CPRsouth

With the vast dependence of effective security and business information on communication technologies, what would be the implications of a global communication system shutdown?

As odd as this question may seem, it is probably one of the case studies that forensics professors should simulate with their students and discuss in anti-terrorism classes.

One time while I was an intern at a telecoms vendor company, the internet service from our ISP went down. This also happened to other companies whose ISPs relied on internet connection through the Nigerian SAT3 cable. For some reasons, an alternate connection was not provided at the office on time and the usual communication channels (outlook emails, Skype, Microsoft communicator, video conferences and VoIP calls) were useless for a few days. Communication activities that involved internal parties were almost crippled. Project teammates had to make costly phone calls to bridge some of the gaps in communication. Yet, project activities were immensely affected. That was just the case of one submarine cable.

Now, I am guessing that if something that could cause a global communication blackout happened, the following implications would hold:

Some people would lose their jobs. Since it is some people’s job to make sure there is no termination in communication, some folks even at NASA get fired. They have sacked someone for the sake of love before. And according to them, “The primary reason for the termination is we don’t have the administrative means to deal with the criminal charges against her.”

People would lose their lives. When you imagine a president with bodyguards who lack access to walkie-talkies, pagers and mobile phones, you get the idea. Information and communication technology keeps security systems secured and helps to sustain human health. If the global communication network goes down, the tracking system for airplanes, national security agencies and traffic control would be off. Telemedicine would also be affected (see a sample story here). Hence, many lives would be exposed to high risk and some lives would be lost.

People would lose a lot of money. Since information drives business in this century, a lot of money would be lost in various economies around the world. When mere Nigeria SAT-3 shutdown in 2008, some business bled out serious profits.

People would say that the world has come to an end. This is inevitable as people would also give religious meanings to the event.

There would be other implications too; these are just a few.

However, a global communication system shutdown is almost impossible for many obvious reasons.

Besides, a shutdown of the global communication system is not a situation that we can cope with. In fact, it is something we should prevent through continuous advancement in communications policy research and technology.

Communication technology has really changed the way we live.

First, sanitation is at risk because, like Jared Cohen of Google Ideas pointed out, there are more active smart devices in use in the world today than there are toothbrushes.

Though I may not be able to speak for Asia or the rest of Africa, I know Nigerians too well to not admit that technology has affected us.

When some of us city people go to bed at night, the last thing we part with is often a smartphone, tablet or notebook. Many of those who do not share in this fad but own such devices are usually conservative folks or non-youths. Others are wannabes who do not really know the full functionalities of their phones.

Yet, a lot of techies tend to use their devices everywhere –in traffic, at meetings and while eating. To save time and multitask, some people even use them while in the toilet.

You can’t blame some folks because that is what their jobs demand. When you have a lot of mails to read and have to read them to stay on point, you might even find yourself using your devices at night in your dreams. I know folks who get up to 1200 emails per day! And no, they don’t work inside the circuits and ports that make up the internet. They too claim to be ordinary human beings. For such people, the obvious and smart way to go is to setup various devices to receive these mails so they can read them anywhere.

Most of the folks that own a portable internet device (such as a 3G or 4G mobile phone, an ipad, a palmtop, tablet, playbook, notebook and any other existing i-thing or screened-book you know) have formed some sort of relationship with these tech devices. I know a couple of writers who have given names like Aduke, Arike and Ashake to their devices. These names are not based on a scientific nomenclature. Rather, they are Nigerian names that I hear human beings answer. It takes a relationship to achieve that.

I also know tens of screenagers in my parents’ previous neighbourhood and my younger sister who is one of them always wanted to spend more time doing things on her smartphone than on house chores. I have even seen people bump other people’s cars in traffic because of the unrestricted attention given to their smart devices.

Now, here is something I heard recently.

A young couple had made advanced plans and were ready to get married in Nigeria sometime ago. The husband-to-be was working for an ISP in Australia and the wife-to-be had just finished her MBA in Spain. The two extended families involved had made all the necessary arrangements and both partners were meant to fly into the country for their wedding on a particular date. Unfortunately, the groom got stuck in a major project at work and knew he couldn’t make it for the date so he informed his bride. The lady understood and they decided that the date would not be postponed. Instead, they chose to leverage on technology and made arrangements for a broadband internet connection, windows-enabled laptop and widescreen TV in Nigeria. On the wedding day, the family gathered together in Nigeria, the bride got one of her classmates as best lady and got a priest in Spain and the husband took some time off the project to attend his wedding remotely. They exchanged vows and wore their rings themselves on Skype! There were witnesses in Nigeria who watched the ceremony and had a wedding party on their behalf. The wedding was held on Skype and recorded on Youtube!

I think that communication has influenced and is still influencing our lifestyles. So, any government that is not investing in the research of its policies and technologies is probably joking with people’s lives.

We invite applications to the M4D Doctoral Workshop in DakarSenegal. The workshop will provide a forum for PhD students in the area of mobile communication technology in and for development to present their work and receive constructive feedback from experts in the field as well as from peers. PhD students at any stage of their doctoral studies are invited to submit papers. The workshop will host about 15 attendees besides the experts in the field. We expect submissions to be from current PhD students who have selected a clear research topic within M4D in the broadest sense. Participation for selected PhD students are free for M4D2014 conference delegates who have registered and payed the conference fee. The doctoral workshop is sponsored by the International Network of Post Graduate Students in the area of ICT4D (IPID).

Goal of workshop
The goal of the workshop is to provide professional development in M4D with critical, but constructive, feedback and advice to PhD students on their ongoing research from senior researchers. The workshop will also offer the opportunity to meet and exchange ideas and suggestions with peers in the M4D field.

Submission
Submissions should address the student’s PhD research area, specifically:
•    a well-defined formulation of the problem statement, objectives and aims of the research,
•    explain the research context and why the research is important,
•    give details of research design and data collection techniques,
•    present preliminary results and research findings, do clarify the state of the research work,
•    discuss of the theoretical contribution to the area of M4D and the practical implications of research.
Your name, affiliation, email address, PhD supervisor’s name and affiliation and year when you started PhD should be included. The submission should be max. 5000 words in length. Please note that the workshop is not a venue for publication; there will be no published proceedings. However, we encourage workshop participants to also submit to the M4D2014 main conference (poster, full or short paper see www . m4d2014 . net).
Doctoral workshop participants are asked to submit their papers with the subject line [M4D2014 doctoral workshop].

Workshop Format
Participants will be divided into two groups depending on their research topic. Group A will be led by Anne Shongwe and Jonathan Donner and Group B by Laura Stark and Richard Ling. Participants will be asked to read the group member’s papers prior the workshop so that focus can be on discussing each paper in depth rather than listening to presentations. We will reserve around 15-20 minutes for comments and 10-15 minutes for general discussion.

Important Dates
Submission by: 23:59 (GMT), February 1, 2014
Notification of acceptance: March 15, 2014
Workshop date: April 7, 2014

Old age is just a record of one’s whole life.
                    –Muhammad Ali

I had the rare privilege of learning how to use the telephone early on. I call it a privilege because fixed telephone lines were precious to the government at that time and not all kids had access to one at home. I also think it is rare because my dad and grandma did not try to keep the telephone boxes out of reach. Let me explain why I got such opportunity.

My dad was working with the only national telecommunication company in Nigeria back then –but that was not exactly the reason. He had studied Electronic/Electrical Engineering at a foremost Polytechnic and deepened his knowledge in telecommunication by enrolling at a federal school of telecoms afterwards. But the man seemed to have a liking for all kinds of telephone gadgetry –now, that was the reason. As a result, I got used to seeing varieties of telephone devices at home in my kindergarten days. Even my rustic-like Grandma used to receive a couple of phone calls from her hajja friend whose daughter was a Nollywood actress in the mid-90s.

The transition of telephone technology was evident in our home. We saw telephone box change from those analogue noisemakers with fixed lines to the digital table phones with fixed lines to heavy cell phones with intercoms to monophonic, mono-coloured 2G GSM handsets and CDMA phones. In-between the transition, we witnessed the advent of advanced fax machines, adjunct voicemail recorders, Thuraya’s international roaming mobile phone and the very common wide frequency band walkie-talkies. Excluding the GSM era, grandma was also involved in that transition.

About 4 years ago, when I went home from school during a semester break, mom told me that grandma wanted us (her grandkids) to have her mobile number. I was not surprised that she had gotten a GSM phone for herself but I wanted to know if she understood how the thing works. Since grandma only had primary education, I was curious to know if she understood the technical jargons in the phone’s manual. When next we visited grandma, I asked her how she was finding her 2.5G Nokia phone and she was quick to explain that she had been making and receiving phone calls herself and always sent someone to get recharge cards for her whenever she needed them. She even knew it had an FM radio and integrated flashlight! It was clear that grandma too was evolving with technology at her own pace and we were proud of her.

When I returned to school, I was telling my friends about my grandma when someone informed us that his great granddad was already on Facebook. We didn’t believe him until he logged on and showed us his page. The ninety-something year old man was really a Facebook user and he had a nice profile picture to match! His “About Page” said, “I believe that the internet was invented early so that old boys like me could enjoy some of it before signing out of earth.” What could be cooler than that?

Some grandparents too don’t want to be left out of the tech wave that happening today so perhaps I should ask, “Is your grandparent on Facebook yet?”

The Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies 2014 Conference happening in Bangkok from 18-24 February 2014 is now accepting applicants for its fellowship program.

Details regarding application procedure and deadline can be found here: http://www.apricot2014.net/fellowship

It is no longer news that many of the fastest growing economies in the world are in Africa. Along with this new found growth and enthusiasm about the future of Africa is also the emergence of a new class of wealthy Africans. However, some believe that the high growth rates being witnessed should be viewed in context, since African economies – many of them relatively small – are expanding from a low base, making improvements seem disproportionately impressive.

A major irony that has characterised this growth is that while the number of extremely wealthy Africans continues to grow, the number of extremely poor Africans dramatically also continues to rise. As Francisco Ferreira, Deputy Regional Chief Economist of the World Bank Africa Region noted “Africa grew faster in the last decade than most other regions, but the impact on poverty is much less than we would’ve liked. Africa’s growth has not been as powerful in reducing poverty as it could have been because of high levels of inequality.”

This leads to certain questions that need to be addressed to ensure that the growth is sustainable in the long term. What is the implication for socio-political stability of African nation states? And if it is generally agreed within the ICT4D research community that ICTs do actually aid in the socio-economic transformation of societies, a lot of research outputs seem to support this view. It becomes expedient to understand why in spite of the contributions of ICT to the transformation of Africa’s socio-economic landscape in the last decade, why there seems to be an increase in poverty and inequality.

Anders Granlund, head of ICT secretariat at the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), believes that due to the flexible nature of ICTs , they have the potential to be effective instruments in support of poverty reduction, and they can help address problems in health, education and livelihoods. He also urged all countries to have a presence in the emerging technology-based economy, stressing that ICTs can enable people’s empowerment and ultimately strengthen human rights

Francisco Ferreira further commented that “growth with equity is possible, but it requires a decline in inequality in both outcomes and opportunities” Beyond the impact of the political economy of individual African states to influence such outcomes and opportunities, what role can ICT4D as a subject area of interest and the general ICT ecosystem of individual African states play to ensure that Africa rising does not inadvertently become Africa sinking considering that high incidence of poverty and inequality in any society can lead to political instability.

Away from the basic amenities of metro life

Gbade’s wife was already heavy when they visited Mama in the village. It had been six years since Gbade went there; so his wife had convinced him to go that year. They had planned to spend the December 2011 holiday with Mama and return to the city on January 2. But a twist in fate surfaced and affected everything. No one knew that the proposed fuel subsidy removal would be implemented during the days that should welcome the New Year celebrations.

Once government removed the subsidy, transport fares suddenly escalated and the idea of mechanical locomotion became difficult for all the villagers. All the commercial motorists and gas stations at the outskirts of the village went on a never-ending strike action. The health workers at the community clinic vanished from the village. NEPA had put electricity away even before people started buying their Christmas attires. I-better-pass-my-neighbour generators earned the right to sing every night.

Gbade and his pregnant wife, Sade, were also stuck in the village. They were very surprised that phone signals could not be received anywhere around the village. Gbade’s friend, Kola, had agreed to call before coming to pick them sometime during the holiday. But they had not heard from him since their arrival at the village. They later realised that no mobile operator had prioritised the village and its surroundings for mobile service.

During this time, Sade’s pregnancy ripened and she grew sore with the pressure of labour pains. Once she disrupted the nightly quietness of the neighbourhood with incessant yells, Mama quickly summoned two local midwives and they came with their unsanitary instruments. Gbade was very unhappy with the situation because he had wanted his wife to be in safe hands. He had planned to escape to the city with his wife before her delivery but the subsidy issue had held them back. So, he warned his mother and the midwives not to touch his wife until he had reached Kola, his doctor friend, to know his bearing. Besides, he knew that Kola’s wife was a certified and experienced midwife and she would surely be with him. Under the fading moonlight, Gbade trekked for hours in search of a radio signal so he could reach Kola’s number. Kola and his wife were in a village that was 125 minutes away from Gbade’s village. Gbade knew that Kola was with his car and could speed down to their village to help out. He swapped his two SIMs and searched for networks. He tried his wife’s phone but nothing changed. He walked haphazardly, ran up and down and climbed dangerous trees. Then he gave up his efforts to receive any mobile signal.

When it occurred to him that he had wasted thirty-five minutes on the unproductive adventure, Gbade ran back towards his mother’s cottage. The race cost him extra twenty minutes. When he arrived at his wife’s side, he noticed that she had grown very tired. He threw his eyes upon his mother’s but the old woman hissed and took hers away. The midwives told him that he was killing Sade’s health and should let them do their work. He gazed at them in search of assurance but could not find any. He took a final look at the phones in his hands. They still showed nothing except low battery. So, Gbade cautioned the midwives to do their work carefully and went on to sit in the outer darkness. Sade was delivered of a beautiful baby girl that night. But she and the baby incurred some health complications during the process. The baby became a corpse that night but Sade survived the complications after she was operated on at a general hospital some weeks later.

The couple subsequently discovered that Kola had wanted to go and pick them a day before the incident. He had tried to reach the couple since he and his wife arrived at their destination. Kola had dialled their phone numbers and sent SMS, MMS and Facebook messages repeatedly but could not establish communication. Though they lived hours apart, they were absolutely divided by telecommunication.

This part fiction simply shows an instance, perhaps out of many, where communication policies could have saved a life. If there had been proper checks by government through its regulatory agencies to ensure that telecom operators deploy their networks without excessive preferences, maybe the story would have ended differently.

It however reinforces the importance of communication policy research which attempts to find the need for new communication policies, uncover the shortcomings of existing ones and make recommendations to policy-makers. This is why policy think tanks such as LIRNE Asia and Research ICT Africa who seek to shoulder the responsibilities of governments through trainings and conferences that delve into the research of communication policies should receive unreserved support.