Category Archives: soft-core

The Coconut Wireless

Last week’s column introduced a broad but important topic about current trends in technology. Over the next few weeks, we’ll take some time to look in more detail about the issues of privacy and access to information. What are the current trends? How are they going to affect us here in Vanuatu? What can we do to mitigate the worst effects and maximise the best of them?

Before we go into detail, though, it’s important to establish a bit of context. We’ve already described how people often make the wrong assumptions about the level of privacy they enjoy when using computers and the Internet. But let’s look at this issue in more practical terms.

Everyone in Vanuatu knows what ‘Coconut Wireless’ means. It 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.
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Privacy and Paper Walls

Every time I get on a plane, I find myself wondering if the crew feels the same about the aircraft I’m in as I do about computers. Does the pilot mutter, “If only they knew…” under his breath after the in-flight announcement? Does the technician who handles the pre-flight checklist give the thumbs up while saying a silent prayer?

Happily, the answer is no. If planes worked the way computers do, nobody would ever fly again.
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Kinder Capitalism

This week, Bill Gates made a speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, calling for what he describes as a ‘kinder capitalism’. The Wall Street Journal states that his newfound humanitarianism was born of the awareness that although capitalism has served many in the developing world, it leaves the poorest of the poor behind.

Gates sees capitalism’s worst failings in the areas of technology, health care and education. Billions are invested in each of these sectors, but only a tiny fraction of that investment reaches the two billion poorest members of the population.

His prescription? “We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well,” says Gates. He goes on to describe how businesses should task some of their best and brightest with creating products and services targeted at the poorest of the poor.
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The Honeymoon's Begun

On Tuesday this week, Parliament agreed to put an end to the telecommunications monopoly in Vanuatu. This news has been greeted with widespread enthusiasm. People throughout Vanuatu believe that this means the days of over-priced, low-quality telephone and Internet services are finally over. But is this really the case?

The answer is mostly yes, with a few important qualifications. It’s almost certain that costs will decrease, service coverage will increase and quality will improve. It’s also quite likely that new kinds of services will be rolled out as well. But many of the environmental factors that constrained telecommunications in the past still remain.

With competition guaranteed. The major telecoms companies are in a beauty contest now. Customers in Vanuatu will shortly find themselves being wooed by players old and new, offering all kinds of exciting services, prices and promotions.

Let’s look into our crystal ball and try to see what things will be like over the next year or so.

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Pushing Pebbles

Last week’s column dealt with the frustration one sometimes feels about the slow pace of change here in Vanuatu. Communications and access to information are fundamental to all aspects of life, and the challenges that we face here make the task of achieving universal access to even basic resources a very difficult one indeed.

Telecom Vanuatu, the government and other important stakeholders are all working very hard to implement a new telecommunications strategy. This includes far wider mobile service coverage and a much more open and competitive environment. These first critical steps are to be applauded, of course. We all look forward to the coming improvements in service.

Notwithstanding these significant changes, a great deal remains yet to be done. The good news is that an improved environment will make all the small steps to follow easier, and in some cases, possible for the first time in Vanuatu’s history.

The process of opening up the telecommunications market in Vanuatu has been a long one, and will go on for years to come. It would be instructive to take a look at how all this came about.
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An Immodest Proposal

When I stop to think about it, the prospect of improving communications here in Vanuatu seems an almost insurmountable problem. At the best of times, it feels like a labour of love. At other times it’s more reminiscent of wading chest deep through a vat of Jell-o.

Everything moves at an infuriatingly slow pace, a pace made worse by a general inclination to stay on the well-trodden path. Now, this desire to stick to so-called safe ground is born of bitter experience. In all aspects of our development, available resources are as tiny as the logistical problem is large. The cost of failure is disproportionately high, too. Mistakes made by headstrong or naive advisors sometimes take us years to recover from.

And yet…. And yet there are times when this risk-averse behaviour comes at a cost higher than failure. One sometimes wishes that our leaders would be just a little bolder, that they would accept that nothing in this world is certain, and that gambling on good odds is sometimes the best alternative. It’s difficult, to say the least, to find a balance between folly and commitment, especially when the political landscape can change at the drop of a hat.
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The Right Tools for the Job – II

I was in Pentecost island last week, visiting some members of my extended family in Lalwari, a village located almost in the clouds in the island’s mountainous spine. The village is only accessible by footpath, meaning that day-to-day life is almost entirely without automation of any kind.

Half an hour’s walk down a muddy mountain trail lies Ranwadi School. It recently received nearly a million Australian dollars in upgrades. The school has always been a beacon to PENAMA province’s brightest students. Now, due to strong support, solid administration and high quality resources, Ranwadi is stronger than ever.

I walked down to the school one rainy morning to provide assistance with a computer that had been acting up. A spyware infection had damaged some system files and the machine could no longer start. I spent about an hour re-installing the operating system software on the machine, and everything was fine.

Well, it should have been, anyway….

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Network Neutrality

There was a story recently in the newspaper concerning a perceived need to ‘invent a new Internet’. It explained that the increasing use of music and video content was threatening to fill up our Internet connections, potentially bringing the whole system grinding to a halt. There’s been a lot of buzz about this recently, most of it deriving from telecommunications carriers and media companies in the US and elsewhere.

On the face of it, the arguments being presented are fairly straightforward. We’re changing the way we use the Internet, that much is true. We don’t rely nearly so much as we did on plain text spiced up with a few images. These days, Internet-based services provide tons of animation, music, videos, games, etc. All of this is designed to make information more compelling, more accessible to everyone.

Even as recently as last year, we in Vanuatu could only dream about downloading a TV show and watching it at our leisure, or listening live to a sporting event through Internet radio. For most of the population, this is still a dream, but it’s undeniable that our Internet services have improved vastly in a fairly short period of time. With the advent of affordable computers and Internet services on the horizon, the future holds a great deal of promise.

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The Wisdom of Crowds

The successful development of Vanuatu in this day and age is contingent on improvement in communications. In geographic terms, the majority of Vanuatu has little or no access to even basic communications services. In terms of population, the situation is better, but not by a lot.

We’ve known about this problem for a long time. We also have a very clear understanding of the limitations we face. Those of us who are devoted to solving technical problems in Vila, Santo and the islands have an intimate and detailed knowledge of the problems that can afflict us. Those working in development in more general terms have become adept at working around the shortcomings that poor communications place on us.

It’s clear as well that most – if not all – of the stakeholders in this game have some pretty clear ideas about how these problems can be addressed. It’s therefore difficult to understand why these issues continue to dog us as they do.

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Getting Out of the Way

I’ve got a friend visiting right now, a colleague of mine from my previous life in the world of software start-ups and corporate manoeuvring. For about as long as the World Wide Web has been around, we’ve been part of a community of explorers, people who defined the Web, extended it and made its strengths our own. From the mid 1990s through the so-called Dot-Com Boom, we had the sense that we were pioneers, marking trails across a new and exciting space. The frontier seemed to have infinite possibilities.

Human history shows us that after the explorers come the missionaries, and after the missionaries come the colonists. Carpet baggers, speculators, misfits and refugees seeking a better future away from the centre of things – these are among the first to arrive. Then come the homesteaders. Then come government, roads, taxes and schools. Before long, the landscape begins to look like the one they left behind.

In this version of events, those who get least mention are those who were there first. Those who, rather than shape the world in their own image, adapted to the shape of the world until it was impossible to tell where one began and the other ended.

This column’s purpose is neither to re-hash the history of Vanuatu nor to moralise about past actions. It is nonetheless useful to understand the shape of human trends, and to understand the forces that drive them. This is especially important because of Vanuatu’s nearly unique position as a country whose family- and village-based culture and ways have remained more or less intact.

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