By Emma Elebeke

Vice President, Global Technology Policy, Cisco, Mr. Robert Pepper is advisory council member of the Alliance for Affordable Internet, A4AI  at the just concluded Commonwealth Technology Organization, CTO in Abuja. He moderated a panel discussion with ministerial experts on affordable broadband. In this interview, he bares his mind on the purpose  of A4AI, Cisco’s role in the project and how A4AI plans to boost broadband access and plan to crash the cost of broadband in Africa, among others. Excerpts:

Tell us about Alliance for Affordable Internet, A4AI that was formed at the just concluded CTO?

It is a new organization with 30 members that include companies, Non Governmental Organizations, NGO, Civil Society and government. The purpose of the alliance is to help countries lower the cost of access to the internet and how to make internet and broadband more affordable across the world especially in Africa, working with Nigeria and Ghana as key countries in Africa. Cisco believes that by connecting everybody in the world to the broadband, there would be clear benefit to both the economy and would help business, education and healthcare.

*Pepper

Is Cisco’s studies on broadband plan in partnership with the UN Broadband Commission?

After looking at data from over 160 countries, for 10 years, it was discovered that if you have a National  Broadband strategy that  increases broadband deduction, it can increase fixed broadband deduction by 25 percent and increase mobile broadband deduction by 30 percent. The difference between having competition and monopoly for mobile doubles mobile broadband subscription.

Public private partnership is extremely important because the government can’t do it by itself, it is the private sector that makes most of the investment, it is the private sector and technology companies like Cisco that provide the technology. Having a partnership with government, setting up a framework, government providing the leadership and private sector building and operating the networks makes the difference. Public private partnership, PPP in broadband results to more effective broadband in countries.

Major findings from the studies?

Another major finding was that because technology and market is so dynamic, broadband plans need to be reviewed periodically. Average broadband plan is seven years old but we believe that you need to review them every two to three years because the market moves quickly.

Importance of these studies?

This finding is extremely important to Cisco because we work with government and service providers as well as users of broadband to build up networks and provide the benefits of broadband across the economy. We evaluated broadband plans globally and we found that balance broadband plans have ten components, five that are on the supply side and five on the demand side.

So, building the networks by themselves is not enough. There is another part that is important, which is the demand side. During the Ministerial Panel that I moderated, a lot of ministers made an important point on affordability, local content government bringing the broadband to rural areas to bring the benefits of the technology across the entire economy and across the entire society. Cisco believes that Alliance for Affordable Internet is very important. One of the things we at Cisco do to bring about ICT components adoption is skills. People have to have skills to not only build, install, maintain and operate networks but also to use ICT and
use the internet effectively.

Cisco network Academy?

We have a programme called Cisco Networking Academies. In the Academies across Africa, we have about 77,000 students in approximately 800 academies across Africa. Here in Nigeria, we have about 10,000 students in about 52 academies who have passed through those academies we have in Nigeria.

When can internet be said to be affordable and the role of Cisco in the Alliance for Affordable Internet?

We were at the very beginning part of conversation with other companies and government to set up the Alliance. We are part of the advisory committee for the alliance. Part of the alliance’s agenda is a research track where we have more things to understand about the best practices, what are countries doing that appear to be working the best and then working with countries to have countries share the best practices with each other,  so that we can actually bring down the cost of internet everywhere.

On what is affordable internet, this is one of the big issues we looked at as part of the UN Broadband Commission.

We decided that as part of the UN Broadband Commission’s goals, which is having broadband everywhere, is to have the price of broadband in not more than  five percent of the average monthly income of a household, we looked across the world and what is affordable is not a single number because different countries have different levels of income. So,  a number that might be affordable in Europe may be extremely high in Nigeria, so the best is to look at the percentage of household income and we looked at five percent as the threshold. The developed countries are 1.7 percent of average household income. In Africa, it is between 15-30 per cent. That is not affordable.

Why all this research?

The goal is to bring the price down to not more than five percent of monthly household income. At the UN Broadband Commission, we have seen the prices declining and we now have more countries with the price below five percent. We have more countries coming below 10 per cent, they are on the right track but they are not yet there.