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Dr. Gilbert Balibaseka Bukenya, Vice President of Uganda told a story during the opening session of Digital Africa 2010. While traveling within the country, he paid special attention to small schools. While lacking nearly every normal school resource, each school had one common denominator – they all had black boards and chalk.

The question started nagging him. As the VP, he was in pretty good touch with imports, exports, and manufacturing within Uganda. But chalk, as an ubiquitous tool, was nearly completely imported from China. Something as simple as chalk, a tool used by nearly everybody n the country, was not being produced in the domestic business sector.

Dr. Bukenya changed that. The chalk problem was quickly rectified, and a new program of "can we make it in Uganda" started. The basic idea is if the product is capable of being made in-country, then Uganda should not pay another country for the product.

Reward local innovation, but don't forget we are part of a global community

It is very easy to slap a flag on a cardboard box identifying the origin of contents with a "Made with Pride in ____." And a good idea. If the materials and labor force are available, those things should not be imported, and the product may actually be robust enough for export. In the US we are nearly militant in our enthusiasm supporting "Made in America" campaigns, almost to the point of being accused of a shortfall in patriotism for buying foreign materials.

But let's keep in mind we are part of a global economy. Innovation and entrepreneurship occurs in every nation of the world, and although it is difficult to admit, some ideas are better than ours. And at some point we like variety. And we can call this world trade.

Be a Hunter, not a Gatherer

Dr. Bukenya further challenged the delegates to change our minds (as a society) from accepting handouts from others, buying everything we use from others, and being dependent on donors for our livelihoods. Take control of our own destiny, and start producing. Nurture entrepreneurs, nurture innovation.

This includes innovation in the ICT sector. Dr. Aggrey Awori, Uganda's Minister of ICT, stated "broadband (communications) and ICT are now the greatest enablers of modern society." He went to make an even stronger statement "access to ICT is a basic human entitlement."

Evidence indicates this is not idle rhetoric, but actual policy. The Open Internet Initiative (ONI) does not find any evidence of government filtering or censoring within the country. The major obstacle in Uganda's efforts to bring Internet to the people being a lack of basic infrastructure, including both telecom and electricity.

The eLearning Component

Ugandans enjoy government mandated education up secondary school. However, while the basic literacy rate is high (66.8%), there is little wide spread access to advanced education tools such as Internet. Thus students complete their education at a great disadvantage to students in other countries with much greater access to network applications and technology.

Chalk is easy, producing software or manufacturing consumer and industrial goods for export is not. While Dr. Bukenya's "can we make it in Uganda" idea is worthy, to make it work will require considerably more attention to building basic infrastructure needed to prepare workers for the global marketplace.

As we've discussed in previous articles, ICT is the 4^th utility. Roads, power, and water are now joined by information and communications technology. Without ICT infrastructure as a basic requirement, a country cannot compete in the global marketplace, and will be restricted to depending on global donors for its existence – not to mention the vulnerability such as country has to political upheaval and violence.

Uganda gets it, and the delegates of Digital Africa 2010 get it. Now it is our job to make sure the rest of the world gets it.

Previous article in this series:

Digital Africa 2010 and Cloud Computing in Developing Countries

Posted by John Savageau at 08:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For the first time in over ten years, I spent the night without Internet access. Ten years of working in remote parts of Mongolia, Vietnam, Palestine, Indonesia, and other small and developing countries, and in March 2010 I finally hit the access wall. My hotel in Addis Ababa does not have Internet access. And not a single WiFi or wireless connection available nearby.

Maybe it is just not realistic to believe that in the year 2010 travelers or residents of a major city like Addis Ababa would enjoy the same sense of Internet entitlement we enjoy in other parts of the world.  It is probably more realistic to think fresh water is a higher priority than Facebook.  Probably a higher priority to think that basic nutrition is a higher priority to some people in the world than Twitter.

Having been plucked up from the opulence of Burbank, California, where Friday afternoon brought the amusement of watching about 50 SUVs and minivans queuing to pick up elementary and middle school children, as it is not reasonable to expect children to walk more than 100 yards from school to home, being denied email and net access for a night is shocking.

Does the Opulent World Owe the Developing World Anything?

There is an old phrase explaining that “nobody likes a victim.”  When natural disasters occur, wars create a large number of refugees, or other events propel people to leave their homelands for safer places, the countries and people who are forced to absorb those refugees normally look at them with contempt.  It is one thing to watch the impact of a typhoon or earthquake on a country via CNN, and maybe donate a few dollars to help bring food, but in most cases we want to watch a different story on the next day’s news, and we rarely welcome refugees with open arms into our community.

 Easy to understand why.  As a society and culture, wealthy countries have normally built their communities with hard work, and the residents enjoy the quality of life they’ve built.  Visitors are welcome, but communities often find it difficult to absorb new people, particularly those with no money or have lost nearly everything they owned, into a community with a stable economy, school system, and social system.

We have some compassion for those who are in need, but much like driving past a major automobile accident on the freeway, we feel compelled to look, but then we drive past and soon forget the tragedy another human being is going through a few miles back on the road.

How We Reduce the Burden, and Strengthen our Global Community

For sure, Internet access may not purify or deliver water to those with a basic need.  However education delivered to all levels of economic or social groups will potentially bring better intellectual capacity to those residents and leaders in poor and developing countries to plan for the future, with the ever-increasing capacity of taking care of their own problems.  Educated people in most cases are simply better prepared to respond to disasters and problems when they occur.

Internet access is a very powerful tool in bringing basic and advanced education to any part of the world with a connection.  When a student in Addis Ababa, or any other part of the country, has the same access to online lectures, course materials, and even formal education programs over the Internet, the national capacity for dealing with topics ranging from developing water strategies, to energy, to agriculture, to entertainment all become one small step easier to attain than if the developing country had to do it on their own.

But what about UN and other NGO Programs?

Like the community that does not want to be burdened with a long term, recurring commitment to absorbing refugees, global philanthropy has a time threshold.  New disasters are happening daily.  New wars are popping up around the world at the same rate as ever, and when your own disaster is falling behind the front page in priority, then it is the people of that location or country who eventually have to solve the problems on their own.

There are simply not enough resources, emotionally or economically to go around.

There is one common characteristic of communities which handle disaster better than others.  They are well educated.  California handles earthquakes and wildfires without bringing the state to a halt.  France handles major flooding and other weather-related disasters, Okinawa finds Super-Typhoons a passing amusement, and Japan has tsunami response down to a science.

Sure, those countries have money, but even Japan and Germany started out with nearly no resources after the second war, and now are both economic powers.  It is education, and the resolve of an educated society.

Back to the Internet

Delivering online resources to poor countries is becoming cheaper and more powerful every day.  Wireless technologies are making fixed copper a legacy, and the cost of Netbooks and powerful workstations is dropping every day.  Localization and language translation are becoming more powerful every day.

Don’t stop delivering clean water, but let’s carefully consider the long term impact of delivering a tool to the nations of the world, including the area I stayed in Addis Ababa, and give everybody access to the same intellectual development tools as our kids in Burbank.

Check out resources published by the World Bank, United Nations Development Program (UNDP), US Agency for International Development (USAID), and others to find how we might better support development of eLearning in the developing world, as well as development of basic infrastructure.

Continue reading "Life without Internet in Ethiopia" »

Posted by John Savageau at 06:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The news started hitting California early Saturday morning with an SMS alarm on my mobile phone – a major earthquake struck Chile, and there was a potential of tsunami activity in California and Hawaii (as well as the rest of the Pacific). First stop – CNN. The news source was right on the story, with real time information flowing into the newsroom from, not on-scene journalists, but through Twitter and Facebook updates.

Another SMS message hits the phone letting me know there was a Twitter list at #hitsunami, and the discussion would include all the most current news related to tsunami preparations in Hawaii. Also gave a link to a web page that was broadcasting a live feed from KHON in Honolulu until the station integrated their feed on the KHON home page.

Back to CNN, cell phone videos began pouring in from Santiago and Concepcion. CNN began broadcasting directly from Chile – not from a CNN journalist, but from a Chilean citizen streaming video through a Skype connection. KHON also began streaming video and audio from a private citizen through BJPENN.COM in Hilo, as KHON also did not have a real time video feed of their own, or a journalist on site that could provide adequate real time information from the city.

Then, the same stream from BJPENN.COM in Hilo showed up on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.

Citizen Journalism is here to Stay

News media is changing forever. Citizens now have the technology, and savvy, to provide the world with real time, unedited news feeds 24x7, 365 days a year, and from nearly any single location on the planet. Neither mainstream news media outlets nor governments can fully control the presentation of events occurring around the world. With nearly every mobile phone equipped with a camera or video device, and the ability to send images through both the mobile networks and Internet, reality can once again be reality.

Government actions, law enforcement actions, and individual actions are now more likely to be recorded than not – ensuring that at a raw level, fact will become available to the world without government or media corruption of the source.

While the mainstream news media may still add "expert" commentary and attempt to interpret events, those events can no longer be controlled or hidden from the global community. There are exceptions, such as embedding journalists within military operations. The government will still control what the public views or learns from those journalists, and propaganda will still be part of our lives. Mainstream media will still try to interpret events in a manner supporting their political views (if in doubt, watch the US stations Fox, MSNBC, CNN, and BBC America for a variety of interpretations of a single event).

But that line of deception, or use of propaganda, becomes thinner every day as the diffusion of recording devices and communications continues to become available to nearly every person on the planet.

"We are getting Twitter reports and photos from the Big Island…"

With residents of the Big Island scattered along the shores of Hawaii, and nearly 100% of them with a mobile communications device, people on the island were kept up to date by the second of tsunami activity hitting the island. Emergency services broadcast information upon receipt of updates, and if there was ever a "dry run" for emergency communications, the people of Hawaii showed the world how it should be done.

As Governor Lingle stated in a pre-event news conference (broadcast to KHON studios via Skype), "the eyes of the world are now on Hawaii." Gov. Lingle, and the people of Hawaii should be proud of the way they set a new standard for integrating citizen journalism, broadcast journalism, and emergency services into a single, integrated community.

CNN, Fox, and MSNBC had one theme in common throughout the rapidly unfolding Chile earthquake events, and preparations for a tsunami event around the Pacific – "send us your images, reports, and video, but do not put yourself in danger."

Mainstream media gets it. They may not like it much, but they get it. iReports, real-time Skype and Twitter reports, SMS messages, and mobile imaging have given us the potential of having around 4 billion citizen journalists available to produce news content. CNN, Fox, and MSNBC are more than welcome to collate and interpret those events, but now we have a choice of making our own interpretations, listening to the mainstream media's interpretations, or listening to the government's interpretation of local or global events.

Posted by John Savageau at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

How does a small or medium business ensure it can meet the basic needs for disaster recovery and business continuity? Whether it be Internet-facing applications, or Enterprise-facing applications and data, one of the most important issues faced by small companies is the potential loss of information and applications needed to run their operations.

Disaster recovery and business continuity. Recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives. Backing up data to offsite locations, and potentially running mirrored processing sites - it is an expensive business requirement to fulfill. Particularly for budget conscious small and medium-sized companies.

Christoph Streit, founder of Hamburg-based ScaleUp Technologies, believes cloud computing may offer a very cost-effective, powerful solution for companies needing not only to protect their company's data, but also reduce their recovery point objectives to near zero.

"In a traditional disaster recovery model the organization must have an exact duplicate of their hardware, applications, and data in the disaster recovery location" explains Christoph. "With cloud computing models it is possible to replicate applications virtually, spinning up capacity as needed to meet the processing requirements of the organization in the event a primary processing location becomes unavailable."

ScaleUp did in fact demonstrate their ability to replicate databases between data centers in an October 2009 test with Cari.net, where ScaleUp was able to bring up a VPN appliance and replicate data and applications between Germany and Cari.net's data center in San Diego, California.

While there may be issues with personal data being in compliance with European Data Protection Laws, nearly every company and organization around the world participates in a global market place. This means applications and data serving the global market cannot be considered local, and the next logical step is to extend access and presentation of the company's network presence as close to the network edge (customers) as possible.

Some companies may have physical network capacity in multiple geographies, others may look to companies such as ScaleUp to develop relationships with other cloud service providers to allow "federated" relationships.

Until a true industry standard is determined to define data structures and protocols to use between cloud infrastructure and platform providers, it is probably easiest for relationships to develop between companies using the same cloud platform as a service (PaaS) application. Such is the case with ScaleUp and Cari.net, who used a common platform provided by 3Tera's AppLogic.

The cloud service provider industry will provide a tremendous service to small and medium businesses which normally cannot afford near zero recovery time and recovery point objectives. Whether it is real-time replication of entire data bases, subsets of data bases, or simply parsing correlated data from edge locations at regular intervals, disaster recovery modeling is changing.

A backup location can be made in some cases by logging into a cloud service provider and opening an account with a credit card - or through a very fast negotiation with the service provider. Certainly not without cost, but potentially at a much lower cost of operation than in models requiring physical data center space, hardware, and operations staff at each location.

The important lesson for small companies is that both disaster recovery and a company's ability to recover from either a physical disaster such as a fire in their data center, or data corruption, may limit or prevent a company's ability to continue operations. Adding cloud services to the disaster recovery model may provide a very powerful, simplified, and cost-effective model to protect your business.

Posted by John Savageau at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

CA and 3tera have announced CA's acquisition of the innovative cloud computing Infrastructure as a Service vendor. This is a great thing for Computer Associates, and perhaps a bit sad for the cloud community in general. Why? It is hard to fit the energy and enthusiasm felt when walking into 3Tera's Aliso Veijo office into words. A tight group of committed entrepreneurs and innovators, with a bit of cockiness due to the unique stature they held in the cloud computing community.

Not that Computer Associates is a bad company. In fact, they have always been one of the best kept secrets in business and enterprise software. Rock solid systems, professional sales and engineering – just not as well known to the broader community as other large enterprise systems vendors.

AppLogic brought the cloud community many firsts. The first to integrate IPv6 into their provisioning system. The first to really simplify the drag and drop provisioning process. Perhaps the first to really test and prove the concept of globally distributed processing and disaster recovery models. And they are really great guys.

Bert, Peter, Sean, and the rest of 3tera's public face spent a tremendous amount of time supporting the community through participation in training events, community organizations such as the Convergence Technology Council of California, the Any2 Exchange Community – all with not only good community spirit, but also providing strong thought leadership to motivate the community into learning more about cloud computing and the future of information technology.

We will deeply miss 3tera, and hope the team will eventually regroup with a new set of ideas, and lead us into another generation of technology that will further enhance the industry's ability to deliver a true, global, massively distributed cloud computing reality.

Computer Associates will bring value to the cloud community as well. With the power of CA's organization behind recent acquisitions such as 3tera, Oblicore, NetQoS, Orchestria, Platinum Technology, Netreon, and others related to process, database and large data set management, the stage is set for increased competition in the cloud service industry. CA has the ability to provide a broad understanding of all aspects of enterprise and Internet-facing tools equal or better than IBM, Microsoft, or any other full-service integrator.

We will look forward to seeing the product of 3tera integration into the CA family, and hope the innovation and enthusiasm 3tera's team brought to the cloud community is not swallowed up into a large company bureaucracy.

Posted by John Savageau at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What is the common verbiage of Hawaii's broadband initiatives set in senate and house bills SB895, HB984, and HB1077?

Easy, "Carried over to 2010 Regular Session."

• SB895 – 2/10/2009 Establishes the Hawaii Communications Commission (HCC), The committee(s) recommends that the measure be deferred. Carried over to 2010 Regular Session.
• HB984 – 5/11/2009 Implements key recommendations of the Hawaii broadband task force by establishing the Hawaii broadband commissioner (HBC). Carried over to 2010 Regular Session.
• HB1077 – 5/11/2009 Establishes the Hawaii Communications Commission (HCC) in the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs (DCCA).
  The committee on EDT-CPN deferred the measure. Carried over to 2010 Regular Session.

The governor last jumped on the media bandwagon with her press conference in Feb 2009 announcing formation of the Hawaii Communications Commission. Yes, the bill listed above (SB895) which is deferred until the 2010 session. There may be budget problems, there may be difficulty understanding the scope of broadband communications in today's society and economy.  But the reality is all broadband bills are deferred, and at this point on hold.

In an article by Mark Niesse (AP) in January 2009, David Lassner, chairman of the former Hawaii Broadband Task Force (and CIO at the University of Hawaii) was quoted as saying "although we know that broadband is an essential component, essential communications infrastructure, we don't know what it is, and we're still trying to define it."

It is possible the University of Hawaii has not yet implemented Google search engines in their home pages, or a study of broadband communications in the university curriculum, although my own Google search on "broadband communications university curriculum" net 47,700 entries. And the fact Mr. Lassner is a member of the Internet 2 initiative.

"Internet2 is the foremost U.S. advanced networking consortium. Led by the research and education community since 1996, Internet2 promotes the missions of its members by providing both leading-edge network capabilities and unique partnership opportunities that together facilitate the development, deployment and use of revolutionary Internet technologies."

Let's Get Serious

Jan 13, 2010. "The Hawaii Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs will use a $1.9 million federal grant to map broadband availability in the state." (West Hawaii Today). The intent is to let Hawaii's telecom companies know what telecom and broadband infrastructure is already available in the state, and stimulate competition to develop more broadband opportunities and stimulate competition within the telecom community.

As a 30+ year veteran of the telecommunications industry, from personal experience I can say that Hawaii's telecom infrastructure is no secret to anybody who is already in the industry. Hawaiian Telcom, Time Warner, Sprint, Verizon, Clearwire, and all the others are made up of people who have both transferred between companies several times through the course of their careers, or participate in programs such as "Call Before You Dig" and city planning (yes, every conduit, cable, duct, and culvert have a corresponding license document and city planning approval) whenever a road is opened to lay conduit or cable, as well as hanging cable on utility poles.

There are few, if any, secrets in the telecom infrastructure of Hawaii. Another $1.9 million dollar waste of taxpayer money.

WASHINGTON – The Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and USDA‟s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) today announced availability of $4.8 billion in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) grants and loans to expand broadband access and adoption in America. This is the second funding round for the agencies‟ broadband programs. The investment will help bridge the technological divide, boost economic growth, and create jobs.

Not all is lost. There are private companies that have taken the opportunity to apply for, and receive stimulus money. Aloha Broadband on the big island bagged $193,908 in stimulus money to further develop their broadband coverage in the northern part of the island, with plans to extend this to the Kona area. Good use of funding.

But We Have a Long Way to Go

Hawaii
Average speed: 378 Kbps
SurfSpeed rank: 49th
Satisfied users: 50 percent
Broadband penetration: 57.0 percent
Hawaii is connected to the Internet via the same fast trunks as mainland America, but something is definitely holding its residents back. With an average SurfSpeed of 378 Kbps, Hawaii was the second-slowest state in the Union. Nevertheless, residents reported exceptional satisfaction with their service: Hawaiians were the fourth-happiest group among SurfSpeed users, with fully 50 percent reporting themselves satisfied. (PC Magazine)

Maybe our expectations are not that high, maybe as a state we are satisfied with something other than the best. However if you look at the broadband.gov website, the US government lists the advantages of delivering broadband resources to Americans as providing support for:

• Education,
• Healthcare
• Telehealth and Telemedicine
• Economic Development and eCommerce
• Electronic government
• Public safety
• Homeland security
• Entertainment
• Communications for people with disabilities
• and lots of subsections within the above

That would indicate broadband is a good thing for Americans – which in my case includes Hawaii. If we are 49^th in the nation (as claimed by PC Magazine), then we are suffering a serious shortfall in our capacity to meet the basics of our nation's broadband vision.

It is the Private Sector, Not Government that Will Lead Us into True Broadband

The government is not an Internet or Broadband Service Provider. Let's not expect the state to lead us out of this embarrassing situation of lagging the United States in broadband technology. The government can play a role in making delivery of broadband services easy for commercial companies to deliver, offering incentives in taxes, licensing, planning approvals, or rights of way for companies who have the means to construct broadband infrastructure.

Offer greater financial and tax incentives to deliver broadband to rural areas with a true shortfall in broadband access – and open that up for both cable and wireless models. LTE/4G wireless technologies with MIMO (multiple in, multiple out antennas) offer the potential of up to 1Gbps (gigabit per second) stationary subscriber access. That is enough for both HD Television AND broadband Internet access (including telephony and mobile phones).

Force your representative to address the issue, and quit debating the meaning taxonomy of broadband. Make it simple – broadband is the availability of big, fat, dumb communications pipes. Give the telecom comp0anies an incentive to deliver big, fat, dumb pipes (BFDP). Once the BFDPs are available, the applications developers will follow. Data centers will follow. Schools will produce better, and more graduates with deeply diffused network-enabled knowledge, at the same level as Korean, Dutch, or Swedish kids.

No more excuses, let's start digging.

Posted by John Savageau at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)