leapfrogging into Die wireless age

Developing countries seen leapfrogging into Die wireless age

The mobile phone, the pager and the Internet cafe can help remote, impoverished communities in the Pacific region and elsewhere break out of their isolation and participate in global economic growth, Asian business leaders argued.

Some poorer communities where telephone and television ownership has not yet become universal may yet be able to leapfrog across a generation of technology - government deregulation permitting, they said.

“The developing countries have got a better chance of going global sooner, quicker, faster, getting outside national boundaries” than they did before the Internet age, Derek Williams, Oracle Corporation senior vice president for Asia, said in an interview.

With wireless communication through satellite or earth stations, he said, developing countries can overcome costly infrastructure hurdles that hamper the spread of land lines.

In an earlier speech to business executives from the Pacific Basin Economic Council (PBEC) meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii, Williams predicted that within the next three years there will be more than a billion hand-held phones in use globally, a number equivalent to one sixth of the world

population.

Integrated with interactive services, “your ordinary cell phone will become your most important transaction and information appliance - not your personal computer or even the television,” he said.

As a result, the value of electronic commerce is expected to grow to a “staggering” 9.5 trillion dollars by 2003, he added.

Already in India, Internet cafes providing communal Web access - are springing up in isolated villages.

In that country, “in the previous generation of fixed-line phones, even in remote villages there would be a post office set up that would have a telephone, a community telephone,”

Williams said. “That has now turned itself into an Internet cafe.”

Throughout Asia, according to Motorola president for the Asia-Pacific region C D Tam, who also addressed the PBEC meeting, “the growth of cellular subscribers has outstripped the growth of personal computers.”

Japan and China are now the world’s second and third largest cellular subscriber markets after the United States, he said.

But both Tam and Williams stressed that governments must deregulate their telecommunications monopolies if the full benefits of wireless communication are to be felt in developing countries.

“To enable our developing economies to leapfrog generations of technology, we need to embrace global standards and minimize regulations and legislation on access, content and technologies,” Tam said.

Telecommunications monopolies can impose high prices and hamper Internet access, Williams noted.

“But as soon as you introduce

competition and deregulation, prices

drop,” he said, citing the example of India where, through deregulation, Internet access rates have come down sharply.

“Any government of a developing country has got to be prepared to say, ‘We want to step up to the challenge, we will deregulate, we will open up our industries to competition.”

“That in turn will bring some upheaval within the country but it also gives you a chance to participate and compete ... on an even playing field,”

Williams said. ■