The Digital Divide: Primarily * a Matter of Geography?

16 The Digital Divide: Primarily * a Matter of Geography?

ICT development boils down to an extension of the networks relaying information to various parts of the country and making it possible to communicate. From that point of view, nothing really new has happened since Alexander Graham Bell fi rst invented the telephone in 1876. Even Bell felt that these technologies would reduce space to nothing. Communication via the telephone or Internet is now instantaneous, in stark contrast to the prolonged wait and sometimes tedious journeys required for letters to arrive through the post. The late Ancien Régime mail coach, regardless of the quality of the royal highway system, needed up to a week to reach some parts of the kingdom from Paris; and the early nineteenth-century Aéropostale airmail service took days to assure the link between Paris and Buenos Aires or Santiago de Chile. Delivery times today are measured in a matter of milliseconds.

Is it not slightly absurd, then, from the geographical standpoint, to be talking about a digital divide with respect to technologies that are doing more to bring remote places together than ever before? Those railing against the digital divide tend to forget – or, perhaps, draw a veil over – this particular aspect of telecommunications networks. Each new cellphone subscriber or Internet surfer and every

cybercafé is helping create an ever-better connected space. One does not have to buy into the utopian ideal of a global village to wonder about the meaning of a digital divide that tends to divide people and places once held asunder by geography but now brought together by ICTs. In other words, talk of

a ‘ geographical’ digital divide is little short of an abuse of language. There is some truth to this line of argument. Laying a fi bre-optic cable costs €50,000 a kilometre

compared to €1 million/km for a sewer and drainage network and €35 million/km for a motorway or high- speed railway tracks; a computer costs ten times less than a car; a mobile phone is so cheap that

95 percent of youngsters in Europe now own one; and while GPS satellites may be very expensive, their global use makes it possible to spread the burden in a genuinely cost-eff ective manner. So ICTs represent a highly economical means of interconnecting people and helping them overcome spatial barriers. This has been understood full well by the local authorities or cable operators deploying

networks at every scale – from the SIPPEREC system 1 covering the suburbs of Paris to the SAT3/ WASC/SAFE submarine communications cable linking Europe to the Far East via Africa 2 . Technological progress and the relatively low cost of network deployment would appear to rule out the possibility of the digital divide, unlike in the case of transport, being primarily geographical in nature.

Yet things are not quite as simple as they seem. Ideally, ICTs should be able to reach any point in any territory and to eliminate geographical distances. But the fact is that geographic disparities continue to persist. Why? There are two reasons. On the one hand, the speed of technological progress is such that genuine breakthroughs are soon rendered obsolete. Access to fi xed-line telephony, for instance, is no longer the most relevant yardstick now that mobile telephony is the norm almost everywhere; and being an Internet subscriber in France is meaningless without broadband access.

* Previously published as « La Fracture Numérique est-elle d’Abord Géographique? ». In: Dupuy, G., 2007, La Fracture Numerique . Series Transversale Débats. Paris, Editions Ellipses, pp. 104-111. Included with permission.

Chapter 16: The Digital Divide: Primarily a Matter of Geography?

So the disparities are fading in basic service provision yet resurfacing for more sophisticated services. The dividing line may shift but the digital divide still prevails.

On the other hand, the operators have yet to fi nd a satisfactory business model for providing total

territorial coverage. The older networks formerly playing more or less the same role – telegraph, fi xed- line telephone, drinking water, electricity, roads – took quite some time to come up with stable models, mostly within the framework of private or public monopolies: the road system covers a substantial share of its costs by making motorists pay parking taxes, road tolls and, fi rst and foremost, fuel tax; telephone, water and electricity networks charge customers a set subscription fee plus a variable amount corresponding to their consumption; radio companies took quite a while to fi nd a suitable

model before advertising revenues came to the fore; terrestrial television, in France at least, still draws on a mix of licence fees and advertising revenues, albeit with increasingly less of the former and more of the latter; and the promoters of the Minitel system settled on the highly original, practical and lucrative kiosque information service.

So far, neither mobile telephony nor the Internet has yet found the right business model. The Internet, for its part, has tried everything from direct and indirect advertising to the sale of hardware, software and value-added services and more. But users are loath to pay for something presented as free when their mere participation has market value. As long as this issue remains unresolved, the operators are going to continue holding back on the investment front – refraining from, among other things, the general introduction of costly yet, in some areas and on some routes, increasingly cost-eff ective ‘last- mile’ delivery. At some point, this state of aff airs is bound to result in clear geographical diff erences, and the fact that less densely populated areas are the worst served defi nitely does seem to suggest that the digital divide is fundamentally a matter of geography.

Midi-Pyrénées region boundary 2004 ADSL coverage (forecast)

0 50 km

Toulouse

1999 population density (persons per km2)

> 200 100 - 200

60 -100 20 - 60

Illustration 16.1 Comparison of population distribution and Internet services in Midi-Pyrénées.

Source: Dupuy (2004); data sources: Cabinet JCA ON-X et Conseil Régional Midi-Pyrénées, 2003 ( ADSL); ® INSEE 2003 ( population density)

Urban Networks – Network Urbanism

A quick solution to the problem seems unlikely. Developing value-added services is a long and costly process for the operators. Periods of intense competition are followed by a tendency to consolidate, meaning that the business model is certain to be oligopolistic or even monopolistic. The most likely outcome as far as ICTs are concerned is that they will follow the example of the huge airline companies that came to monopolize the market in the wake of competitive liberalization, leaving just a few niches for smaller, low-cost, companies. In which case, services may gradually be extended to sparsely populated and/or isolated areas, thus reducing the geographical dimensions of the digital divide at some geographic scales, at least. But this is obviously just one possible scenario for the future. For the time being, the operators’ economic rationales, in spite of the various regulatory mechanisms in place, are therefore giving rise to geographical disparities liable to lead to a digital divide.

While it may well be true to say that less densely populated regions – density being the usual yardstick of diff erentiation, over and above the harder to identify rural/urban distinctions – are less well served than others, are they in actual fact receiving any less than might be expected in the light of their population density?

Fortunately, there are some answers to that key question. Internet service provision, for instance, is not consistent throughout the land. It is more limited in places inhabited by fewer people. But variations in Internet connectivity have been shown to follow strictly the same laws as variations in population

density. At the global scale, spatial settlement patterns – in the countries of the North, at least – have been seen to adhere to a so-called ‘ fractal’ law. In other words, the more one enlarges the space being studied, starting from a highly populated area in northern Europe, Japan or on the north-eastern seaboard of the United States, for instance, the sparser becomes the population in proportion to the surface area under consideration. This is no random decrease in density. It tallies with a well-established statistical law characterized by a stable parameter – the fractal dimension – that is independent of the area in question (see box 16.1). The fractal dimension for the population is 1.5, which is extremely close to that of the distribution of the nodes and key links of the Internet networks serving the various spaces and populations (Yook, Jeong & Barabási, 2002).

Box 16.1

What is a network’s fractal dimension?

In geometry, a line is said to have a dimension of 1 and a surface a dimension of 2. The mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot has taken this further in suggesting that some fl at fi gures could have a fractal dimension of between 1 and 2. Such is the case of extensively branching networks whose branches are reproduced in the exact same shape yet at diff erent scales.

A network’s fractal dimension can illustrate how well it ‘covers’ or ‘serves’ a particular geographical space. If the dimension is close to 2 it covers almost the entire surface area. If the dimension is closer to 1 it only serves a selection of lines across that area.

Chapter 16: The Digital Divide: Primarily a Matter of Geography?

Fada N’Gourma

Bénin

Côte d’Ivoire

Illustration 16.2

Topological structure of backbone networks in Burkina Faso. Source: Bernard (2003)

Amsterdam The Hague

Dusseldorf Ghent Hanover

Lisbon Valencia

Illustration 16.3 Topological structure of backbone networks in Europe. COLT EuroLAN network

(2005). Source: after http://www.colt.net/fr/fr

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Applying this rule to the Midi-Pyrénées region of France, which many offi cials regard as receiving limited coverage and blighted by a digital divide of a distinctly geographical nature, the Toulouse urban area is clearly far better served by the main Internet routes than the ‘ digital deserts’ of Aveyron and Gers (Dupuy, 2004). But the fact is that the diff erence in service provision merely refl ects the size of the population drawn to Toulouse and a few other districts in the region. As at the global scale, the

fractal dimension for the distribution of the Midi-Pyrénées population was 1.36 in 2003, with an almost identical 1.44 for Internet coverage by the major providers (see illustration 16.1), meaning that Midi- Pyrénées was not suff ering from a digital divide of a primarily geographical nature. On the contrary, the region even enjoyed slightly better services than its population distribution might have led one to expect.

So the digital divide cannot as a rule be regarded as a matter fi rst and foremost of geography. ICTs have helped overcome some geographic obstacles, especially that of distance, but they have not been the answer to the dreams of those that wanted to see them totally eliminate space. Indeed, space still fi gures as a factor in the rationales of present-day operators setting their sights on short-term economic gains.

Illustration 16.2 shows a radial network in Burkina Faso where the primary concern was to save as much as possible on infrastructure costs, resulting in a highly vulnerable network part of whose

territory will be completely deprived of Internet services in the event of a cut link. The COLT corporate telecommunications EuroLAN network in Europe, on the other hand (illustration 16.3), consists of a

series of connected rings with an alternative traffi

c path for each link ensuring against such eventualities. This kind of network is highly reliable and, of course, very expensive to build.

Both in the North and the South, then, Internet and mobile telephony networks, as seen in the illustrations, adhere quite closely to human settlement patterns regardless of any geographical barriers to territorial service provision. Even in the South, where there is a bona fi de, full-fl edged digital divide, that divide is not just of a geographical but also of a socio-economic nature. In spite of the geographical barriers on territorial service provision, however, the Internet and mobile telephony networks adhere quite closely to human settlement patterns, except in the countries of the South where there really is a digital divide of both a geographic and socio-economic nature (see illustration 16.2).

Notes

Note 1 SIPPEREC: Syndicat Intercommunal de la Périphérie de Paris pour l’Electricité et les Réseaux de Communication. This is an intermunicipal authority coordinating electricity and telecommunication services in the Ile-de-France region.

Note 2 SAT3/WASC/SAFE: South Atlantic 3/West Africa Submarine Cable/South Africa-Far East.

Chapter 16: The Digital Divide: Primarily a Matter of Geography?

Urban Networks – Network Urbanism