Geographic inequality

[ianp@peg.apc.org]

I am interested in responses from service providers, government
departments, and others with an interest in the following
proposal:

Any national networking initiatives that involve dial-up
components in rural Australia suffer from participation problems
due to the high cost of access to information services in rural
areas. While people in capital cities can normally obtain dial-up
access and obtain Internet access for something like $1 per hour
in packages from commercial providers, people in rural areas not
close to capital cities often pay more than $12 per hour, either
in the form of Austpac costs passed on by service providers or in
STD costs in dialling to capital cities. Because the latter is
unaffordable many projects suffer and so does rural Australia.

Despite many government, community and industry initiatives under
consideration to provide access from certain rural areas, many
areas will not see affordable rates from these initiatives in the
forseeable future.

The proposal is for a contract under tender to a carrier or value
added reseller who would undertake to provide affordable dialup
access (affordable being $1-3 per hour for 28.kbs traffic ) from
anywhere in Australia, and who would undertake to make the service
available without variation to all government, industry or
community initiatives  which would like to use the service. The
charges on top of  local call costs would be on a reverse charge
basis to any participating service provider.  Service providers
would also pay monthly fees for rental of lines connecting them to
the service.

A government interested in addressing issues of geographic
inequality might feel inclined to support such an initiative,
which is probably the cheapest and perhaps most desirable way to
immediately equalise the cost of data access from rural areas.

The alternative to such action will probably see over the next
twelve months several different government initiatives at state
and commonwealth levels creating separate and closed
infrastructures for such purposes, and several Internet service
providers investing to create facilities to provide access to
their own systems only. It could be that as much as $100 million
would be spent providing duplicative racks of modems and routers
so that everyone has their own separate rural access system. The
result of this uncontrolled development would be Internet
development dominated by costs of closed carriage systems. It
would see large amounts of funds tied up in carriage which might
otherwise be invested in creative content,  software development,
improved services, training, etc.

If affordable carriage is provided for rural Australia, all
information providers and content creators will benefit as well as
rural people themselves. It's a small equity step that should be
taken.

It is not suggested that this alone solves all the problems of
access. Local public access and community networks will still have
to exist and affordable ISDN will be necessary to link them to
main Internet infrastructure. Similarly affordable ISDN is
necessary to link educational facilities, etc. The specific
proposal is a step towards providing facilities for home, small
business and local access point dialup, and as such affects many
government initiatives with a rural component, including health,
environment, distance education, libraries, primary industries,
regional development, etc. etc.

That's the best I can express the idea at present. It already has
tentative support from some service providers, some large
government projects at state and commonwealth level, and community
movements needing network facilities.

Which is very encouraging. However I would like further feedback,
and particularly would like to hear from projects, associations,
service providers and government departments planning such
initiatives to guage the level of support. And naturally we would
like to know if anyone has a strong objection to this approach,
which is an approach to support a question of equity and access. I
personally have no commercial interest in any organisation which
would bid for provision of such an infrastructure, and simply see
it as the most efficient, equitable and affordable way to solve a
dilemma of geographic inequality.

All comments and expressions of interest welcome either by email
or in further discussion here if clarification of the proposal is
needed!

Thanks,

Ian Peter