The Broadband Gap is a Money Gap
Several years ago, I found myself sitting next to Mike Lazaridis at an awards luncheon. If that name doesn’t ring a bell, it’s because it belongs to a previous generation of digital innovation. Lazaridis designed the BlackBerry, the original smartphone, which was introduced in 1999 and took the world by storm until the 2007 introduction of the iPhone and Android phones.
During lunch, he told me, not about the BlackBerry, but about the home he built in what Canadians call their “cottage country” of lakes and mountains. At the time, it was a broadband desert. Mike wanted his connectivity, however, and paid through the nose to have Bell Canada run a high-speed line to his home.
He wasn’t telling the story to brag but to make a point. To his surprise, that high-speed line turned him into an internet service provider. The topic of connectivity came up in conversations with neighbors, and he was soon handing out his Wi-Fi password so that others could share the capacity. Some clever soul figured out how to mesh routers together so that the Lazardis home eventually served dozens of premises. Being a generous guy, Mike was thrilled by it.
The Money Gap
Remembering that lunchtime conversation made me realize something. SSPI’s current topic campaign, Bridging the Broadband Gap, is all about the impacts of the gaping holes in global IP connectivity, and what companies are doing to fill them, whether for villages in Africa, humanitarian relief camps or warfighters at the front. But when we talk about the broadband gap, we’re really talking about something else. A money gap.
Affordability is critical. For a long time, cell service in India was only for the rich. But when the price of a phone dropped to equal the average monthly wage in the country, adoption exploded.
Technology and Service Solutions
The space and satellite industry is doing its bit to spread broadband access and make it more affordable – despite the fact that we have never been known as a low-cost provider. LEO constellations aim to build a subscriber base in the tens or hundreds of millions, which could make their connectivity and custom terminals cheap enough for a truly mass global market. We are seeing it happen now, month by month, launch by launch.
Satellite service providers are focusing on making cellular backhaul cheap enough to drive expansion of cell service into previously unservable areas. With 60 percent of web traffic already coming from mobile devices, that certainly has promise.
The most intriguing approach to me, however, is using satellite to provide internet access to a location and local Wi-Fi to share that service among many households and businesses. I like it for its simplicity. It is a business model innovation. It does not involve a high-risk, capital-consuming gamble on a constellation with thousands of satellites. It does not depend on overcoming the settled view of mobile network operators that satellite backhaul is bad. It takes well-understood technologies, tweaks them a bit, and develops a new kind of service, of which Community Wi-Fi from Hughes is a leading example. Solutions like that can have real staying power over the long haul.
In this issue of The Orbiter, we gather all the audio, video, social media and written content of our campaign in one convenient place, and we add new points of view. Will satellite always be the solution to bridging the broadband gap, which is really a money gap? We certainly hope not. But with three billion people never even having used the internet, there is plenty of room and growing hope for progress.
