states fall considerably short of the global average (Figure 5). In Networks (not shown, as it is not fundamentally different), all countries are below the regional and global averages.
Among the island states in this group, New Caledonia leads in main lines, cellphones (with a much higher penetration than
Figure 5
ICT Opportunities Index, Pacific Island States, 2005
the others at 56.7 per cent—up from 31 per cent in 2001) and Internet penetration (Table 2). In terms of levels, main lines are relatively high also in French Polynesia, Tonga and Fiji. Cell-phone penetration is once again the success story as it has taken off more than any other ICT, most dramatically in Tonga, which from near zero in 2001 achieved a penetration rate approaching 30 per cent by 2005. Big increases were also recorded in Samoa and Micronesia from near-zero levels. French Polynesia leads in PCs, albeit with a modest 10.9 per cent penetration—significantly lower than the global average. American Samoa and French Polynesia have very high penetration of TVs. French Polynesia and New Caledonia are also the only countries with some broadband—although bandwidth in the islands is very low compared to the global average.
Table 2
ICTs in Pacific Island States, 2005
|
Main lines |
Cellphones |
Internet |
PCs |
TVs (% of |
Broadband |
Bandwidth |
|
(per 100) |
(per 100) |
(per 100) |
(per 100) |
households) |
(per 100) |
(kbs/inhabitant) |
Fiji |
13.3 |
24.2 |
8.3 |
5.9 |
60.0 |
8.5 |
0.8 |
French Polynesia |
20.9 |
34.0 |
21.5 |
10.9 |
92.1 |
51.6 |
4.3 |
Micronesia |
11.2 |
12.7 |
12.6 |
5.4 |
15.1 |
5.4 |
0.0 |
New Caledonia |
23.3 |
56.7 |
32.1 |
2.5 |
78.0 |
55.7 |
4.1 |
Papua New Guinea |
1.1 |
1.3 |
2.3 |
6.6 |
10.0 |
0.1 |
0.0 |
Samoa |
10.5 |
13.0 |
3.2 |
1.9 |
98.0 |
4.9 |
0.0 |
Solomon Islands |
1.5 |
1.3 |
0.8 |
4.6 |
4.1 |
1.7 |
0.1 |
Tonga |
13.7 |
29.8 |
3.0 |
6.0 |
26.3 |
2.0 |
0.6 |
Vanuatu |
3.2 |
5.8 |
3.5 |
1.4 |
6.0 |
2.3 |
0.0 |
Regional avg. |
19.7 |
43.5 |
21.8 |
21.2 |
67.5 |
5.0 |
128.3 |
Global avg. |
19.6 |
45.4 |
18.2 |
16.0 |
65.5 |
3.7 |
133.2 |
American Samoa |
18.2 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Kiribati |
5.1 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Marshall Islands |
8.3 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
1. It is not only that main lines generally do not increase much anymore, but also that in many cases they are decreasing in number even in advanced countries, mainly due to substitution of cellphones for fixed-lines.
2. The indicators used are those of the ICT Opportunity Index, with the exception of bandwidth, broadband and international outgoing traffic which, methodologically, are subject to a monotonic transformation and are not conducive to indices.
ITU. (2007). Measuring the information society 2007. ICT Opportunity Index and World Telecommunications/ICT Indicators, Geneva.
Orbicom. (2003). Monitoring the digital divide…and beyond. National Research Council of Canada.
Orbicom. (2005). From the digital divide to digital opportunities: Measuring Infostates for development. National Research Council of Canada.
Saik Yoon, C. (ed.) (2005). Digital review of Asia Pacific 2005/2006.
Annex Table 1
ICTs in Asia Pacific, 2001
|
Main lines |
Cell phones |
Internet |
PCs |
TVs (% of |
Bandwidth |
Broadband |
|
(per 100) |
(per 100) |
(per 100) |
(per 100) |
households) |
(kbs/inhabitant) |
(per 100) |
Afghanistan |
0.1 |
0.0 |
0.0 |
0.0 |
6.3 |
0.0 |
0.0 |
Australia |
51.8 |
57.3 |
39.7 |
51.5 |
96.3 |
36.2 |
0.6 |
Bangladesh |
0.4 |
0.4 |
0.1 |
0.2 |
17.2 |
0.0 |
0.0 |
Bhutan |
2.6 |
0.0 |
0.7 |
1.0 |
57.7 |
0.3 |
0.0 |
Brunei |
25.9 |
41.8 |
12.9 |
7.3 |
98.3 |
17.5 |
0.6 |
Cambodia |
0.2 |
1.7 |
0.1 |
0.1 |
40.0 |
0.0 |
0.0 |
China |
14.1 |
11.3 |
2.6 |
1.9 |
87.3 |
0.6 |
0.0 |
Hong Kong |
58.0 |
85.9 |
38.7 |
38.7 |
99.0 |
106.7 |
4.2 |
India |
3.7 |
0.6 |
0.7 |
0.6 |
31.6 |
0.1 |
0.0 |
Indonesia |
3.5 |
3.1 |
2.0 |
1.1 |
54.5 |
0.2 |
0.0 |
Iran |
16.9 |
3.2 |
1.6 |
7.0 |
67.4 |
0.2 |
0.0 |
Japan |
48.2 |
58.8 |
38.4 |
35.8 |
99.0 |
17.8 |
3.0 |
Laos |
1.0 |
0.5 |
0.2 |
0.3 |
29.9 |
0.0 |
0.0 |
Macau |
40.4 |
44.5 |
23.1 |
18.3 |
93.0 |
27.5 |
2.2 |
Malaysia |
19.7 |
30.9 |
26.6 |
12.6 |
85.9 |
3.1 |
0.0 |
Maldives |
9.9 |
6.9 |
3.6 |
5.4 |
61.5 |
1.6 |
0.0 |
Mongolia |
5.2 |
8.1 |
1.7 |
1.7 |
49.0 |
0.4 |
0.0 |
Myanmar |
0.6 |
0.0 |
0.0 |
0.3 |
3.0 |
0.0 |
0.0 |
Nepal |
1.3 |
0.1 |
0.3 |
0.4 |
13.2 |
0.0 |
0.0 |
New Zealand |
47.0 |
59.0 |
45.4 |
38.7 |
98.1 |
49.0 |
0.4 |
Pakistan |
2.3 |
0.5 |
0.4 |
0.4 |
38.5 |
0.2 |
0.0 |
Philippines |
4.2 |
15.5 |
2.6 |
2.2 |
61.5 |
0.3 |
0.0 |
Singapore |
47.1 |
72.4 |
41.2 |
50.8 |
99.4 |
63.9 |
3.7 |
South Korea |
54.4 |
61.4 |
51.5 |
47.5 |
99.0 |
20.7 |
4.2 |
Sri Lanka |
4.4 |
3.6 |
0.8 |
0.9 |
20.6 |
0.1 |
0.0 |
Taiwan |
57.3 |
97.2 |
34.9 |
36.4 |
97.8 |
32.3 |
4.2 |
Thailand |
9.8 |
12.2 |
5.7 |
3.2 |
90.6 |
1.0 |
0.0 |
Vietnam |
3.8 |
1.6 |
1.3 |
0.9 |
79.6 |
0.0 |
0.0 |
Global avg. |
19.6 |
21.8 |
9.5 |
10.0 |
63.0 |
30.4 |
0.4 |
Regional avg. |
19.1 |
24.2 |
13.4 |
13.0 |
63.4 |
13.6 |
0.8 |
.af |
Afghanistan |
.au |
Australia |
.bd |
Bangladesh |
.bt |
Bhutan |
.bn |
Brunei Darussalam |
.kh |
Cambodia |
.cn |
China |
.hk |
Hong Kong |
.in |
India |
.id |
Indonesia |
.ir |
Iran |
.jp |
Japan |
.la |
Lao PDR |
.my |
Malaysia |
.mv |
Maldives |
.mn |
Mongolia |
.mo |
Macau |
.mm |
Myanmar |
.np |
Nepal |
.nz |
New Zealand |
.kp |
North Korea |
|
Pacific Island Countries |
.pk |
Pakistan |
.ph |
Philippines |
.sg |
Singapore |
.kr |
South Korea |
.lk |
Sri Lanka |
.tw |
Taiwan |
.th |
Thailand |
.tl/.tp |
Timor-Leste |
.vn |
Vietnam |
Afghanistan in the past four years has been trying to recover from the trauma of war and instability. A successful presidential election followed by successful parliamentary elections has put the country on the road towards democracy and prosperity. The ICT sector has improved, teledensity grew from 0.08 per cent to 8 per cent and access to information has become easier.
Both the government and the private sector have put together the telecom infrastructure, which has made it possible to achieve a reliable infrastructure in three years based on international best practices. By the end of 2006, 31 out of 34 provincial capitals, 160 major cities, 10 highways and 180 districts had voice and data connectivity contributed by three GSM operators, 14 ISPs and one CDMA operator with roaming service in 124 countries.
As of today, all of the international communications use a satellite connection. However, in 2006, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) contracted the installation of 3,600 km of fibre through ZTE Corporation China. The fibre connection will form a ring connecting most of the major cities of the country. The aim is to be able to connect the country's major cities with TAE (Trans/Asia Europe) and SeMeWe (South East Asia Middle East, Western Europe). This will enable the country to enjoy good quality communication at reasonable cost.
Internet penetration has increased from 0.08 per cent to 1 per cent. It is hoped that this will increase with the completion of the District Communications Network (DCN) project and the fibre optic connection.
The Afghanistan National Data Centre (ANDC) will be operational by the end of 2007. It will provide a central location for hosting the government electronic data and will provide collocation space for the private sector. The Centre will also host the e-Afghanistan project of the MCIT.
The MCIT is the government entity working for the promotion of telecoms and IT in Afghanistan, in partnership with various international and local organizations. The private sector is importing a lot of ICTs into the country.
Indeed, ICT use in Afghan society is growing. Unfortunately, the government has not yet adopted ICT as a tool for national reconstruction and economic development. This may change with the new mandate of the MCIT. Also, the National ICT Council of Afghanistan (NICTCA) established in 2006 will be fully operational in 2007. This will boost coordination of ICT efforts by the government and the private sector.
In order to contribute to the development of national ICT policies, standards and procedures, the private sector, IT professionals and IT departments in academe are establishing the National ICT Association of Afghanistan (NICTAA). This entity, which will be fully operational in 2007, will have permanent seats in the NICTCA.
The telecom sector is regulated by the Afghanistan Telecom Regulatory Authority (ATRA), an independent regulator established in 2006 as the successor to the Telecom Regulator Board (TRB), which also covers spectrum monitoring in the country.
On 18 December 2005, the new Telecom Law of Afghanistan was put in place. This law governs only telecom services. However, the MCIT has drafted an ICT Law that will address issues such as IP, digital signatures, e-commerce, e-government, IPR and cyber security.
ATRA has started working on different regulations to encourage the sector's competition, growth and new telecom services (for example, WiMAX, VOIP).
There are a number of initiatives underway for developing a platform to meet local computing needs. The MCIT in collaboration with the Afghan Computer Science Association (ACSA) has developed a Pashto language version of MS Office 2003 and MS Windows XP, to be launched by Microsoft in mid-2007. There are plans to localize MS Office 2007 and MS Windows Vista in 2007. This will enable the 64 per cent of the population who are Pashto literate to make use of computers in their daily life. ACSA, in collaboration with the PAN Localization Project, finalized the character set, keyboard layout and collation sequence in 2006. The project will continue with font development, lexicon, spell-check and machine translation in 2007.
All of the newly customized software applications developed for the government is in the official languages of the country, Dari and Pashto.
ACSA is working to put in place a task force for the introduction of open source in Afghanistan.
Online services are not yet popular in Afghanistan due to the lack of electricity and the lack of local content. But there are a number of websites that provide information about policies, regulations and development projects to the public and to the international community. Some good examples are the website of the Office of the President (www.president.gov.af), Ministry of Foreign Affairs (www.mfa.gov.af), Afghanistan Reconstruction and Development Services (www.ards.gov.af), Afghanistan National Assembly (www.nationalassembly.af) and Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (www.mcit.gov.af).
The government has put together a unified development strategy called the Afghanistan National Development Strategy (ANDS) (www.ands.gov.af). It covers security, governance, rule of law, human rights, and economic and social development. The MCIT has developed a concept called e-Afghanistan, which focuses on the utilization of ICT to achieve the goals set in the ANDS. e-Afghanistan covers the development of e-government, national portals, e-commerce and ICT governance.
The ICT industry is growing very slowly due to the lack of physical security in the country and the lack of electric power. In spite of this, the telecom industry attracted over USD 700 million in the last three years. Some statistics shows that in 2005, the government spent more than USD 70 million on procuring ICT equipment. This shows the potential of the market for investors. Also, the number of SMEs in the country is growing.
The government has established a separate entity called the Afghanistan Investment Support Agency (AISA) to attract foreign direct investment. In addition, the MCIT has plans to set up an ICT Park. This facility will improve the state of the ICT industry in the country.
Capacity building has been the primary focus of the government from the day it came into being after the Taliban regime was deposed. There are a number of national projects addressing the issue. The Civil Service Commission (CSC), an independent body, is tasked with implementing programmes such as training civil servants and re-engineering the business process of the government administration.
There are a number of projects focusing on ICT-based training, such as the Cisco academies and the ICT training centres established by the MCIT.
The new educational policy of the government is to open the field to private sector investment, which has increased the number of institutions contributing to human resource development in the country.
The country is on the road to recovery and is making great progress in different areas. The government and the international community have identified three main challenges to development activities in Afghanistan—terrorism, narcotics and corruption. The MCIT believes that adoption of ICT and the e-Afghanistan project will help reduce corruption and bring in administrative reforms and transparency.
Other challenges confronting the ICT sector are the lack of trained human resources, lack of awareness and acceptance of ICT, lack of electricity and political instability. Despite these challenges, different sectors are committed to the development of Afghanistan. The penetration of telecom services in Afghan society is remarkable, compared to its neighbouring countries. However, the penetration of the concept of ICT4D will take some time because of the lack of local content.
The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the international community are determined to strengthen their partnership to improve the lives of the Afghan people and to contribute to national, regional and global peace
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