Bridging the digital divide is about more than internet access

For some, advance­ments in mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy have opened up the world. Yet for huge swathes of soci­ety, reli­able and robust com­put­er and inter­net access are still not a real­i­ty.

From infra­struc­ture issues to dig­i­tal exclu­sion, the dri­ving forces widen­ing this gap are plen­ti­ful. It’s a chal­lenge that’s also bor­der­less: in the US mil­lions of Amer­i­cans still lack basic broad­band access, while in the UK some 1.9 mil­lion peo­ple (22% of the pop­u­la­tion) do not have the dig­i­tal skills need­ed for every­day life.

So how do we edge clos­er to clos­ing this divide? Ankit Agar­w­al, man­ag­ing direc­tor at STL, explains.

What is the great dig­i­tal divide and why does it exist in a world where tech­nol­o­gy plays such a piv­otal role in our every­day lives?

The dig­i­tal divide refers to the huge gap between those who have access to mod­ern ICT and those who don’t.

There are plen­ty of dri­vers behind this inequal­i­ty. One of them is a lack of tech­no­log­i­cal aware­ness and edu­ca­tion. This is a chal­lenge among cer­tain demo­graph­ics in the UK, where the gov­ern­ment is in the midst of imple­ment­ing a ‘dig­i­tal inclu­sion strat­e­gy’ after find­ing that more than 5 mil­lion adults do not use the inter­net due to a lack of inter­est, abil­i­ty or access.

Anoth­er fac­tor widen­ing the gap is a lack of infra­struc­ture across geo­gra­phies. In India, over 25,000 rur­al vil­lages still lack inter­net con­nec­tiv­i­ty. Covid-19 has only widened the gap.

What is the first step to clos­ing it?

Bet­ter dig­i­tal infra­struc­ture is the start­ing point.

We need to up the ante and invest in devel­op­ing opti­cal fibre-pow­ered broad­band high­ways across regions. Improv­ing infra­struc­ture could add $13tn to glob­al GDP by 2030, trans­form­ing bil­lions of lives in the process.

In the UK, the gov­ern­ment is already invest­ing in this area with Project Giga­bit.
STL, with its pur­pose of trans­form­ing bil­lions of lives through dig­i­tal net­works, is work­ing with play­ers like Open­reach to con­struct an ultra-fast, ultra-depend­able ‘full fibre’ broad­band net­work.

Beyond fibre, what else can nar­row the chasm?

Wire­less, satel­lite and 5G tech­nol­o­gy can com­ple­ment fibre.

Where fibre pro­vides high capac­i­ty and band­width, wire­less tech­nolo­gies offer mobil­i­ty. Satel­lites can pro­vide cov­er­age in areas where it is too cost­ly to imple­ment oth­er solu­tions.

5G-pow­ered tools and tech­nolo­gies can be used to deploy large scale net­works extreme­ly fast and main­tain them in real-time.

In the UK, what oth­er projects are help­ing to close this gap?

The rur­al cov­er­age in the UK is 17% weak­er ver­sus urban cov­er­age and the pan­dem­ic fur­ther widened the gap. There­fore, we see tele­com providers and alter­nate ser­vice providers dri­ving large-scale broad­band roll­outs across the UK.

Over the last decade, STL has been pow­er­ing opti­cal fibre net­works for part­ners like Open­Reach and almost all the top Alt­nets in the UK to solve this issue.

Once peo­ple are con­nect­ed then, how do you empow­er them to use the dig­i­tal tools at their dis­pos­al?

While clos­ing the acces­si­bil­i­ty gap is a pri­or­i­ty, it’s impor­tant to recog­nise the more pro­lif­ic usage gap which exists among peo­ple liv­ing in already-con­nect­ed areas. About 3.4 bil­lion peo­ple are cov­ered by mobile broad­band inter­net but don’t use it.

We need to build a dig­i­tal ecosys­tem that trans­lates into trans­for­ma­tive use cas­es for all then we need to human­ise the tech­nol­o­gy pow­er­ing it.

GARV – a super­com­put­er in the form of a kiosk that is oper­at­ed by a semi-trained oper­a­tor – is one solu­tion from STL that enables access to mul­ti­ple coor­di­nat­ed dig­i­tal infra­struc­ture and ser­vices for rur­al com­mu­ni­ties. It has helped close to 100,000 rur­al cit­i­zens in India so far.

How do you make rur­al con­nec­tiv­i­ty viable and afford­able?

Through greater adop­tion of open tech­nolo­gies and soft­ware-dri­ven net­work­ing (SDN). SDN pro­vides flex­i­bil­i­ty and pro­gram­ma­bil­i­ty with­out alter­ing the exist­ing net­work archi­tec­ture in any way. The advent of open-source tech in rur­al areas will make net­work deploy­ment more cost-effec­tive.

STL has been help­ing tel­cos, gov­ern­ments and large enter­pris­es to bridge the dig­i­tal divide for the last 30 years. To know more about their solu­tions, vis­it www.stl.tech

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