It won’t come as news to anybody if I say that family is strong in Vanuatu. We’ve known it all along. But with the upcoming release of a new report on telecommunications liberalisation, we will see its influence illustrated in vivid terms.

The Pacific Institute of Public Policy (PiPP) will soon be releasing a report measuring the social impacts of telecoms liberalisation in Vanuatu. One of the main findings is that, in the months following the extension of mobile telephone service to the majority of Vanuatu’s population, families benefited more than businesses in terms of changed perceptions and real outputs.

We’ve suspected this for a while. In June of this year, I presented a talk to regional telecommunications providers. Titled ‘Network Effects: Social Significance of Mobile Communications in Vanuatu‘, it explains Network Effects and how they manifest themselves in village life, then looks at some obvious and not-so-obvious implications for network providers in the Pacific.

Briefly, my point is that village life features very tight communication loops from which no one is exempt. The one-to-one aspects of village communications are enhanced by mobile communications, and smart network operators should do what they can to enhance this effect. The result is that our island geography (and gestalt) creates more value per user than traditional business analysis might lead us to believe.

I based this point on three things: anecdotal data gathered from the VIGNET technical mailing list, my own personal and professional experience and a survey conducted in 2004 by the People First Network (PFNET) in the Solomon Islands. The PFNET survey showed that about two thirds of the email traffic generated by their 20+ rural email stations was family-related.

It seemed reasonable to believe that this same phenomenon would make itself visible in Vanuatu with regards to mobile telephone use. PFNET’s email stations are located in some of the most remote areas of the Solomons, and in most cases represent the only affordable communication media in their respective areas.

The PiPP report validates this. It goes further, though, and shows that mobile telephony has even exceeded public telephone usage in places where it’s available. One interesting datum is that people spend more on mobile telephones now than they used to on public telephones.

One of the questions that came up regularly when I asked for feedback on my talk was how people would be able to afford mobile services. Given that 5000 vatu (about USD 50) per month is not an unusual family income in the village, even topping up with 200 vatu credit (currently the smallest increment available) would be a burden, would it not? The answer is yes and no.

There’s an interesting relationship between commodity prices and agricultural production here in Vanuatu. When the price of commodities like coffee, copra and cacao rises, production actually decreases rather than increasing. The reason for this is that the need for cash in rural areas is quite limited. Once a villager earns enough to pay school fees, clothing and a few staples, there’s no more need to sell their crop. So when they can earn the same amount of money for less effort, they do so.

This is one of the factors leading to a kind of economic insulation for the average ni-Vanuatu. The bottom line is that the cash economy remains small in rural Vanuatu because the cash economy is only a small part of the whole picture.

When mobile communications are introduced, the perceived need for cash increases. In the short term, this puts stress on the pocket book, but things can probably work themselves out through a nominal increase in the amount of cash being generated (e.g. through cash crops). Add to this the increased efficiencies that come hand in hand with better communications, and we’ll likely see more prosperity and economic activity – in cash terms – than less.

In other words, this is not a zero sum game.

That detail is still lost in many traditional planning processes. In fact, ignorance of this dynamic is a bigger inhibitor to growth than many other external factors. If people can’t forecast capacity properly, their estimates come out consistently low, and because products and services don’t meet the need, they don’t have the effect they’re intended to, so people don’t invest in them.

The PiPP Telecoms report validates this important point, and illustrates in some detail the ways that family livelihoods benefit from improved communications:

“The research findings demonstrate that households in Vanuatu are ‘stretched’ between rural areas and urban areas and increasingly between rural areas and overseas. Migration is becoming an essential component of household livelihoods in rural areas. Telecommunication liberalisation and greater access to telecommunication services is playing a critical role in ‘managing distance’ between rural and urban households, and facilitating the redistribution of resources to rural households.”

It’s critical that this point be taken on board by planners and policy makers as we continue the process of liberalising the telecommunications market. Very often, private sector-driven initiatives like this tend to be driven by business-oriented approaches, and their success measured using finite metrics like increased GDP.

There’s no doubt that improved access to mobile telephone services has had a beneficial effect on the bottom line. We need look no further than PiPP’s finding that people are spending more on communications now than they did before. And it’s important as well to note that, while telephone services are beneficial to business in and of themselves, one of the reasons we didn’t see a bigger impact on business activity is because of the lack of complementary infrastructure, like roads, shipping and electricity.

So there’s an argument to be made that basic infrastructure needs to improve in order for the full benefits of mobile telephony to be realised by business. Some of that is already underway, with the MCA project building airstrips, roads and wharves across the nation.

Work has already begun on rural electrification, but the problem is a difficult one, and will take time to address in a comprehensive manner. The lack of electricity has curtailed mobile uptake in some rural areas. Respondents reported that they spent more money on charging their phones that they did actually making calls.

There’s a great deal more we can do to enhance the social value of communications in Vanuatu. Rather than wait for rural electrification to catch up, we could help people use their phones more efficiently. For example, PiPP notes that relatively few rural users know how to send a text message. This means that they’re spending more per communication, and using more battery life as well. An advertising and awareness campaign that took advantage of informal family and village networks could prove effective and beneficial.

PiPP’s report on the social effects of telecommunications liberalisation is an invaluable resource. It provides a useful snapshot of the effects of telecommunications in the first months following the service roll-out.

We can’t allow this report to be a one-off effort. By supplementing it with ongoing and/or periodic updates, we can develop a deep, nuanced understanding of this integral part of the nation’s development.

Denis O’Brien, owner of the Digicel Group, graces the cover of the August 11th issue of Forbes Magazine. Their profile, titled ‘Babble Rouser’, begins with a tone of detached and vaguely supercilious astonishment at the risks that Digicel has incurred in the course of its lightning-quick expansion across the island nations of the world. It quickly sobers, though, when it reports that the Digicel Group earned $505 million in operating profit on $1.6 billion in revenue in the financial year ending March, 2008.

Forbes leaves it to O’Brien himself to explain his damn-the-torpedoes philosophy:

“Get big fast. [Damn] the cost. Be brave. Go over the cliff. [The competition] doesn’t have the balls.”

I suspect he used some word other than ‘damn’.

Most anyone would enjoy downing a beer with the honey-tongued chancer from Cork, but Denis O’Brien didn’t make the cover of Forbes merely because of a flamboyant devil-may-care attitude. He’s noteworthy because he saw an opportunity where others didn’t, and he got rich capitalising on it.

The idea is simple enough: If you give everyone – literally everyone – access to mobile services, you can make money everywhere. In O’Brien’s world, there is no such thing as low-hanging fruit. Every single market gets aggressively cultivated. The fruits of such labours are truly remarkable.

O’Brien is not the only one to have realised that there are fortunes to be made in places once considered unserviceable. Indeed, much of the government’s telecoms policy is predicated on the certainty that market forces will provide enough incentive to encourage well-funded entities like Digicel to invest in Vanuatu without requiring some sort of financial crutch.

The economic manifestations of Network Effects are becoming increasingly well understood in the business community. Indeed, it appears that TVL has been pleasantly surprised to find that mobile phone services were far from the money-losing service they first thought it would be.

The urge to communicate is fundamental to human nature, and people are willing to go to great lengths to talk to others. More willing, in fact, than they consciously realise. An early usage survey of an email network in the Solomon Islands showed that, contrary to expectations, well over 60% of messages were between family members exchanging news. Those messages cost about 50 vatu each back then.

Digicel is benefiting from this desire to communicate primarily because of its first-mover status and commitment to its chosen course. That implies a fair degree of risk, but risk is one thing the private sector handles better than most others.

Now, let’s not overstate things. Denis O’Brien is not the Oracle at Delphi. He’s simply better positioned than the majority of corporate leaders. What we have here is a corporation tapping new reserves in a market that most others considered unserviceable. The job of other CEOs, as they saw it, was to consolidate revenues and find new ways to tap existing markets. There’s probably not a telecoms CEO anywhere that wouldn’t have been pilloried for attempting what Digicel did. If the board hadn’t ended such apparent rashness, the shareholders certainly would have.

It’s true that O’Brien was one of the first entrepreneurs to see the business potential of Network Effects in the developing world. But the process of commoditisation of hardware and software that made this investment possible has been visible for years.

My first brush with this phenomenon came when I was living on Baffin Island in Canada’s eastern Arctic. In 1994, a few friends and I created the most remote commercial Internet Service Provider in the world. We found that we were able to take a frighteningly expensive satellite link and make good money from it by slicing and dicing the bandwidth between hundreds – and later thousands – of customers.

After only six months of operation about 25% of the local population – over a thousand people – were subscribed to our service. Our competition, belatedly set up and funded by the local telecoms monopoly, had 7 customers. I’ll admit we surprised even ourselves.

Lest this be construed as an exercise in self-congratulation, the lesson here is that Network Effects work. That’s been obvious to anyone who cared to think about it since Bell Telephone president Theodore Vail first described the phenomenon a century ago in 1908. The 1990s saw a resurgence of the effect due to the advent of the Internet. In this decade and the next, low-power handheld devices will be where most of the growth occurs.

To sum up: O’Brien put two and two together, and has made a couple of billion out of it so far.

We can too, if we want. The next wave of innovation in technology and communications is happening right here in the developing world, and thanks to the vision of a few dedicated individuals here in Vanuatu, we’re further along than the majority of our neighbours. If we take advantage of the investment that O’Brien and others are making in Vanuatu, we can become allies in an island-hopping campaign reminiscent of General Douglas MacArthur’s conquest of the Pacific.

Both Digicel and TVL are investing heavily in localisation of staff and management positions. The advent of competition led directly to the promotion of a few key individuals in the TVL hierarchy. Most notable among them was the appointment of the first ni-Vanuatu comptroller in its corporate history.

John Delves, General Manager of Digicel Vanuatu, states that he is “aiming to localise all positions as soon as possible and our current experience is that there is tremendous talent here. Our ultimate goal is for Digicel Vanuatu to be run by people from Vanuatu.”

Judging by its performance in other markets, Digicel seems to favour a high degree of independence in each national operation. This is achieved in no small part because of a willingness to invest in the local population. They are currently actively recruiting both Sales and Technical Operations managers.

But these are not the only opportunities available. Improving communications requires significant policy change and the creation of strong regulatory mechanisms as well. This is another area where Vanuatu can take the lead. Some of the World Bank consultants helping Vanuatu put together its regulatory regime are citizens of Caribbean nations, veterans of the liberalisation process in their region. There is no reason why a few talented ni-Vanuatu couldn’t join their ranks. There will also be demand for logistics experts, marketing and customer service staff – you name it.

The immediate benefits of investing in this area are blindingly obvious. Salaries for skilled technology positions are higher than in most other employment sectors. Work in this field is not bound by geography. I continue to work in Port Vila with clients around the world. This means that we can export our talent throughout the developing world without losing it ourselves.

Digicel is the first company to really grasp the market potential of marginal markets like those in the Pacific. They aren’t the only ones, though. The people of Vanuatu need to take note of this regional phenomenon and commit themselves to strengthening it. If we aren’t complacent about our role in this process, the rewards for us and our neighbours will be considerable.

About a month ago, I gave a talk [Powerpoint File] to telecommunications network operators from all over the Pacific region. It dealt with the social aspects of Vanuatu’s communications revolution. Many of the themes I touched on will be familiar to readers of this column.

In a nutshell, I talked about Digicel’s approach to so-called marginal markets and how they relied on Network Effects to generate traffic where there had been none before. Once you have more than a certain percentage of the population using a particular means of communication, everyone else is compelled to join them, simply because everybody is using it.

Mobile telephone services significantly enhance one – and only one – important aspect of Vanuatu culture. They enable family members and friends to stay in touch with one another much more easily than they could before. This has the effect of strengthening some of the bonds that keep small groups together. As such, it should be viewed as a positive reinforcement of many of the things that we hold dear.

But in Vanuatu society, there’s more to communication than conversations between family members. We’ve so far succeeded in re-creating the kitchen conversation by electronic means. But we have no nakamal, no nasara. We have no meeting place we can truly call our own.

If you plot the rise of mobile telephone use in Vanuatu since the inception of the service, you’ll note that at first it started very slowly. Phones and SIM cards were expensive, which meant that only the richest could afford to use them. But prices reached a level attainable by the average wage-earner, uptake was huge. In the course of a few short years, GSM services became the single largest source of revenue for TVL, who reportedly had over 20,000 subscribers as of mid-2007.

Digicel’s arrival this year has only accelerated and expanded the process. Neither Digicel nor TVL will release sales figures or call volumes, but since they launched their service, Digicel has so far exceeded its own expectations that it’s currently out of stock on many telephone models.

The appeal of mobile telephony in the islands is immediate and compelling. Recent discussion on the VIGNET mailing list highlighted a few interesting anecdotes. People everywhere can’t bear to be separated from their mobile phones. They take them fishing, to the garden, everywhere they go. At this week’s Independence festivities in Freswota, the fastest selling item in every store I canvassed was phone credit.

So what does this mean in terms of Vanuatu society? There’s been a lot of discussion recently about the potential for negative effects. Many people with a stake in building communications capacity in Vanuatu privately confide that they’re nervous about a vast tidal wave of information spilling into Vanuatu from the outside world. What will happen to language, kastom and culture? Will our youngest generation throw over tradition, trading in string band music for the latest hip-hop ringtones?

To a certain, admittedly limited degree, mobile telephone services are immune to that kind of thing. Their initial value lies, as I mentioned, in one-to-one communication. The very same kind of communication that ni-Vanuatu have so enjoyed, in the kitchen while grating coconut for laplap, on the road to and from the garden, under a shade tree on a long afternoon, over a shell or two of kava in the evening.

This reflects an integral part of everybody’s life: The casual, constant contact that keeps families intact.

But mobile phones don’t easily allow another equally important aspect of communication in Vanuatu society: There is no virtual equivalent of the communal space. There is, in effect, no nasara, nowhere for the village to come together and consider matters of import to them all.

This has one extremely important effect. I’ve written before about the Coconut Wireless, the informal network of gossip and rumour that has historically provided a remarkably effective and versatile means of disseminating news of all kinds:

“[Coconut Wireless] refers to the lively rumours that spread via word of mouth concerning anything – or anyone – of interest to people as they idle away their spare time. In small doses, it’s generally unreliable, but when information is amalgamated from numerous sources, an assiduous listener can gather a good deal of interesting (sometimes deliciously scurrilous) and surprisingly accurate information.”

Mobile telephony has given us part of that. It’s given us better, more convenient access to some sources of our daily dose of hearsay. But it doesn’t give us everything. It limits the number of sources we can readily access. This means that there are fewer opportunities to correlate – and mitigate – much of the information reaching us.

Take for example the furore that arose a few years ago concerning the planned visit to Vanuatu of the reverend Sun Myung Moon. Families were divided over whether he should be allowed in, some supporting him, others threatening that it was their sacred duty to assassinate him, should he arrive, because rumour had it that he was a false prophet, possibly even the Antichrist.

Imagine how SMS and mobile telephone conversations could further exacerbate what was already a tense situation.

Conversely, it also provides the opportunity for individuals to become known to a larger proportion of society than ever before. It’s conceivable that the Coconut Wireless’ newfound spread might give us our very first truly national political figure since Father Walter Lini. Depending on the individual, this might be a very good thing indeed. Or not.

The Coconut Wireless becomes dangerous when it’s not leavened with verifiably correct public information. The Internet can provide this. Its very nature gives us back the many-to-one and one-to-many communications that typified the village nasara, where everyone could gather, offers their views directly to the community as a whole, and listen as well to the guidance offered by their chiefs and elders.

Next-generation mobile technology, including GPRS and WiMax wireless Internet services, will provide some mobile phone owners with access to this resource. Projects like One Laptop per Child and the small satellite stations being tested by the government as part of the Pacific RICS project will also fill in critical parts of the puzzle.

But they do so at a price. The Internet is not Vanuatu’s alone. The nasara we are entering is extends across the globe, even to places that many ni-Vanuatu will find foreign and possibly repulsive. Unless steps are taken to positively reinforce Vanuatu culture online, we run the risk of bringing up a generation who consider kastom to be nothing more than a collection of ramblings told by their bubus around the fire.

Vanuatu has invested wisely in its material infrastructure. But even when the last cable is plugged in, the job is not nearly finished. Vanuatu’s cultural infrastructure needs to be enhanced as well. This requires that young and old alike cooperate to translate the best elements of Vanuatu society into this new medium.

Make no mistake: This worldwide cultural nasara already exists. It is up to us to determine how our children enter it, and what they see and hear when they get there.

• Greg Ross’ delightfully intelligent Futility Closet features a very interesting map. Memorising it should be a pre-requisite for any technology discussion. Understanding it should be a criterion for sainthood.
• Jan Chipchase is exploring that map. He’s a poster boy for the the new geek chic: rambling around the world, finding out how people live their lives, then trying to find ways to make technology that fits. I’d be more condescending about his rock star status, but hey, that’s mostly what I do, too. If he’s the rock star, then I’m the wandering minstrel. I suppose each of us is good for the other.
• I say it below, but I need to set the proper emphasis here: Mobile communication devices are the application platform for the rest of the world. Power, cost, literacy, localisation and different approaches to network management (i.e. more entrepreneurial space in newborn networks than in established ones) all contribute. 2G, 3G, NG are all great, but think about SMS interfaces first. There’s a huge opportunity space there.
• Digicel launched their mobile phone service  last week, making a bigger splash than anything I’ve seen since I arrived here.
  • Photos of the mad queuing (and a couple from the party) here.
  • They’ve done admirably in the first 90% of the job, which was getting the network up and running. Let’s see how they do on the other 90% – keeping it running.
  • I bought myself a 2000 vatu (USD 20) phone and a separate SIM card for my Motorola in order to test the service. I’d been using the Digicel service for barely two days, and when I ran out of credit, I swapped in my TVL SIM (with nearly 4000 vt credit in it) and had an important call fail 5 times in a row. I immediately put my Digicel card back in and stumped up another 1000 in credit. In less than two days, I’d come to assume that calls would actually work. This in spite of the fact that I’ve been using TVL’s services (and working closely with them on occasion) for years. I should have been inured to their level of service and surprised by the improvement that Digicel provided, but the opposite was true. Lesson: We only think about the network when it’s not working.
  • I heard rumours that Digicel had to fly a replacement generator to Ambae by helicopter on their first full day of service. The story might be a case of the Coconut Wireless running a little hot, but if it turns out to be true, I would be interested to know whether the machinery died of natural causes or of bush knife. There’s a whole article in here, but briefly stated, here’s the equation: A radio tower is of no value until it’s turned on, so nobody objects to its existence until the service starts up. From that moment on, people have something they can hold hostage, so however generous the initial agreement, there’s almost always a re-negotiation, usually with a metaphorical knife to the throat.
  • Update: I’ve also got reports of an outage in Tanna in the South. How does it go again? One is an accident, two is incompetence, three is enemy attack. Or heck, it could just be birthing pains.
  • Double Update: Turns out it wasn’t outages, per se; it was delays commissioning some of the systems. Sources with a clear view of the proceedings told me that Digicel could not have turned up their service at all even a few before the launch date – that’s how close to the wire things got. To be clear: This doesn’t reflect poorly on Digicel at all. Quite the contrary. I’ve seen projects that were trivial in comparison lose months (even years) because of minor technical or logistical problems. The fact that one or two of the generators weren’t 100% ready on the day does nothing to diminish the fact that they increased communications coverage nationally by an order of magnitude; and that, to my knowledge, is unprecedented anywhere in the Pacific since 1942.
• On Monday at 09:00, I presented a talk to the Pacific Network Operators Group (PACNOG) at the Sebel Hotel. It’s titled ‘Network Effects: Social Significance of Mobile Communications in Vanuatu‘. It explains Network Effects and how they manifest themselves in village life, then looks at some obvious and not-so-obvious implications for network providers in the Pacific. Briefly, my point is that village life features very tight communication loops from which no one is exempt. The one-to-one (but not the one-to-many and many-to-one!) aspects of village communications will be enhanced by mobile comms, and smart network operators should do what they can to enhance this effect. The result will be that our island geography (and gestalt) creates more value per user than traditional business analysis might lead us to believe.
• The telecom licensing regime will be opening up a little further some time before the end of the year. I need to find a way to convince local operators to take advantage of this opportunity. It won’t be easy because:
  • There are a bunch of better-funded outsiders who want in, and are willing to sit on losses in order to get market share; and
  • Capital investment for Vanuatu companies can be really, really hard. Most companies here live hand to mouth, so asking them to amortise any kind of investment is a huge demand.
  • Hopefully, the Universal Access Fund will help mitigate the problem. It’s not clear yet how it will be administered, and there will be a lot of flies buzzing around that particular pot of honey, so I’m not willing to get enthusiastic about the opportunity just yet.
• Now that we’ve actually got the beginnings of truly nationwide communications, we need to deal with power generation. The toughest part will be hardware. See, we’ll never generate enough power to run a desktop computer in every house, and community telecentres are expensive and of limited usefulness, so we need to see how suitable things like the Asus eEe, OLPC and smart phones are to use in the islands.
  • On that front, Wan Smolbag Theatre will be getting about 25 XO laptops soon for their young people’s literacy project. Yay! They’ve also sent an eEe up to their youth center in Loltong on Pentecost island for evaluation.
  • The Mac Minis we first sent there performed in a less-than-stellar fashion due primarily to hardware problems. Even trivial problems (like a stuck CD) can take weeks or months to resolve.
  • The biggest challenge we face is the assumption that being in the tropics means we have lots of sunlight. Uh, maritime climate, anyone? Jungle? Mountains? Solar panel not work good on cloudy day under tree with no flat places. Okay, there are places in Vanuatu where solar power is fine, but unfortunately, it’s least reliable right when you need it most (e.g. hurricane season).
  • One way to mitigate power requirements (and decidedly non-trivial UI/literacy issues) is to leverage SMS-based apps as a computing platform. See above. There’s a lot of work going on in this area in India and Africa. We need to do more here. See this and this for previous rants on the subject. Must find more sponsors….
• UNDP has finally released funds for the Vanuatu leg of the People First Network. Only 5 years late. (Yes, you read that right: 5 years.) I’ll be doing a little consulting to try to re-frame the project to reflect the changes that have occurred in the last half decade.

Somewhere in here, I eke out a living, write 2000 words a week and try to have a life. I’d love to be a rock star just like Jan and find a Daddy Warbucks to take all my mundane worries away, but I’m not starving, so I can’t complain.

I wrote, “Making simple mistakes is the easiest way to expose yourself to attack…. You won’t be targeted so much as stumbled across.”

Within two days of writing about the issue, an online security blog reported a wave of attacks affecting approximately 200,000 web servers. The single most important part of comedy, as they say, is timing.

This latest wave of attacks is important to us for a couple of reasons: It demonstrates that the democratising effect of information on the Web respects no single set of ethics or morality. The very same information-sharing tools that have so empowered people everywhere are being used by vandals and criminals for their own selfish ends as well.

It also means that there are no safe havens online.

Vanuatu is famous for its relaxed atmosphere and the almost overwhelming insouciance of its population. The attitude infects everyone who lives here. It’s sometimes a shock to newly-arrived expats to see just how slowly things can move relative to the place they came from. But inevitably they find themselves settling into the same pace, allowing events that would have made them livid elsewhere pass with a shrug and a sigh.

But the Internet has no borders. Electrons travelling through the networks of the world don’t travel on the right side of the cable in Vanuatu and on the left in Fiji. They don’t slow down in school areas, they don’t stop at Customs for inspection, and the only laws they obey are the laws of physics. They don’t know and, frankly, they don’t care about our laws, attitudes, culture and kastom.

It’s up to us to do that. Grasping the technical, ethical and even moral aspects of the Internet is a very difficult task, mostly because there are no short cuts to understanding, and the ultimate effects of this new technology are very hard to see. It’s true that Vanuatu is years behind the curve in terms of using communications technology, but it’s hard to know where to look for lessons.

The developed world’s communications networks are layered over a century’s worth of infrastructure development. Indeed, the Internet was designed explicitly in order to ensure that communications could continue even in catastrophic circumstances.

Contrast that with the impact of everyday influences such as rain, heat, dust, humidity and insects on communications technology in Vanuatu. It’s fashionable to roll one’s eyes whenever minor things cause major disruptions, but we need to recognise that they do happen, and they’ll continue to happen.

When we compare ourselves to the rest of the developing world, we see more similarities. We can see as well that we’re not so far behind. In fact our small size makes it easier in some ways for us to embark on a programme of lifting ourselves up by our proverbial boot straps. There are technical challenges that we share with many other nations, but choosing which lessons we need to learn from can be a difficult task.

In the mean time, the same threats that assail servers in the US, India and China are also assaulting ours. And the same infections they spread are also infecting our machines.

Viruses and other malicious software are an immediate and pressing problem, because they keep us from spending time and resources on improving and optimising our particular corner of the Internet. They affect us disproportionately because repair, maintenance and service provision is thin on the ground in Vanuatu.

But the problem extends much further than that. We face a lack of depth and breadth of understanding of technical issues that is systemic, nearly universal.

I’ve argued before that our planning in the communications sector should focus on human resource development above all other things. But this should not be construed to mean that we need a lot more computer science graduates. We do need people with more technical background, certainly. But the nitty-gritty technical part often takes care of itself, and technologies change so fast that on the job training is sometimes the only available option.

Back in 1994 or so, the world was just starting to wake up to the World Wide Web. There were no web designers at that time. Nor were there a significant number of people with a background in networks. But there were a lot of people with time on their hands and a love of learning.

In many ways, the Web invented itself. The development of the vast and richly detailed landscape of information, diversions, distractions and threats happened through a cyclical process: The web was easy to access and useful, so people used it, and in the process of doing so, made it easier to access and more useful.

We can expect similar things to happen here in Vanuatu. Some have fretted that low levels of literacy will adversely affect the uptake of written communications like SMS, email and online chat. But the trend in other developing countries is that functional literacy rises even in the absence any formal inputs from government or NGOs. People will always find a way to talk.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t formalise and promote basic literacy and language education nationwide. On the contrary, these efforts are more timely now than ever, but they’ll be most effective if their format facilitates peer education, so that people can share the learning materials freely among themselves.

Likewise, people can be trusted to learn whichever software and interfaces most readily allow them talk. Our standards, therefore, will likely be dictated as much by happenstance as by technical appropriateness: The interface that Person A is most familiar with will almost certainly be what she teaches to Person B. At a certain point, whatever we geeks suggest becomes almost irrelevant.

So how are we to go about improving human resources if the Internet is going to do it all for us, and more to the point, why bother? Isn’t it all going to happen on its own?

A so-called technocratic class will almost certainly arise in Vanuatu, just as it has in every other country. Eventually. But we need it to bloom. We need people who can reconcile the competing and sometimes contradictory themes of learning, culture and safety on the Internet and in traditional Vanuatu life. If we don’t, we may find that we’ve bought technological sophistication at the expense of social and cultural stability.

It won’t be enough for our new generation of geeks to be the best in Vanuatu; they’ll be operating in a world without borders or backwaters. They will have to be as good as the rest of the world, because they’ll be responsible for making Vanuatu’s communications environment as fruitful as possible for everyone here.

The process is cyclical, and when it works it’s self-sustaining. But it needs to start somehow. The way to do that is to create opportunities to learn, to work and especially to play with the Internet. That means creating the positions and resources necessary to foster growth and exploration. It means creating the means for people to learn in-depth, practical skills through experimentation, development and implementation. But mostly it means commitment.

Sese is worried. Her son Kaltaso has his heart set on getting a new toy for Christmas. She’s not quite sure what it does, exactly, but it’s the latest thing overseas. At least, that’s what Kal says. He tells her all his online friends have them, that it’s really fun to link them on the Internet and play together.

The toy is expensive, but not too expensive. Sese has talked it over with her husband, and he agrees that it’s good for the boy to spend time online with friends from around the world. If this toy helps with this, then it’s worth it. But there’s a problem: It’s not for sale anywhere in Vanuatu, let alone here on Pentecost.

Sese knows that you can buy things online, but she doesn’t have a bank account yet, let alone a credit card. So she sends an SMS to her cousin-sister Lily in Port Vila, asking for help. Lily works as an administrator for one of the online banking operations that opened up after the fibre optic link was installed. She knows about these things.

Lily texts back, saying that she’s checked on eBay and found exactly what Kal wants, at about 30% less than anywhere else. She’ll just send the cash from her PayPal account. She knows Sese doesn’t have a lot of cash so she asks if Sese could send 20 kilos of kava on the next ship. One of Lily’s boys is going to be circumcised soon, so it will save her a lot of expense. Kava costs about 40% less if you get it straight from the island.

Sese checks with her family, then writes to Lily to say that she’ll put the kava on Wednesday’s ship. But Lily has to promise not to say a word to anyone. Kal chats online all the time with Lily’s second born son, and if he gets word about the gift, it will spoil the surprise.

This little story is fiction, of course. It’s a description of how things could be in two or three years, if we do just a few little things.

There is no lack of vision today among those who think about technology and what it means to Vanuatu. Discussions abound and plans are afoot. Politicians and businessmen alike are positioning themselves, moving the pieces into place, considering the costs.

Simple consumer pressures are starting to be felt, as well. The law of supply and demand is inescapable. If enough people demand previously unavailable goods or services at a reasonable price, inevitably someone finds a way to deliver.

Interpreting demand and reacting appropriately to it, however, requires insight that can sometimes seem a little counter-intuitive. You see, demand for communications-related services is driven by perceived need. This means that, for as long as communications don’t usefully exist, there is no visible demand for them. Supply, however, creates demand.

Let me repeat that, because the concept doesn’t always make sense at first. Demand for communications will stay flat for as long as supply remains below a certain level. Put plainly: there’s no point in talking if no one can hear you.

But the other half of this equation is even more interesting: The more you invest in communications, the more you use them. The more you use them, the more you need them. The more you need them, the more you invest.

When I first arrived in 2003, my job was to improve ICT capacity at the grassroots level. As part of that work, I toured around the NGOs operating in Port Vila. Almost every time, I found the same thing. A single computer had Internet access. It was used intermittently to check a single email account, which nobody really used because… well, nobody used it.

Computer problems were rampant, but nobody got too fussed about them, because… well, nobody relied on them. PCs weren’t much more than glorified typewriters. People printed everything out, so if the drive went to hardware heaven, nothing was really lost.

At that time, Internet was really too expensive to use at all. This was because the service was being sold by the minute. Whether it was intended to or not, the pricing effectively discouraged demand, thereby reducing revenues and inhibiting investment.

But some time in 2003, TVL announced a flat-rate dial-up scheme. Once that product became available, it was possible to create small office networks with shared access to the Internet. Staff were given individual email addresses, and before long, if the Internet connection dropped for more than half an hour, I’d get a half-dozen irate calls asking me what was going on.

If I could go back in time to 2001 and tell NGO directors that they would be doing the majority of their work online, that Internet-based communication was going to be one of the critical factors to the success of their work, they would have laughed at me. (In fairness, some would still do so today, albeit far fewer than before, but the number dwindles with each passing year.)

So there it is – people need technology because people use technology. The more uses we find for the network, they more useful it becomes, and the more we use it. The more we use it, the more uses we find for it, and the more useful it becomes. The cycle continues, spiraling outward with no end in sight. This is known as the Network Effect.

It’s possible to accept this as an academic premise, but understanding what Network Effects really look like can be quite another thing. The story at the beginning of this article is just one tiny manifestation of how networks grow, and how they integrate themselves into our lives. There are as many permutations of this story as there are people willing to give it a moment’s thought. Happily, one person’s dream doesn’t preclude anyone else’s.

Unless, of course, the vision doesn’t allow for growth. When asked to forecast growth and capacity in markets such as Vanuatu’s, many analysts will simply plot a linear curve that shows a slow but steady increase based on previous trends. The problem is: they’re right. Or they will be, if we listen to them.

You see, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you act on the assumption that nobody will use a network, then – surprise surprise – nobody will. But it works the other way as well. If you simply build out the network, trusting that people will use it… well, they will. What for? It’s impossible to say for sure. My guess is that it will dovetail itself into normal life, more or less as described above. But honestly, the only way to be sure is to roll out the network first, then wait and see.

This kind of advice is, unfortunately, the worst kind of absurdity to planners, donors and business people alike. There’s really only one argument for it, and that is: It Works.

Network effects have been demonstrated time and again, both in academic and business studies. It’s a well-understood phenomenon that has gained acceptance among such technology leaders as Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google. It can be argued that Bill Gates earned his billions because he understood network effects before most others ever did.

So where does Vanuatu stand with regard to this? The truth is, it appears to be teetering on the cusp of a commitment to this kind of growth. Whether our leaders will ultimately commit to investment on the scale required for network effects to be felt remains to be seen.

If we don’t, nobody will notice the difference. Life will continue more or less as it did before. Incremental improvements will trickle out. They’ll stay intact for as long as someone cares about them, or until the donor money runs out. Then they’ll break down like they always do, and we’ll start again.

Or we can leap.