Earlier this month I attended a workshop with the rather heartwarming title – “Regulating For Inclusion”. The workshop was organized by the Association for Progressive Communications, Mozilla, Gram Marg, IIT Bombay, IIT COE, and the White Space Alliance.
While the intent of the organizers was clearly to engage with both policy makers and practitioners in the space to enable a progressive discussion towards affordable access to communications for all, the experience was a bit like attending a memorial service for the telecom industry in India.
Barely half a decade ago, similar gatherings typically had standing room only with a few hundred people attending and large advertisement-like banners announcing the support of telcos like Airtel, Vodafone and Idea. This time there were barely 30 people at the outset, and by the time the workshop ended it was largely speakers and organizers only. The telcos, represented largely by members of the COAI were essentially complaining to the last few people who would listen about the joint bullying of the Government and Reliance Jio, one of their own member corporations. Reliance Jio was invited to the event as well, but remained conspicuous by absence. In hindsight the lack of enthusiasm for what should have been a golden opportunity for collaboration is hardly surprising given the shambles that the Indian telecom sector is currently in.
The affordable connectivity discourse in India effectively started with the National Telecommunications Policy of 1994, which effectively opened the door for foreign and domestic investment in Indian telecom. The journey from there to the latest National Digital Communications Policy of 2018 has been an interesting one from grassroots implementation practitioner perspective.
I entered the ecosystem somewhere midway into the story as an implementer of affordable access solutions in 2010, when I started consulting for the CGNet Swara mobile citizen journalism project.
By 2010, the 2G spectrum case was already afoot. Despite the number of players in the mobile communications space, the reach and quality of service in rural and remote areas was quite deplorable. Roaming tariffs were still in place and inter-circle calls were charged at a higher rate than intra-circle calls. At the time the solutions to lowering cost from a grassroots perspective was to locate low cost portable IVR servers in each circle where coverage was needed and to link them up using free cloud services via the BSNL broadband over copper line connections that provided the best speed possible in most rural and remote areas.
Even as the Android operating system and the new 3G data services that made it usable began to be rolled out in urban areas, rural India still remained largely underserved from a mobile telephony perspective as the smaller players exited in the wake of the 2G scam, leaving a handful of the larger ones in place. These were already locked in a tussle with the government over licensing fees and revenue sharing agreements (one that culminated recently with the Supreme Court’s October 24 judgement) and had very little revenue to allocate to improving rural connectivity. In the 2013-2015 period there were attempts by larger corporations like Google and Facebook to improve the connectivity landscape via public WiFi projects. Here the urban startup lobby started a major pushback online in the name of Net Neutrality. The Net Neutrality conversation in India was in retrospect almost detrimental to affordable access since it largely focussed on ensuring equitable access for smaller Indian companies that largely served an urban, upper income market. Almost no attempt was made to bring in the larger population into the debate to get their views on the matter. As a result, most of these efforts failed to make a serious impact on the rural connectivity scenario.
With the in-fighting in the private sector being what it was, the job of ensuring rural connectivity fell back to the government. The USOF had already been established in 2002 and was funded with revenue shares from licensed telcos, a fact that the telcos have never failed to underscore as their contribution to rural connectivity. In 2011 a large chunk of the USOF was allocated to BBNL with the intention of creating a national fiber backbone network. The fiber network was also expected to provide some relief on the backhaul front to telcos in rural areas. However, by 2015, only 60000 panchayats had actually been connected.
WiFi (2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz) was delicensed in 2005 which allowed for some experimentation in the connectivity space. During the 2012-16 period I participated in setting up three different community networks in different parts of rural India as part of the COWMesh (Community Owned WiFi Mesh) project .
The first was a local village network in rural Karnataka, now maintained as the Janastu-Mesh, the second in rural Madhya Pradesh in a residential school for children from indigenous communities, and the third again a local village network for shared access to the Internet in Uttarakhand. All of these efforts were driven from the grassroots up with no top down support from the government or the corporate sector. This was by design, as one of our goals was to measure how feasible it actually was for a community to own and operate communications networks. In all of these networks our biggest challenge was connecting to the Internet.
In Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh, the locations we were working in had access to only 2G connectivity, since none of them were within line of sight of BSNL or BBNL’s range of operation.
In Uttarakhand, we were able to link up the network to the Internet via two broadband connections with the princely bandwidth of 512Kbps each, which was the fastest connectivity available until the arrival of Jio in the area, in 2017.
The last four years have been particularly interesting from the point of view of grassroots connectivity. BBNL has been revived as BharatNet and the government appears to be pushing the project quite hard. However, the availability and cost of access to BharatNet still remains a barrier to entry for community networks to really be able to leverage it. The Common Service Center program has also been revived, with the goal of having Village Level Entrepreneurs leverage the connectivity provided by BharatNet to provide digitally enabled services in rural India. However, digital literacy being what it is in the country, the demand and revenue potential for such services is still quite low. As a result VLEs are finding it necessary to supplement their revenues through sales of FMCGs, mobile accessories and payments, and in some cases even pirated entertainment content.
TRAI did a little experimenting on its own in 2017 with the WANI open WiFi pilot in 2017, where the attempt was to establish an interoperable open standard for WiFi access points across the country. This was a fairly progressive attempt but received very little participation and a fair amount of pushback from the telcos, who immediately quoted the 1885 Telegraph Act on the sanctity of licensing. The pilot was deemed successful but widespread adoption of the open standard is yet to happen. One of the key challenges that remains unaddressed here is the complexity of establishing interoperable roaming agreements between a large number of operators.
WiFi based ISPs who are leveraging the new fiber connectivity are coming up, but maintaining service quality remains a challenge for most of the newer players. This is in no way exacerbated by the routine finger pointing between BSNL and BBNL on the operations and maintenance of the BharatNet fiber network.
Meanwhile Jio has been wreaking havoc on its competitors in the mobile telecom space with its aggressive pricing while simultaneously building a fair amount of coverage in rural India. The Supreme Court verdict that has hit the telcos with back dues on AGR will likely result in a further consolidation of the private telecom sector. From what it appears, the government appears to be fully in support of this consolidation.
At the time of writing, the quality of connectivity is definitely improving in rural India.
However the choices in backhaul providers continues to shrink or remain static at one or two.
As a result, the causes of concern at the consumer level should be price setting by dominant players or cartels and overarching government control on information access.
Evidence for the former being a valid concern is already available, with Jio and other telcos hiking up subscription prices by 40% over the last month. The criticisms of the new Personal Data Protection Bill provide ample food for thought on the latter.
From where we stand, the only affordable connectivity at the grassroots will be through the government fiber backbone and the SMEs that leverage it.
Community networks can still play a major role in bringing this connectivity to the last mile as well as in democratising access to information by working with the government at a policy level.
The involvement at the policy level is particularly key. In our experience one of the key value propositions of bringing communication to remote areas is to enable comment on policy from regions which have been largely unheard and ignored in policy debates.
Also, having a policy position that one can voice is also a strong way to engage the community at a local level
However, as Mike Ginguld of Air Jaldi pointed out to me at my very first community networks workshop in 2012, the challenge for community networks will always be less about technology and more about economics and community dynamics. So far community network implementers in India have not been successful in finding the right mix.
Perhaps a good place to start would be to recognize that collaboration and interaction among community network implementers is the only way to actually find replicable models that can sustain themselves.
It may also be time to look beyond grant based funding and start by identifying what economic value a community network can realistically serve for a community rather than designing for pilots and prematurely announcing “success” as soon as the network is up and running.
Programs like BharatNet and CSC and opportunities for policy interaction such as the Regulating for Inclusion workshop can only work for the community if the community is willing to make the effort.
If not, there’s always Jio.