Cisco’s recently launched “Welcome to the Human Network” tagline taps the same emotional hook as AT&T’s 1981 campaign, “Reach Out and Touch Someone.” Yet while Internet-enabled communication may offer better prospects for delivering the promised emotional connection than a phone call, closing the gap between communication and “touching someone” requires a break from business as usual.
For the vast majority of the 6.6 billion people on Earth, proximity continues to dominate daily life. Communication tools remain insufficiently distributed to alter the accidental realities of war and wealth tied to place of birth. The question of how to make communication available to everyone deserves more attention as the human network marches toward the 7 billion-mark, a threshold it’s forecast to reach by the end of 2012.
The lack of access to communication may seem moot relative to the lack of access to power, basic shelter, clean water and sufficient food. But Muhammad Yunus won a Nobel Prize in 2006 for demonstrating via Grameen Bank that access to communication yields access to basic needs, not the other way around.
There also exists a feedback mechanism between the motivation for deployment and the cost and utility of communication tools. The emergence of mobile phones more the doubled the number of people with access to communication. That 70 percent of the world population remains disconnected represents an indictment of the long-standing failure to improve the affordability and utility of communication.
The network effect makes getting everyone connected important for the already connected. An infocom ecosystem expanding the reach of the infotech industry to communication holds more promise in this regard than relying on the usual stewards of communication. A three-tier value chain of devices, connectivity, and a means to address the devices need not even include telephone companies.
The communication device represents the primary expense in this model. The cost of connectivity gets spread across all the uses of Internet access, and the addressing functionality seems unlikely to consume more than a few pennies of resources per user. There exist a number of free self-help, open-source platforms for addressing functionality in OpenSER, Asterisk and FreeRadius.
This architecture and a budget of $100 billion (about the size of the global pet food market) could go a long way to connecting everyone in the human network. SignalSys offers a $25 starter SIP phone; global scale and the four years until 2012 should be enough to make $5 SIP phone feasible. Meraki already provides a means to blanket areas with Wi-Fi connectivity for less than $5 per user.
Backhaul represents the only non-fixed cost of the entire endeavor, but the $30 billion that would be left over after buying SIP phones and setting up local Internet access for 7 billion people exceeds the revenue of the entire Internet backbone industry in 2007. There exist unknown logistic and maintenance issues, but cost and technical feasibility do not look like insurmountable obstacles.
The challenge of distribution is one of breadth. There also exists plenty of room for improvement in the depth of communication functionality. An infocom ecosystem can create a broad range of multimedia-capable devices at the high end of the market at the same time it delivers a lowest common denominator device necessary to get everyone connected. The emerging infocom industry can welcome everyone to the human network.
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