Seminar: Heather Hudson, From Rural Village to Global Village: ICTs in Development
Seminar details:
Thursday 27 April 2006
3:30-5:00pm
DV Lounge, 2nd Floor Cordura Hall
Stanford University
Seminar speaker:
Professor Heather E. Hudson is Director of the Telecommunications Management and Policy Program in the School of Business and Management at USF.
She received her MA and PhD in Communication Research from Stanford. She is the author of From Rural Village to Global Village: Telecommunications for Development in the Information Age (January 2006) and several other books including Global Connections: International Telecommunications Infrastructure and Policy, Electronic Byways, Rural America in the Information Age, Communication Satellites: Their Development and Impact, and When Telephones Reach the Village.
Dr. Hudson has planned and evaluated communication projects in northern Canada, Alaska, and more than 50 developing countries in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Latin America. She has consulted for government agencies, consumer and indigenous organizations, telecommunications companies, and international organizations including the World Bank, the ITU, UNDP, UNESCO, USAID, CIDA, International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and the Commonwealth of Learning. She has published many articles and presented numerous conference papers and expert testimony on telecommunications applications and policy issues such as universal service, information infrastructure, and telecommunications planning for socio-economic development.
She has been a Sloan Industry Fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Tele-Information (CITI), a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer for the Asia/Pacific and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Hong Kong, Senior Fellow at CIRCIT (the Centre for International Research on Communication and Information Technologies) in Australia, and Fellow at the East-West Center in Hawaii.
Seminar abstract:
Connectivity and Development: Strategies to Increase Access
Access to telecommunications as a means to obtain and share information is critical to the development process. The good news is that access to voice services has improved dramatically in recent years in developing countries, thanks largely to newly available and more affordable wireless (mobile) services. The bad news is that Internet access is still very limited, and that broadband, a key requirement for productive use of many Internet resources and other services such as IP telephony (VOIP), is still largely unavailable and/or unaffordable. These conditions could severely hamper developing countries’ competitiveness and limit exploitation of the Internet’s potential for social and economic applications – in commerce, education, health and other public services.
This presentation examines the current status of Internet and broadband access as well as wireless (mobile) access in developing regions, with data from Africa, South and Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. It then examines lessons learned from the growth of wireless that may be relevant for broadband including the impact of competition on innovative services and pricing, the enormous pent-up demand for communication services, and the irrelevance of past regulatory distinctions. The presentation then proposes strategies to increase investment in Internet access including broadband through such means as limiting exclusivity periods in licenses, encouraging resale, facilitating use of broadband wireless technologies, reducing local barriers such as permits and fees, and using incentives and targeted subsidies to extend service to schools and rural and isolated communities.