Mark Lyn­der­say

On the sec­ond day of the Caribbean Tide con­fer­ence, the dis­cus­sions surged more de­ter­mined­ly in­to the ter­ri­to­ry in­ferred by an event that took its acronym from tech­nol­o­gy and in­no­va­tion for the dig­i­tal econ­o­my.

The three-day event, which ran from Au­gust 25 to 27 at the Hilton Trinidad ex­plored many re­gion­al is­sues re­lat­ed to tech­nol­o­gy, but Wednes­day morn­ing brought re­gion­al bankers and min­is­ters to­geth­er to dis­cuss ICT in re­gion­al gov­er­nance and in­fra­struc­ture, which are mis­sion crit­i­cal for any re­al growth in the arch­i­pel­ago.

The World Bank's Doyle Gal­le­gos dis­cussed ear­ly find­ings from a glob­al re­port ex­plor­ing the "dig­i­tal div­i­dends" of the tech­nol­o­gy rev­o­lu­tion.That re­port, Gal­le­gos stressed, was still in the in­for­ma­tion gath­er­ing stage (http://ow.ly/RO1SE), and its find­ings are still in­com­plete.The find­ings on a glob­al scale are what you might ex­pect to find.

In­ter­net use de­creas­es mar­ket and non-mar­ket trans­ac­tion costs, but the de­vel­op­men­tal con­se­quences of that fun­da­men­tal change have been, the World Bank is find­ing, coun­ter­in­tu­itive.Ac­cord­ing to ear­ly da­ta from the re­port, in the dig­i­tal age, glob­al pro­duc­tiv­i­ty has dropped, glob­al in­equal­i­ty has ex­pand­ed and the share of elec­tions that are free and fair has al­so de­clined.

Tak­ing a hit are the ana­log economies of in­no­va­tion, cre­at­ing a sit­u­a­tion in which ICT tends to de­liv­er be­tween four and six per cent of GDP and one to two per cent of jobs while gob­bling up 15-20 per cent of in­vest­ment cap­i­tal, and tend­ing to cre­ate dig­i­tal mo­nop­o­lies.Mid-skilled jobs are shrink­ing in 20 of the 22 de­vel­op­ing coun­tries as­sessed for the re­port. If work­ers in that sec­tor of the job mar­ket can't up­grade their skills, they drift down to low-skilled work.

The dream of uni­ver­sal ac­ces­si­bil­i­ty is on track, but on­ly for voice and SMS mes­sages, for which cov­er­age is avail­able for 6.8 bil­lion peo­ple.Of an es­ti­mat­ed glob­al pop­u­la­tion of sev­en bil­lion, six bil­lion have no broad­band, four bil­lion have no In­ter­net and two bil­lion have no ac­cess to mo­bile phones.

On­ly 1.1 bil­lion peo­ple in the world have ac­cess to af­ford­able high-speed In­ter­net ac­cess.This isn't a prob­lem for de­vel­op­ing na­tions on­ly.Ac­cord­ing to Dr Arunas Slekys who con­sults with Glob­al VSAT, a satel­lite based In­ter­net provider, 10-12 per cent of US cit­i­zens are un­der­served, a to­tal of 10-12 mil­lion peo­ple who the provider works to reach us­ing its tech­nol­o­gy.

In In­dia, satel­lite tech­nol­o­gy serves 100,000 pub­lic In­ter­net ac­cess points in rur­al com­mu­ni­ties.Glob­al VSAT us­es geo­sta­tion­ary satel­lites ca­pa­ble of de­liv­er­ing 100GBps and new­er mod­els will be ca­pa­ble of 200GBps.Dig­i­tal learn­ing is tak­ing off in re­mote vil­lages in In­dia as a re­sult, and as Dr Slekys not­ed, "store own­ers are mak­ing more mon­ey rent­ing time on the In­ter­net than they are sell­ing goods in the store."

"Broad­band de­ploy­ment is a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of the Na­tion­al ICT Plan for 2014-2018, SmarTT," said Vashti Ma­haraj of the Min­istry of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy.Ac­cord­ing to the min­istry's rep­re­sen­ta­tive, 147 com­mu­ni­ties in Trinidad and un­der­served, as is most of To­ba­go. On­ly the west­ern tip of To­ba­go has ac­cess to wired broad­band and the re­main­der of the is­land de­pends on a mo­bile sig­nal.

The Tech­nol­o­gy Min­istry has al­so been de­vel­op­ing a pro­pos­al to im­prove T&T un­der­sea ca­ble con­nec­tiv­i­ty, mak­ing use of the land­ing at Mis­sion Bay in To­co which links To­ba­go to add a sixth ca­ble land­ing on the north­east coast dubbed TT-1.The ex­ist­ing five land­ings were all at Mac­queripe Bay in Ch­aguara­mas.

Clear­ly im­prov­ing In­ter­net ac­cess is crit­i­cal­ly im­por­tant since the tech­nol­o­gy on­ly dri­ves de­vel­op­ment when it's fast, af­ford­able and al­ways on.Change will on­ly be dri­ven when uni­ver­sal, af­ford­able In­ter­net ac­cess is pro­vid­ed in a growth fo­cused na­tion, some­thing that Gal­le­gos not­ed must some­times be dri­ven by pub­lic-pri­vate part­ner­ships when the com­mer­cial mar­ket place fails to pro­vide the ser­vice.

"Dig­i­tal strat­e­gy needs to be broad­er than ICT strat­e­gy," Doyle Gal­le­gos said."We can no longer think of dig­i­tal ad­vance­ments as aligned with ICT, they must be part of all [gov­er­nance] sec­tors."