Internet access critical to national development

We also note that the Presidential Internet Programme has to move along with the Presidential Solar Programme, since the schools and other centres need an electricity supply before a broadband internet connection. This makes much sense, so the developments will often come together in the more remote areas.

THE major remaining gaps contributing to the rural-urban divide are electricity and affordable internet access along with provision of safe available water supplies.

So there is little surprise that President Mnangagwa has led his Second Republic Government to fill these gaps and end the divide that tends to keep too many rural people with lower quality of life, despite the successful education and health initiatives that have largely filled other gaps.

So we have the Presidential Borehole Programme that is steadily drilling boreholes in every district until every village and every school has its own borehole and decent water supply. We have the Presidential Solar Electricity Programme, designed to ensure that every household has at least basic electricity supply for essentials from solar power if a grid connection is not possible.

And now we have the Presidential Internet Programme approved by Cabinet this week to provide high-speed and broadband internet connection to every one of the 2 400 administrative wards across Zimbabwe.

These programmes have also been filling urban gaps, such as the urban boreholes, and the internet programme will work with all schools, but since services are so much easier to roll out in urban areas it will be the rural areas that will see the most dramatic progress.

The expansion of the mobile phone networks has largely ensured that a degree of internet access is available almost everywhere in Zimbabwe to everyone who has a smartphone, even a basic smartphone, and there is such a phone in the vast majority of households.

But the phone internet services are limited and data is sold at high prices, far higher than cable or satellite access and far higher than most people can afford, especially when they need broadband connections.

There are technical reasons why data is pricey on pure wireless telephone circuits, although the continual upgrade of the technology should reduce costs as the equipment on a tower can handle far wider bandwidths and quantities of data. The Government is already working to get the providers to be justifying costs and to be lowering data charges. But there will still remain inherent technical limits that require alternatives.

The point is that we need fuller and more affordable services when we want to use internet access to upgrade education, to provide clinics and hospitals with better access to expertise, to ensure businesses are fully linked, to make sure our development ministries can tie in their thousands of staff, and to give ordinary Zimbabweans access through some sort of community centre. This is what is behind the new Presidential programme which will use both terrestrial fibre optic cable connections, always the best and cheapest where there is cable, and low-orbit satellite connections where cable cannot be provided to ensure the critical centres across the communities are connected.

These are the schools and clinics, the business centres, the administrative offices and police stations, agricultural extension offices, courts, district development coordinators’ offices, vocational training centres and other obvious points. There is already a policy to set up community information centres across the country, and these will now be where ordinary people can come and access cheap or free broadband internet.

Fibre-optic cable is now available in most urban areas and can be extended easily to schools and other needed community centres that are not on the fibre grid. It should also be possible to extend fibre-optic cable into some rural areas, often having it ride piggyback on infrastructure that is already in place for cable phone and the electricity grid.

But that leaves a lot of places across rural Zimbabwe needing the other alternative, the low-orbit satellite networks. One such network is already licenced to operate in Zimbabwe and its competitors are catching up and will soon be able to offer similar services, with the competition helping to control prices.

The Ministry of Information Communication and Technology, Postal and Courier Services is following the dual strategy of getting the internet services to the desired community centres and on seeing how costs both at these centres and for the general public can be kept as low as possible.

We would hope that in many areas it will be possible to get a better density of community wifi centres by dual use. We would think that a community information centre could be opened next door to a connected school at very low cost, and could use the same connection, at least out of school hours. There will be other obvious ways of combining infrastructure.

Technology is changing so fast in these digital fields that there may well be ways through innovative licencing and other systems to upgrade phone data while lowering its cost so we get the advantages of all systems. We can advance on a broad front.

Within a few years there should be no serious divisions between rural and urban areas when it comes to services, the divide being largely between those who farm for a living plus the service providers and processors within those communities, and those who work at jobs more conveniently done in urban areas.

Already housing standards have been converging as Government development programmes pump more cash into most rural households, and the devolution programme is making sure that rural people can get to health facilities nearer home and their children are within walking distance of schools.

Now the trio of Presidential service programmes will over the next few years make sure that basic services reach all rural communities.