Página 7 . Nº 18 - EDICION QUINCENAL 25 DE AGOSTO AL 7 DE SEPTIEMBRE DE 1999.
Cabinas para navegar Internet, ¡como las telefónicas!
* La mayor operadora de Internet en Perú negocia una alianza con la italiana
* Telecom y un grupo de bancos, para expandirse por Latinoamérica con una inversión de $440 millones, dijo un ejecutivo.
Marco Aquino
“Podría formarse una alianza tripartita en la cual nosotros no perderíamos la gerencia”, señaló José Soriano, gerente general de la Red Científica Peruana (RCP), una firma emergente que tiene poco más de la mitad del mercado de correo electrónico de Perú.
Indicó que la alianza con la italiana Telecom y el consorcio de bancos europeos WorldTel está al “borde de una decisión” y se negocia la participación del grupo.
Precisó que Telecom planea invertir en la alianza estratégica unos $400 millones, en menos de dos años, para interconectar la región con fibra óptica e instalar “cabinas públicas” a escala nacional y latinoamericana.
Las cabinas permitirán “navegar por Internet” a menor precio a personas que no tienen en su casa una computadora debido a su alto costo en la región.
En Perú ya operan 250 “cabinas públicas”, cada una con 20 computadoras, donde se puede acceder a Internet hasta por $15 al mes frente a los $19 promedio que paga un usuario con ordenador en su casa.
“Del monto total, para cubrir Perú con fibra óptica Telecom invertiría $70 millones”, agregó Soriano.
Afirmó que WorldTel, por su parte, tiene planeado invertir $43 millones en unos 18 meses para expandir las “cabinas públicas” de correo electrónico por todo este país.
“Además WorldTel quiere exportar como negocio este modelo peruano a América Latina y al mundo”, indicó.
Aseguró que si se forma la alianza, la nueva compañía “seguramente tendrá que cotizar no sólo en el mercado local sino también en la bolsa de Nueva York”.
Soriano señaló que actualmente la red local ha exportado el modelo de cabinas públicas a El Salvador, donde el gobierno de ese país la ejecuta con una inversión de $12 millones.
“También tenemos pedidos de los gobiernos de Chile, Uruguay, Nicaragua, Honduras, la India y dos países africanos para ejecutar el proyecto de cabinas", dijo.
Indicó que el espíritu del proyecto tiene que ver con la realidad de Latinoamérica, con un escaso número de líneas telefónicas y computadoras frente a países desarrollados.
Por ejemplo, en Perú hay 1,9 millones de teléfonos instalados y apenas 450.000 computadoras para 25 millones de personas, mientras en Estados Unidos el 97 por ciento de su población tiene teléfono y el 43 por ciento una computadora en su casa, manifestó el ejecutivo.
domingo, 26 de noviembre de 2006
Internet for everyone
Yolanda Maloney
Full-text Paper
There are advantages and disadvantages to the Internet for everyone, and its impact on population in the Third World is uncertain. This paper compares the proliferation of Internet use in the United States and Chile. The nations in less developed countries could profit from access to the Internet, since users no longer need to be "techies" with interfaces like Mosaic, and now Netscape. However, there are also the considerations of elitist disparities and barriers to access (e.g. cost, language, demographics, geography, political opposition).
While there are 236 countries connected to international networks1 of one kind or another, the developing countries in Latin America are underrepresented. The wealthier ABC countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile - and Mexico have the most networks, but the numbers just don’t compare with the industrialized nations. Puerto Rico and Mexico are the only Spanish-speaking territory and country, respectively, that had initial connections in 1989, which is roughly about the same time that industrialized nations had theirs. Most of the Latin American countries have been connected to the Internet since 1990 (Uruguay connected its one network last year), many funded by the Organization of American States and U.S. National Science Foundation.2
As in the US, it was the military in Chile that brought together the technology to make networking possible. (Incidently, it was the US National Science Foundation and NASA that helped create the telecommunications backbone that now supports Internet connections. NASA was interested in sending data from its Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory in northern Chile, which was also funded by the NSF and which is apparently the perfect site to study Magellanic Clouds. In 1987 NASA donated time on the networks supporting the observatory to a project linking three Santiago universities in Chile’s first network.)
Since going online, Chile has not experienced the growth that networked information has undergone in the United States. The academic science community was the first and still is the primary user group. Unlike the United States, private access is very rare. Until the middle of 1994 the public had yet to be convinced of the benefits of networked information and of the Internet in particular. In Chile there are roughly 1,100 users, and is increasing at about one hundred percent per year. According to Patricia Mamana, an executive from Red De Computadores S. A., an Internet consortium of three universities, as more information about Internet becomes available and more computer-trained people gain access to leadership positions in business, more people and more networks are expected to be connected to the Internet. It has been just since October 1994, when information about it started to appear in television and magazines, that people started to buy into the system, doubling the number of users in that short space of time. The Chilean public is just coming to understand that the Internet is not just a place to find games or to send messages to people residing abroad.
One of the reasons for Chile’s lagging behind the U.S. in the number of private users might be found in the fact the main Internet hosts are still at the universities.3 Although the universities are seen as the seat of knowledge and technology, General Pinochet did away with all the humanist disciplines, and allowed to remain only the hard sciences and those disciplines which would provide the country with expertise or products that could be sold abroad; today business and science still predominate. Perhaps having more of a mix between scientists and liberal arts people early on could have made a difference in drawing public interest to the Network. But oddly enough, even the agricultural researchers who were greatly encouraged to use the networks are barely using the Internet.
Stephen Ruth and Raul Gouet, in a 1993 article in the magazine Internet Research, compare the networking activity in Chile and the Czech Republic.4 The countries have similar data communications capacity, population, and GNP. However, the authors say that in a given year the Czech Republic will reach three times the traffic volume and user registration that Chile had. As of April of this year, Chile had 103 host computers connected and the Czechs 459. The article advances no theories as to why the Czechs have more network use than Chile. The two are comparable since both countries were emerging from brutal dictatorships when the networks became available, and both have populations of about 14 million with similar disciplines represented in their universities. What circumstances might account for this disparity? Is technology transfer different from the US to South America than from the US to Eastern Europe? Even more pertinent is the case of Argentina, which experienced a growth of over 400 percent going from 248 host computers to 1,287 in October of 1994. This can only partly be explained by the fact that the actual physical link, the Internet node, is located in Buenos Aires.
By today’s standards electronic communication via computer networks is a cost effective, efficient way to communicate with the world; easier information dissemination and exchange could help the developing countries in Latin America be not only consumers of information but producers as well. In the case of Chile all the basics are in place: the infrastructure and educated population, activity in telecommunications, and hardware and software savvy. Meanwhile, there are four Internet providers in Chile whose cost to the user varies: one charges $50 a month, with a limiting volume of ten megabytes, another charges $45 per month for a volume up to five megabytes.5 However, networking in developing countries runs up against multiple obstacles ranging from telecommunication costs and lack of adequate technical support to regulatory restrictions, political instability and public mistrust.
Although forty percent of the Internet is located outside of the United States, it is only the most developed countries, the industrialized countries, that have the most thorough and sophisticated access. Full Internet connection for a country is very expensive - without going into tedious detail , the basic connection needs a high-speed link running on a lease line or satellite link. Telecommunication costs can be four to eight times what it costs in the United States. For example, to connect on a dedicated, high-speed line in the U.S., it costs $2,000 per month, while in Peru the cost is $8,000 to $14,000 and Cuba’s cost is $16,000 because due to the US embargo, its signals have to go through Canada. The cost of the equipment can be up to$25,000 (for routers, servers, etc) and the cost of installation and training added to the cost of support and maintenance can become unsustainable.
However, the most basic levels of connection do not require expensive use of an Internet node; UUCP (Unix to Unix coPy) and FIDONET can be broadly installed since both are low cost technologies with effective capabilities for email and ftp (file transfer protocol). In fact, the so-called ABC countries: Argentina, Brazil and Chile, all have several each of BITNET, UUCP, and FIDONET sites as well as IP (Internet Protocol) Internet links.6
Training becomes even more important in Latin American countries when the language barrier is considered; not only is most of the information in English (the books in the Gutenberg project, the library catalogs), but also the Unix commands and the computer manuals are in English. There is a man in Peru who says that Latin America needs an indigenous network; he has a project to create an all-Spanish network bypassing the U.S.
Government controls vary in Latin American countries; in Peru, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, the government through the institutions of higher learning, have controlled what is on the Internet and in some cases laws have been passed to keep the Internet free from "undesirable content" - nothing so extreme as in Singapore, which keeps rigid control - but censorship of sorts and control of public access.
Latin Americans fear that the new technologies will be used as a tool of repression in the hands of the government, and in Chile as elsewhere, the fear has some basis in history For 17 years the Pinochet regime relentlessly persecuted journalists and other citizens who published news critical of the government. There is considerable precedent for people being harshly punished for open expression of opinion.
Another consideration that weighs heavily on the minds of Latin Americans and North Americans alike is access for profit versus a non-profit system; the fear is that big American companies like ITT or MCI will take over the Internet and will charge for access, and the business part of the Internet will grow and take over the research, academic, and non-profit side. The groups most concerned with this issue are the non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) who depend heavily on free access to the Internet to keep in contact with their people in the field and with other NG’s. Brazil and Chile each have more than 5,000 of these institutions connected by networks to institutes and universities such as GEONET, ENVIRONET, and PEACENET.
Chile is long, narrow and centralized. In spite of many efforts, decentralization has not been accomplished, but the geographical difficulties which made it impossible to lay cables from Tierra del Fuego to Valparaiso are obviated today by fiber optic technology with no less than three companies vying for the privilege of laying down submarine cables.
In Chile information is housed solely at the universities, which restricts access to the public. It is still very difficult to find information (especially if the patron does not belong to the elite) and to find current information is virtually impossible. Owners of small businesses in the chemical industry are still working with patents from 1916. The phenomenon of the new information technologies is now making current data available to the university elite, but the smaller enterprises and ordinary citizens are in real danger of becoming information-poor in top of their other handicaps.
Perhaps Chile would benefit by adopting another country’s system, for example France, which developed the highly successful public access Minitel and distributed it free to homes, stores, and post offices throughout France. Some features of the French Minitel system are the provision of inexpensive services, user-friendly screens, simplified hierarchies, and accessible sites. This is probably a pipe dream for Chile, because the country does not have the resources that an implementation of such a system would demand. Furthermore, the Chilean culture dislikes communication via machines. Unlike Americans who can do without talking to a human, Chileans - for all the frustrations of standing in lines - are reluctant to let go of the socially-enriching contact which would be lost in a machine.
The situation of public access in Latin America is best exemplified by Jose Soriano, who in 1994, connected the first computer network to the NSF backbone in his native country, Peru. Peru’s Internet services attracted 8,000 members and is among the fastest-growing Internet providers. The Peruvian success could be extended to the rest of Latin America by linking all of the Latin American countries via satellite on an all-Spanish network embedded in the culture, economy, and politics of Latin America and bypassing the United States. The chance for economic survival and the information revolution are going to be their databases.
NOTES
1. NASFNET Networks by Country. April 01, 1995. Available by http://www.nw.com/zone/www/top.html
2. The map shows the countries while the text shows connections: United States, Canada, and Germany were connected in 1988; NSFNET Networks by Country as of 01 April 1995. Available by http:www.nw.com
3. The map shows the position of the universities and the relative position of the two observatories: one American and one European. Presently in Chile there are three of these national networks connected to the Internet: CONICYT, REUNA and RDC S.A. CONICYT is the National Commission for Science and Technology; (governmental) it has about 80 networks and more than 500 clients covering 4,345 kilometers. It is CONICYT’s role to implement a national information network to support scientific and technological activity by establishing infrastructure for communication between researchers at the national and international level by expediting the access to available scientific information both in the country and abroad. In 1992, CONICYT agreed to be part of an association formed by 19 Chilean institutions of higher learning to cooperatively manage REUNA, which resulted in REUNA the national university network (Red Universitaria Nacional) being integrated into Internet through a high-speed channel. CONICYT’s programs and services have been available since 1993 through the server at REUNA. REUNA, helped at inception in 1987 by funding from the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), has paid since 1992 for satellite connections to SURAnet, one of the fastest on-ramp access to the Internet in South America and the only satellite that carries only data in Chile; the high-speed cable provides a speed of 516 kbps and it is expected that at the end of 1995 Chile will have a T-1 connection. The third network RED DE COMPUTADORES S.A. began in 1992 as a joint project by the University of Santiago, Catholic of Valparaiso and Catholic of Chile with the goal to establish a Chilean network; presently RDC S.A. covers the country’s capital, Santiago.
4. Stephan R. Ruth and Raul Gouet, Must Invisible College Be Invisible? An Approach to Examining Large Communities of Network Users. Internet Research (Spring 1993): 36-53.
Eric Arnum, Correlation of GNP/GDP to Number of Internet Hosts in July 1994.
5. In Chile there are 4 Internet providers:
* Chilenet (DCC U. de Chile)
* RDC: it offers access to individuals and enterprises
* REUNA: expanded phone lines providing service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
-added telephone support 7-11 M-F Sat 9-6 services chargeable to credit cards
-Charges: SLIP connection UF 2 plus IVA (one time charge) support UF 1,5 plus IVA
* Tasco: this server will offer the user an opportunity to interactively buy computer products. This provider offers:
-training
-connections through modems of 28,800 bps or 115,200 bps (compression)
-access to CD-ROMS so the user does not need to use servers abroad
6. Larry Landweber, International Connectivity Version 13 - February 15, 1995.
Bolivia has only UUCP and FIDONET; Columbia has less than five BITNET, Internet and less than five UUCP; Costa Rica has Internet and modest UUCP and FIDONET connections; Ecuador and Nicaragua have Internet connections and less that five UUCP sites; Mexico has more than five BITNET sites, IP Internet connections, less than five UUCP sites, and more than five FIDONET sites; Paraguay has less than five UUCP sites no IP Internet connectivity while Peru has Internet connections, more than five UUCP sites and less than five FIDONET sites; Puerto Rico has less than five BITNET sites but plenty of IP Internet connections and UUCP and FIDONET sites, Uruguay and Venezuela both have IP Internet access, more than five UUCP, and more than five FIDONET sites. Note that the U.S. has the full range of BITNET, IP Internet, UUCP, and FIDONET and ISO sites while Cuba has only UUCP sites; Nicaragua has less than five UUCP sites.
Full-text Paper
There are advantages and disadvantages to the Internet for everyone, and its impact on population in the Third World is uncertain. This paper compares the proliferation of Internet use in the United States and Chile. The nations in less developed countries could profit from access to the Internet, since users no longer need to be "techies" with interfaces like Mosaic, and now Netscape. However, there are also the considerations of elitist disparities and barriers to access (e.g. cost, language, demographics, geography, political opposition).
While there are 236 countries connected to international networks1 of one kind or another, the developing countries in Latin America are underrepresented. The wealthier ABC countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile - and Mexico have the most networks, but the numbers just don’t compare with the industrialized nations. Puerto Rico and Mexico are the only Spanish-speaking territory and country, respectively, that had initial connections in 1989, which is roughly about the same time that industrialized nations had theirs. Most of the Latin American countries have been connected to the Internet since 1990 (Uruguay connected its one network last year), many funded by the Organization of American States and U.S. National Science Foundation.2
As in the US, it was the military in Chile that brought together the technology to make networking possible. (Incidently, it was the US National Science Foundation and NASA that helped create the telecommunications backbone that now supports Internet connections. NASA was interested in sending data from its Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory in northern Chile, which was also funded by the NSF and which is apparently the perfect site to study Magellanic Clouds. In 1987 NASA donated time on the networks supporting the observatory to a project linking three Santiago universities in Chile’s first network.)
Since going online, Chile has not experienced the growth that networked information has undergone in the United States. The academic science community was the first and still is the primary user group. Unlike the United States, private access is very rare. Until the middle of 1994 the public had yet to be convinced of the benefits of networked information and of the Internet in particular. In Chile there are roughly 1,100 users, and is increasing at about one hundred percent per year. According to Patricia Mamana, an executive from Red De Computadores S. A., an Internet consortium of three universities, as more information about Internet becomes available and more computer-trained people gain access to leadership positions in business, more people and more networks are expected to be connected to the Internet. It has been just since October 1994, when information about it started to appear in television and magazines, that people started to buy into the system, doubling the number of users in that short space of time. The Chilean public is just coming to understand that the Internet is not just a place to find games or to send messages to people residing abroad.
One of the reasons for Chile’s lagging behind the U.S. in the number of private users might be found in the fact the main Internet hosts are still at the universities.3 Although the universities are seen as the seat of knowledge and technology, General Pinochet did away with all the humanist disciplines, and allowed to remain only the hard sciences and those disciplines which would provide the country with expertise or products that could be sold abroad; today business and science still predominate. Perhaps having more of a mix between scientists and liberal arts people early on could have made a difference in drawing public interest to the Network. But oddly enough, even the agricultural researchers who were greatly encouraged to use the networks are barely using the Internet.
Stephen Ruth and Raul Gouet, in a 1993 article in the magazine Internet Research, compare the networking activity in Chile and the Czech Republic.4 The countries have similar data communications capacity, population, and GNP. However, the authors say that in a given year the Czech Republic will reach three times the traffic volume and user registration that Chile had. As of April of this year, Chile had 103 host computers connected and the Czechs 459. The article advances no theories as to why the Czechs have more network use than Chile. The two are comparable since both countries were emerging from brutal dictatorships when the networks became available, and both have populations of about 14 million with similar disciplines represented in their universities. What circumstances might account for this disparity? Is technology transfer different from the US to South America than from the US to Eastern Europe? Even more pertinent is the case of Argentina, which experienced a growth of over 400 percent going from 248 host computers to 1,287 in October of 1994. This can only partly be explained by the fact that the actual physical link, the Internet node, is located in Buenos Aires.
By today’s standards electronic communication via computer networks is a cost effective, efficient way to communicate with the world; easier information dissemination and exchange could help the developing countries in Latin America be not only consumers of information but producers as well. In the case of Chile all the basics are in place: the infrastructure and educated population, activity in telecommunications, and hardware and software savvy. Meanwhile, there are four Internet providers in Chile whose cost to the user varies: one charges $50 a month, with a limiting volume of ten megabytes, another charges $45 per month for a volume up to five megabytes.5 However, networking in developing countries runs up against multiple obstacles ranging from telecommunication costs and lack of adequate technical support to regulatory restrictions, political instability and public mistrust.
Although forty percent of the Internet is located outside of the United States, it is only the most developed countries, the industrialized countries, that have the most thorough and sophisticated access. Full Internet connection for a country is very expensive - without going into tedious detail , the basic connection needs a high-speed link running on a lease line or satellite link. Telecommunication costs can be four to eight times what it costs in the United States. For example, to connect on a dedicated, high-speed line in the U.S., it costs $2,000 per month, while in Peru the cost is $8,000 to $14,000 and Cuba’s cost is $16,000 because due to the US embargo, its signals have to go through Canada. The cost of the equipment can be up to$25,000 (for routers, servers, etc) and the cost of installation and training added to the cost of support and maintenance can become unsustainable.
However, the most basic levels of connection do not require expensive use of an Internet node; UUCP (Unix to Unix coPy) and FIDONET can be broadly installed since both are low cost technologies with effective capabilities for email and ftp (file transfer protocol). In fact, the so-called ABC countries: Argentina, Brazil and Chile, all have several each of BITNET, UUCP, and FIDONET sites as well as IP (Internet Protocol) Internet links.6
Training becomes even more important in Latin American countries when the language barrier is considered; not only is most of the information in English (the books in the Gutenberg project, the library catalogs), but also the Unix commands and the computer manuals are in English. There is a man in Peru who says that Latin America needs an indigenous network; he has a project to create an all-Spanish network bypassing the U.S.
Government controls vary in Latin American countries; in Peru, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, the government through the institutions of higher learning, have controlled what is on the Internet and in some cases laws have been passed to keep the Internet free from "undesirable content" - nothing so extreme as in Singapore, which keeps rigid control - but censorship of sorts and control of public access.
Latin Americans fear that the new technologies will be used as a tool of repression in the hands of the government, and in Chile as elsewhere, the fear has some basis in history For 17 years the Pinochet regime relentlessly persecuted journalists and other citizens who published news critical of the government. There is considerable precedent for people being harshly punished for open expression of opinion.
Another consideration that weighs heavily on the minds of Latin Americans and North Americans alike is access for profit versus a non-profit system; the fear is that big American companies like ITT or MCI will take over the Internet and will charge for access, and the business part of the Internet will grow and take over the research, academic, and non-profit side. The groups most concerned with this issue are the non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) who depend heavily on free access to the Internet to keep in contact with their people in the field and with other NG’s. Brazil and Chile each have more than 5,000 of these institutions connected by networks to institutes and universities such as GEONET, ENVIRONET, and PEACENET.
Chile is long, narrow and centralized. In spite of many efforts, decentralization has not been accomplished, but the geographical difficulties which made it impossible to lay cables from Tierra del Fuego to Valparaiso are obviated today by fiber optic technology with no less than three companies vying for the privilege of laying down submarine cables.
In Chile information is housed solely at the universities, which restricts access to the public. It is still very difficult to find information (especially if the patron does not belong to the elite) and to find current information is virtually impossible. Owners of small businesses in the chemical industry are still working with patents from 1916. The phenomenon of the new information technologies is now making current data available to the university elite, but the smaller enterprises and ordinary citizens are in real danger of becoming information-poor in top of their other handicaps.
Perhaps Chile would benefit by adopting another country’s system, for example France, which developed the highly successful public access Minitel and distributed it free to homes, stores, and post offices throughout France. Some features of the French Minitel system are the provision of inexpensive services, user-friendly screens, simplified hierarchies, and accessible sites. This is probably a pipe dream for Chile, because the country does not have the resources that an implementation of such a system would demand. Furthermore, the Chilean culture dislikes communication via machines. Unlike Americans who can do without talking to a human, Chileans - for all the frustrations of standing in lines - are reluctant to let go of the socially-enriching contact which would be lost in a machine.
The situation of public access in Latin America is best exemplified by Jose Soriano, who in 1994, connected the first computer network to the NSF backbone in his native country, Peru. Peru’s Internet services attracted 8,000 members and is among the fastest-growing Internet providers. The Peruvian success could be extended to the rest of Latin America by linking all of the Latin American countries via satellite on an all-Spanish network embedded in the culture, economy, and politics of Latin America and bypassing the United States. The chance for economic survival and the information revolution are going to be their databases.
NOTES
1. NASFNET Networks by Country. April 01, 1995. Available by http://www.nw.com/zone/www/top.html
2. The map shows the countries while the text shows connections: United States, Canada, and Germany were connected in 1988; NSFNET Networks by Country as of 01 April 1995. Available by http:www.nw.com
3. The map shows the position of the universities and the relative position of the two observatories: one American and one European. Presently in Chile there are three of these national networks connected to the Internet: CONICYT, REUNA and RDC S.A. CONICYT is the National Commission for Science and Technology; (governmental) it has about 80 networks and more than 500 clients covering 4,345 kilometers. It is CONICYT’s role to implement a national information network to support scientific and technological activity by establishing infrastructure for communication between researchers at the national and international level by expediting the access to available scientific information both in the country and abroad. In 1992, CONICYT agreed to be part of an association formed by 19 Chilean institutions of higher learning to cooperatively manage REUNA, which resulted in REUNA the national university network (Red Universitaria Nacional) being integrated into Internet through a high-speed channel. CONICYT’s programs and services have been available since 1993 through the server at REUNA. REUNA, helped at inception in 1987 by funding from the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), has paid since 1992 for satellite connections to SURAnet, one of the fastest on-ramp access to the Internet in South America and the only satellite that carries only data in Chile; the high-speed cable provides a speed of 516 kbps and it is expected that at the end of 1995 Chile will have a T-1 connection. The third network RED DE COMPUTADORES S.A. began in 1992 as a joint project by the University of Santiago, Catholic of Valparaiso and Catholic of Chile with the goal to establish a Chilean network; presently RDC S.A. covers the country’s capital, Santiago.
4. Stephan R. Ruth and Raul Gouet, Must Invisible College Be Invisible? An Approach to Examining Large Communities of Network Users. Internet Research (Spring 1993): 36-53.
Eric Arnum, Correlation of GNP/GDP to Number of Internet Hosts in July 1994.
5. In Chile there are 4 Internet providers:
* Chilenet (DCC U. de Chile)
* RDC: it offers access to individuals and enterprises
* REUNA: expanded phone lines providing service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
-added telephone support 7-11 M-F Sat 9-6 services chargeable to credit cards
-Charges: SLIP connection UF 2 plus IVA (one time charge) support UF 1,5 plus IVA
* Tasco: this server will offer the user an opportunity to interactively buy computer products. This provider offers:
-training
-connections through modems of 28,800 bps or 115,200 bps (compression)
-access to CD-ROMS so the user does not need to use servers abroad
6. Larry Landweber, International Connectivity Version 13 - February 15, 1995.
Bolivia has only UUCP and FIDONET; Columbia has less than five BITNET, Internet and less than five UUCP; Costa Rica has Internet and modest UUCP and FIDONET connections; Ecuador and Nicaragua have Internet connections and less that five UUCP sites; Mexico has more than five BITNET sites, IP Internet connections, less than five UUCP sites, and more than five FIDONET sites; Paraguay has less than five UUCP sites no IP Internet connectivity while Peru has Internet connections, more than five UUCP sites and less than five FIDONET sites; Puerto Rico has less than five BITNET sites but plenty of IP Internet connections and UUCP and FIDONET sites, Uruguay and Venezuela both have IP Internet access, more than five UUCP, and more than five FIDONET sites. Note that the U.S. has the full range of BITNET, IP Internet, UUCP, and FIDONET and ISO sites while Cuba has only UUCP sites; Nicaragua has less than five UUCP sites.
E-EDUCATION: SET TO BOOM
Focus Session Report
Education and Awareness
E-EDUCATION: SET TO BOOM
"The next Internet dot coms are going to be in education. Get in the business, do it now. We started out as an ISP in 1991. Today, 52% of our income from community centres/internet access booths comes from education and training programmes."
Jose Soriano, RCP Peru
WHAT KIND OF EDUCATION, FOR WHOM?
GLOBALLY
Four types of training are needed to build e-trade competency:
* High End Training for ITspecialists. (Example: Software engineering)
* Mid and Low End Training for employees. (Example: Web-enabled services)
* E-literacy for the general public. (Example: cybercafes)
* E-management for senior managers in export-related business and government. (Example: conferences to shape strategic vision about how technology can be used to achieve key business goals)
LOCALLY
Communities have core competences that they must concentrate upon. This is the only thing that gives them a competitive edge in a knowledge-based world. (Without local content and training, there will be nothing to talk about internationally. The key is to exchange information between local networks.)
WHY RECONSIDER EDUCATION? A CHANGING WORLD
Today, rapid changes in society are being driven far more by technology than by anything else. More than 1 billion web pages exist, with 3 million more added each day. There are two different, though linked, phenomena: technological developments themselves, and the explosion of information and data available via the Internet.
Educational systems are unprepared for technology. We need to rethink what we teach (contents) and how we teach it (methodology) and create new paradigms.
For example, there is an explosion in demand for skilled technical workers. But rather than train people to be certified for specific products, train them to understand the underlying concepts at a deeper level. Do they learn about database concepts, or specific database packages like Oracle?
Change is happening so fast that we need to teach people how to think and how to learn, rather than concentrate on training that will become quickly outdated.
Information cannot be transferred in traditional channels anymore because there is no time to reflect on it. What we need to do instead is share knowledge through linked communities. We need to build networks and tap into them as we need them. Then complementary networks link between each other.
HOW? EDUCATION THROUGH EXPERIENCE; LEARN BY DOING
* Education systems need to move away from book-based provision of information.
Who has learned about Internet through a book? Most of us learned from each other and by working directly on the computer.
* On the job training
As Mr. Ricupero of UNCTAD said in the opening session of this Executive Forum, the IT revolution is the biggest one since the invention of the Gutenberg press. However, most education systems are still based on books... Perhaps we need to return to an earlier model, that of the Middle Ages, to encourage a greater emphasis upon apprenticeships and on-the-job training.
* Learning at your own pace, with your own style.
The Internet allows educators to train students in a tailor-made fashion, rather than with curricula in which everyone must move at the same pace, and with the same methods and styles.
* Alternative learning systems, community based systems.
The amount of available information is growing faster than can be digested. But we don't need to digest it all. We need to be selective, by tapping into networks to access knowledge and information as we need it, in a focused manner.
* Re-examine training policies in universities.
Some students in universities are studying IT related materials and have never seen satellite dishes, routers or computers. You need to touch it to understand it.
* Teachers need to be co-learners and facilitators, not masters.
We need to move away from formal channels of knowledge. In today's world, children are often teaching parents computer literacy skills.
* Build technological fluency.
And start young. Technological fluency can be learned like a language, naturally, with products that help children build computer literacy.
SOME RESOURCE ISSUES
Governments manage and run the education system. But governments do not have the resources to single-handedly invest in the changes we need. Education needs to open up to the private sector to get these changes. This means we need to re-examine things like:
* Role of educational institutes of major IT corporations
* Role of ISPs and community centres/Internet kiosks
* Sharing of costs of education between government and private sector.
Education and Awareness
E-EDUCATION: SET TO BOOM
"The next Internet dot coms are going to be in education. Get in the business, do it now. We started out as an ISP in 1991. Today, 52% of our income from community centres/internet access booths comes from education and training programmes."
Jose Soriano, RCP Peru
WHAT KIND OF EDUCATION, FOR WHOM?
GLOBALLY
Four types of training are needed to build e-trade competency:
* High End Training for ITspecialists. (Example: Software engineering)
* Mid and Low End Training for employees. (Example: Web-enabled services)
* E-literacy for the general public. (Example: cybercafes)
* E-management for senior managers in export-related business and government. (Example: conferences to shape strategic vision about how technology can be used to achieve key business goals)
LOCALLY
Communities have core competences that they must concentrate upon. This is the only thing that gives them a competitive edge in a knowledge-based world. (Without local content and training, there will be nothing to talk about internationally. The key is to exchange information between local networks.)
WHY RECONSIDER EDUCATION? A CHANGING WORLD
Today, rapid changes in society are being driven far more by technology than by anything else. More than 1 billion web pages exist, with 3 million more added each day. There are two different, though linked, phenomena: technological developments themselves, and the explosion of information and data available via the Internet.
Educational systems are unprepared for technology. We need to rethink what we teach (contents) and how we teach it (methodology) and create new paradigms.
For example, there is an explosion in demand for skilled technical workers. But rather than train people to be certified for specific products, train them to understand the underlying concepts at a deeper level. Do they learn about database concepts, or specific database packages like Oracle?
Change is happening so fast that we need to teach people how to think and how to learn, rather than concentrate on training that will become quickly outdated.
Information cannot be transferred in traditional channels anymore because there is no time to reflect on it. What we need to do instead is share knowledge through linked communities. We need to build networks and tap into them as we need them. Then complementary networks link between each other.
HOW? EDUCATION THROUGH EXPERIENCE; LEARN BY DOING
* Education systems need to move away from book-based provision of information.
Who has learned about Internet through a book? Most of us learned from each other and by working directly on the computer.
* On the job training
As Mr. Ricupero of UNCTAD said in the opening session of this Executive Forum, the IT revolution is the biggest one since the invention of the Gutenberg press. However, most education systems are still based on books... Perhaps we need to return to an earlier model, that of the Middle Ages, to encourage a greater emphasis upon apprenticeships and on-the-job training.
* Learning at your own pace, with your own style.
The Internet allows educators to train students in a tailor-made fashion, rather than with curricula in which everyone must move at the same pace, and with the same methods and styles.
* Alternative learning systems, community based systems.
The amount of available information is growing faster than can be digested. But we don't need to digest it all. We need to be selective, by tapping into networks to access knowledge and information as we need it, in a focused manner.
* Re-examine training policies in universities.
Some students in universities are studying IT related materials and have never seen satellite dishes, routers or computers. You need to touch it to understand it.
* Teachers need to be co-learners and facilitators, not masters.
We need to move away from formal channels of knowledge. In today's world, children are often teaching parents computer literacy skills.
* Build technological fluency.
And start young. Technological fluency can be learned like a language, naturally, with products that help children build computer literacy.
SOME RESOURCE ISSUES
Governments manage and run the education system. But governments do not have the resources to single-handedly invest in the changes we need. Education needs to open up to the private sector to get these changes. This means we need to re-examine things like:
* Role of educational institutes of major IT corporations
* Role of ISPs and community centres/Internet kiosks
* Sharing of costs of education between government and private sector.
Internet access in Uruguay
Uruguayan APC Member takes on the telecomms Big Boys with Latin American flavoured Internet Strategy
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay -- Chasque, APC member in Uruguay, plans to open up Internet access in Uruguay by providing telecentres throughout the country’s interior; less lucrative territory which until now ignored by larger scale Internet access providers in Uruguay in favour of the lucrative capital, Montevideo.
With their new partners, the Red Científica Peruana, a commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP) from Peru, which maintains the ‘non-profit’ ideals of its origins despite capturing 50% of the Peruvian ISP market share through popularizing telecentres, Chasque is planning to take on the large telecommunications companies in Uruguay and build a uniquely Latin American Internet ISP marketing strategy at the same time.
For More Information
Interview with Magela Sigillito of Chasque, Jose Soriano of the Red Científica Peruana, Carlos Afonso (Brazil) and Roberto Bissio (ITeM) in Spanish: http://www.espectador.com/text/ent05172.htm
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay -- Chasque, APC member in Uruguay, plans to open up Internet access in Uruguay by providing telecentres throughout the country’s interior; less lucrative territory which until now ignored by larger scale Internet access providers in Uruguay in favour of the lucrative capital, Montevideo.
With their new partners, the Red Científica Peruana, a commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP) from Peru, which maintains the ‘non-profit’ ideals of its origins despite capturing 50% of the Peruvian ISP market share through popularizing telecentres, Chasque is planning to take on the large telecommunications companies in Uruguay and build a uniquely Latin American Internet ISP marketing strategy at the same time.
For More Information
Interview with Magela Sigillito of Chasque, Jose Soriano of the Red Científica Peruana, Carlos Afonso (Brazil) and Roberto Bissio (ITeM) in Spanish: http://www.espectador.com/text/ent05172.htm
RESEARCH NETWORKS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES:
Global_Net Principles
RESEARCH NETWORKS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES:
ANALYSIS, METHODOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES
AND GUIDELINES FOR STARTING
By Daniel Pimienta, REDALC Project Director, Union Latina, Santo-Domingo, e-mail: dpimient!pimienta!daniel@redid.org.do
TRIBUTES
The article presents the synthesis of a part of years of personal and team activities. Several people have participated directly or indirectly in the conceptualizing of the ideas produced by the REDALC Project. Jose Soriano, actual Manager of the Red Cientifica Peruana have more specifically contribute to the thematic expressed in this paper.
ABSTRACT
The paper presents a structured set of guidelines to help starting and operating research networks in developing countries. The proposed methodology is the result of a combination of studies and field experiences in Latin America since 1989 [REDALC Project]. The introduction identifies the key factors for the success of research network creation in developed countries. A comparison is made on the respective industrial and developing countries environments which calls for a different approach. A summary list of the activities linked to network building and operation is shown which demonstrates the bulk of activities is more in managerial tasks than in technical one's. A hierarchical approach for problem solving is described, from politic, to organizational, to financial and, last, technical types. The different levels are described and to each it is associated a set of guidelines. Finally, some success prone ingredients are presented.
KEY WORDS: Research networks, developing countries, Latin America and Caribbean, methodology, guidelines.
I INTRODUCTION
The traditional success story for network creation have proven the unbeatable superiority of the bottom-up approach for the network building process. The putting in place of an initial kernel of users have always been followed by the emergence of a nation-wide network. The mechanisms which allow the growth from this basis have usually been considered as an inherent part of the environment.
A slight detail, among others, makes the method not necessarily transportable from industrial countries, where it have demonstrated its validity, to the developing countries.
MONEY: FINANCIAL CONSIDERATIONS IN RESEARCH NETWORKS
If one analyzes the factors of the growth of the EARN/BITNET model, he will discover, from the bottom to the top, the presence of this efficient tool:
-the money invested by large computer manufacturers to offer the first years telecommunication costs and telematic equipments,
-the money invested by the governments to keep on paying part of the telecommunication infrastructure,
-the money collected from subscriptions by the research institutions,
-and maybe, tomorrow, more money by the last group to pay the bill of transport networks becoming less subsidized... Money was of course not enough. Some other factors were keys to the success.
DETERMINANT FACTORS IN DEVELOPED COUNTRIES
-the existence of good national telecommunication infrastructures,
-the high level of organization and management of the research institutions [mainly the universities],
-their capacity for negotiation in front of the computer industry,
-the existence of pioneers who were able to manage the idea, create the condition of the network emergence, make it happen and keep the effort ongoing.
All that process have created a wide consensus among networkers about the validity of the "pragmatic", "realistic", bottom-up approach against the "planned", "theoretical" top-down approach.
The network architects could have been more inclined, by their profession skills, towards the second approach. However, they were put in the situation of being always in advance compared to the standard authorities, thus encouraged to build on the path and maintained an "advance technology" type of attitude.
The only low rated points of the research networking emergence are the natural consequence of a technology driven situation:
-lack of standardization,
-low involvement of the end users,
-few global efforts for structuring the application level.
PROJECTING THE MODEL INTO DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
It is not the point here to argue against the obvious validity of the historical approach. However, although we are part of the consensus on that very point, we do want to warn the reader about the illusion of projecting that truth, very specific to the industrial world, to a quite different environment: the developing countries.
On one hand, the lack of money may prevent the "growth mechanism" makes a start-up realization evolve naturally toward a national solution. On the other hand, beside money, and beside the time elapsed since the beginning of the application of the technology [should necessarily the new networks be built the same way as 10 years ago?], there are other good reasons why one should think differently in term of solutions. We will show them hereafter.
In counterpart, the experience of the emergence of research networks in developing countries should not leave indifferent the networkers of the first world: although they believe their concern is now on fat pipes and "applications" [in the OSI sense of the term], they may have to learn something, for their own future, from the experiences conducted in developing countries!
Indeed, the signals are clearly appearing of the coming of the time where research networks will evolve to a market driven growth pattern, and hence, situations where the managing power and the budget expenses will drastically switch from networking infrastructures toward end-users considerations [training, support, interfaces, user's applications]. This is why the experiences and considerations of the emergence of network in developing countries may be of special interest for the industrial countries. It may teach something about that key transformation which concern the whole world.
AN APPROPRIATE MODEL
This paper aims to identify a set of factors which argues, to a more balanced approach in developing countries: something which merge the best of the top-down and of the bottom-up approach, something which design is specifically based on the characteristics of this different environment.
And to keep "pragmatism" as a healthy premise to network activities, we present a methodological tool which is applicable in the field, and which have been successfully applied already in two concrete cases [Peru and Dominican Republic].
II BACKGROUND
The proposed methodology is the result of a set of in-depth studies conducted, since 1988, by the author, his team and his Latina y Caribe] is a project from Union Latina, a Governmental Organization aiming at the defense of Latin language and culture, looking for a steady, regional and comprehensive solution for research networks. The study was first conducted from Europe in 1988 and 1989. Then an EEC funding was obtained in 1990 to conduct a 2 years feasibility study in the field. In mid-1991, Unesco [PGI and CRESALC branches] joins the feasibility study to address more specifically the information network content aspects. ACAL [Academia de Ciencia de America Latina] participated in the Unesco studies. Some other related studies or activities are also conducted by the REDALC team of Union Latina: a research network impact study in French West Indies, the coordination of a "listserv" informing about regional networking activities [REDALC@FRMOP11.BITNET], the coordination of the development of a state of the art, PC-based, multi-lingual, network type independent, interface [MULBRI], and last, but not least, a central participation in the launch of two national networks so far [Peru and Dominican Republic].
All this process have made involved the concept of the Latin American network since 1988, from a simple EARN projection to the region, toward something more specific and appropriate to the economical and structural reality of the region [REDALC model].
The paper, which uses the spirit of the results collected by some of the studies, is directly derived from the diagnostics made in Latin America.
We tend to believe that a large part of the experience is applicable in other regions. Readers have to check if the conditions in other regions [Africa, Asia, Middle-East, Eastern Europe] are similar so that the methodology is applicable.
III INDUSTRIAL COUNTRIES VS DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
3.1 FIGURES BACKGROUND
We gather hereafter a set of facts which we consider very significative in giving the readers a close idea of the figures involved in building research networks.
-EARN take-off was obtained between 1985 and 1987 thanks to an IBM grant for the support of international telecommunication costs, of an order of magnitude of 10 millions of US $. Note, on the way, this interesting economical fact: the research networks have allowed a large and indirect transfer of money from the computer private industry to the telecommunication national public operators!
-National networks require yearly operational budgets of the order of magnitude of the million of US $, where the main part is directed toward telecommunication cost. So far, telecommunication is the largely predominant part of the visible side of the [basically manpower and resources given free by universities] is spent in user support, hardware, programming services, local administration and national telecommunication. Yet, the largest part of the "real budget" is used to pay telecommunication cost [guess estimate between 60 and 70%]. However, the amount [and quality] of free-ware produced on behalf networking, is something worth noticing and if one could evaluate on a price basis we could be surprised by the economical importance.
-Brazil current network level [which serves less than 20% of the potential users] is strongly supported by the State of Sao Paulo which pays a yearly bill of few millions of US $.
-One of the first experiments of EARN in Africa was conducted in Ivory Coast. The level of investment for having few users gaining access was in few thousands of US $ [order of magnitude of 10,000 US$ investment per user].
-The ratio researcher population vs national population is, depending of the countries, measured in a figure between 1 and 10 for 1000 in the industrial world, let's say 10 times higher as the same figure in the developing countries.
-The Science and Technology population for France is around 200,000 persons. The same population for all Latin America and the Caribbean is also estimated at 200,000 [with much loose criterions].
-The monthly salary for a teacher in Latin America averages 150 US$.
-The salary for researchers in Latin America may in some case reach the industrial world pattern of few thousands of US $, but the bulk of the monthly salary distribution is in few hundred of US$.
-The building of the Porto Rico research network consumes a budget of the size of 20 Million of US $ [the result is a state of the art network, with multi-protocol support, full optical fiber at T1 speed between campuses, where terminals, with remote logon facility at fraction of second response time, are spread over the various campuses of several universities].
-Twenty millions of US $ is sufficient to build a Latin America proprietary regional backbone. The figure is obtained assuming a satellite transponder provided by the region as counterpart to an International Agency investment in terrestrial equipments and costs of technology transfer. The existence of such backbone will allow the decrease of the telecommunication operational yearly operational costs of an order of magnitude, says few hundreds of thousand US$.
Note: the fact the two figures are presented sequentially is not the result of a mere coincidence! That comparison says it all island of 4 millions habitants have built a state of the art research network for its 4000 research networks users [a 5,000 US$ investment per user]. With twenty millions the whole region could reach the level of basic services for its 200,000 potential users [100 US$ investment per user]. Of course, it would be unfair not to say that the first budget includes every thing from the terminal to the optical fiber, and that the second concentrates only in the backbone infrastructure and implementation costs. But anyway, it is important to identify that this is the amount of money required by the region to definitively solve the problem of generalized affordable research networking.
3.2 SOME OBVIOUS FACTS ABOUT THE DEVELOPED COUNTRIES
Hereafter are gathered a set of facts which are an obvious part of the research environment of industrial countries but are hardly verified in the developing countries.
-The researchers are generally and naturally part of the Academic world, where they split harmoniously their activities between teaching and researching.
-The salary level of the researchers [several thousands of US$] allows them to be full time employees of their institutions with no much incentives for looking for more jobs.
-The large majority of the Academic institutions offers appropriate characteristics in term of budget, administrative and managing skills, computer and telecommunication skills to conduct a node creation and operation.
-The market size of the academic world for computer products justifies global national marketing investments from manufacturers of hundreds thousand of US $ yearly.
-The national packet switching networks have been developed independently of the research networks.
-The Public Administration Education and/or Science and Technology budgets are such that the support of telecommunication costs for networking is rather marginal.
If is feasible to check, one by one, if these facts are also verified in specific developing countries. Of course, the result varies depending on each country, but, in average, the large majority of these facts are not verified in most developing countries.
These obvious facts are the implicit building foundation of the research networks in the developed world. Would it be wise to use the same building model in an environment so different?
IV HOW TO GET THE MONEY FOR BUILDING AND OPERATING NETWORKS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES?
A full scale national network unit cost is on the size of the million US $. How can the required money be collected?
Directly from the using Institutions? The large majority of research centers cannot afford it, and it there is a general agreement on the need for networks to be democratically and openly accessed.
From Public Administration? Of course, the Governments should participate in financing such activities prone to contribute to the global development. But it is hopeless they can support it all: their budgets are narrow and they have to complete more urgent tasks in the Education and Research domains, like, for instance, improving the alphabetization rate and completing the creation of basic education infrastructures [one of the more urgent task being to increase teacher's salary].
Is there a hope to get strong enough contributions from the computer industry? Time have changed and the marginal benefits have become thinner for that market segment! And, anyway, the expectable return of investment does not justify "no free lunch gifts" of that level of magnitude for most developing countries.
Three alternatives remain:
1] Regional Integration. Substantial scale economies could be obtained by building regional transport infrastructures in a coordinated fashion. Furthermore, regional agreements must be obtained for the suppression of taxes on national and international telecommunications used for research networks. Last but not least, dedicating channels in a regional satellite is an appropriate way to offer a regional stable and independent solution.
A lot of money have been and is still expensed by EEC to pave the ground toward European integration in term of networking, primarily with the reinforcement of the normative politic and also with the financial in joint venture on specific advance technology domains. The motivations, both political and economical, are medium term oriented.
For developing regions, integration is an immediate financial urgency.
2] Trading with Telecommunication Operators. Most of the developing countries have very recent data network infrastructures or are on their way to build them, together with the value added services. The key importance of telecommunication infrastructures for the development have not to be demonstrated any more. Developing countries cannot afford what have been the rule in the industrial world: a rather Telecommunication entities. Furthermore, it is the interest of the Telecommunication marketers to use that tiny segment market which have a huge multiplicative factor on the whole market to help solving the chicken and egg problem which prevents the arising of the telematic market. Indeed, it appears to be more cost effective to invest in offering to the research sub-market than in commercial campaigning and advertising for the whole market...
There is a crucial area of common interests between the Telecommunication market players, the world of Science and Technology and finally the whole country development areas.
3] Multilateral Cooperation is probably the only financial way to trigger the process. The international Agencies may provide the funding to fulfill the basic regional infrastructure and act as reinforcing agent for the two first factors within regional programs framework.
Of course, one could still argues [ref 8] it is easy and cheap to build a network node, and, for the telecommunication costs, no problem: the end-user can pay a bill which is one order of magnitude cheaper than international communication by more traditional means [telephone, telex, fax]. One should also accept that this model would, without doubt, conduct to a "only-who-can-pay-research network" exclusive to the minority of third world rich universities. Is that the real credo of networking? Furthermore, is it fair to have the third world researchers pay the bill their homologous of the industrial world had subsidized?
V A PRIVATE HOT TUB VS A PUBLIC SWIMMING POOL: INTRODUCING THE TASK OF BUILDING A NETWORK
There is a common false idea resulting from the dogmatic believing toward the bottom-up magics: create a node with few users, connect it to another network and you will automatically get a network. The transformation from few users on a node toward a real national networking requires a lot of organization and engineering, and also, a lot of money!
Let's use the analogy of the hot tub and the swimming pool. You, of course, can get wet in both of them, but it is not very realistic to believe than you can offer a collective bathing service to a large community... in your personal hot tub! And if your plumber says there is no technical problem to do the transformation of your hot tub into a swimming pool, just tell him that the most delicate problem may no be the water delivery but some managing one's where he may be not skilled for, like, for instance:
-marketing the customers and their requirements in term of bathing,
-defining a billing pattern for the use of the swimming pool and
-offering swimming teachers and watching teams,
-organizing the administration and the accounting of the business,
-insuring the quality of the water, the security of the customers, and their privacy for changing clothes,
-defining a traffic pattern and hence deriving the algorithm for purification and recycling of the water,
-preparing to solve new customer requirements [towel, drinks, foods, music, sun bathing, etc.].
-and so on, and so on.
Finally, you realize that the amount of job and money necessary to transform your apartment in a public swimming pool may be such than you decide to consider professionally the problem...
This analogy does not mean to shower the intents of seeding networking by small realizations: they are necessary actions participating to the learning curve process. The point is to avoid the confusion between a 10 users mail system with a nation-wide solution!
A bad habit have been created of flagging the countries which got network access with no consideration of percentage of served users. This is a consequence of the weird solution-oriented accounting system: counting the nodes. Who really cares about the number of nodes? Product salesmen! What really matters is the number of users. The outstanding task of identifying the world accesses by country [ref 2] should evolve toward some level of user's penetration measurement. Why not distinguish at least, below 1%, below 10%, below 25%, and below and above 50%. The lack of user survey and maintained directories is not a good excuse no to do so: a best guess is better than nothing. The difference of accessing users and using users is probably more delicate, but statistical laws should apply.
The other point we want to make with the pool analogy is to struggle against the myth of the technical gurus. They are many steps to build a national research network, and the set up of the technical infrastructure, if important, is timely and money-wise predictable. Furthermore, the percentage of manpower required for a simple node connection and installation, compared with the whole task set, is rather marginal. Finally, the tasks involving organization and human relations, being much less deterministic, are more exposed to delays or failures.
Building a network have much more to do with the gathering of people under a common and structured organization scheme than installing hardwares and software!
VI WHAT IS A RESEARCH NETWORK?
A research network is a set of telematic services offered to a large user population. Beyond the setting of a network node connected to several users on one hand, and to other need be performed before the result should be qualified as such:
Briefly, superficially, and far from being exhaustive:
-Users base and needs identification [diagnostic, quantification, population growth pattern recognition, surveys, directories,...].
-Users federation within an associative structure [status, rules, partnerships...].
-Users awareness and diffusion strategy.
-Users training and permanent education.
-Users support [documentation, help desks, ...],
-Users and Service administration [profile management, security, confidentiality,...].
-Services Operation [connections and node supervision],
-Financial management [accounting and budget],
-Maintenance [prevention, detection, problem solving,...]
-Traffic Analysis and networks resource provisioning [telephone lines, X25 ports, international links, memory, modems,...].
Beyond the basic functions of e-mail, distribution lists, conferences, remote logon, file transfer, special attention must be paid, from the beginning, on the application level [directories, information networks, data bases].
Such a system is characterized by the quality of the service. The quality is a concept which summarize the global user perception of the services in regard with various system's components.
-System availability [in general for such networks, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week].
-System reliability [the confidence than the data does not get lost]
-Response times
-Maintenance [mean time between failure, mean time to solve a problem]
-Users interface quality [time to learn them, easiness in using them, functionality]
-Users support quality [mean time to resolve a user problem, confidence from the user to have his problem considered and fixed, clarity and efficiency of the documentation]
-quality of resource provisioning [if there is too much of them compared to the real traffic the bill is too high, if not enough it can seriously affect other quality factors as response time or availability]
-Migrability [ability to plan and conduct harmonious upgrades in answer to technology moves and traffic increase]
-System security
These quality concepts translate in complex engineering and managing requirements on the system, like for instance:
-benchmarking,
-system components duplication,
-remote maintenance procedures,
-queuing theory modeling for resource provisioning,
-telecommunication interfaces [protocols and hardware] strategy,
-least cost routing strategy,
-plan and control procedures.
Everything explained here-before is in fact generic of any computer based services offered to a large user population, and one should never forget that, as for any of such system, the fundamental objective is to serve the maximum of the potential users at an appropriate trade-off level between cost and quality.
Let's now be much more specific and show a set of rules, steps and statements which have been specially designed for the launching of networks in developing countries and experimented twice.
VII GUIDELINES FOR BUILDING A NETWORK IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
WARNING:
Learning to build and manage a network is obviously a never ended task. What we want to share hereafter is the level our team have reached based upon our studies and experiments. We know there is still a lot of work to do to improve the method and we urge the readers to share with us its reactions, critics and suggestion of improvements. Of course also, the presented rules may need to be adapted to particular circumstances or specific regional or national contexts.
7.1 INTRODUCTION
We are presenting three group of elements which together we name "methodological tool".
1] PROBLEM SOLVING PRIORITY SCHEME: A logical and hierarchical grouping of the type of problems, usable as a priority scheme tool.
2] STEPS: A chronological organization of the development, a task scheduling tool.
3] OTHER INGREDIENTS: An identification of the driving patterns and the appropriate ingredients which contribute to success.
7.2 PROBLEM SOLVING PRIORITY SCHEME
The problems should be treated with descending priorityfrom the top to the bottom of the pyramid presented hereafter.
I POLITICS
I
I O R G A N I Z A T I O N
I
I F I N A N C E
I
I T E C H N I C S
I
POLITICS: What Institutional model? What areas of the civil society participate to the project? In what terms and conditions? What type of relationship with the Public Administration, the Telecommunication Operator, other regional networks?
ORGANIZATION: What form of Institution? What model of development? What model of operation?
FINANCE: How to get the money? How to expense it?
TECHNICS: What network architecture and design? What implementation choices?
The hierarchical point is based on these sometimes forgotten evidences:
-It is not very satisfactory to get a perfect technical plan if there is no money to finance it. Hardly technical arguments help to get the money for a project!
-Having the money without the appropriate organization is a risk of wasting the money without getting the result done. Next time it is going to be tougher to get the same money!
-Having the technical solution, the money to buy it, and the right organization scheme, without the political will to get across the development is probably the most frustrating situation!
This pyramid does not necessarily imply a chronological order but it does imply a priority scheme for problem solving.
Next, we present a set of guidelines, deriving from the diagnostic made, and associated with each level of the pyramid.
7.2.1 POLITICS
-Associate and federate in the same project Institutions from all the areas which host researchers: Public Universities, Private Universities, Academic Research Centers, Public Administration Research Centers and Councils, Non Gubernatorial Organizations, International Agencies.
-Manage a good trade-off for the development process, maximizing the level of independence from each group and, and, at the same time, the level of participation.
-Involve directly in the development process active researchers [future end-users] and obtain, on the way, political support from their institutions on the project and on their representativeness.
These three objectives represent together the biggest challenge of the whole process.
-Use, as a constant guideline for decision making, the regional integration factor, first at the sub regional, second at the regional level.
-Look for International Agencies and/or bilateral cooperation support in a non exclusive fashion, and manage, with independence, the federation of such contributions.
-Participate to the promotion of the national data telecommunication sector [mainly X25 networks]. Integrate representatives of this sector in the process. In counterpart, negotiate the best level of support in term of tariffs for national X25 access and international links.
-Develop cooperative relationship with the industrial sector.
-Maintain, as a side-objective, the support to the Science and Technology domain. In countries where exist official and strong structure avoid to appear as a competitive structure. In that case, develop a full integration with the Official sector. An important niche of responsibility remains where the Science and Technology Council [or other Official Institution] is a driving force for networking [for instance where it provides the technical layers]: the constitution of a networking user group which can and should orient the decisions in the direction of the users general interest.
7.1.2.2 ORGANIZATION
-Get participation of the end-users in each step of the development.
-Get all the concerned Institutions at the same level in the final organization.
-Offer the same right and obligations to the Institutions coming afterward.
-Establish a consensual juridical form on non-profit making Association. For the statutes, use models from other countries and adapt them.
-Start with an informal and open step where the institutions are non officially represented by future and motivated end-users.
-Only start to formalize the juridical structure when there is a good level of consensus and a good level of participation.
-Consider user training as prioritary compared to technician training.
-Consider from the beginning the integration on the network of national information networks. Use the momentum to catalyze the building of new ones.
-Change from an "assembly" to a "committee" pattern when a sound coordination group is formed and the number of active participants is too large to maintain efficient decision making assemblies.
-Maintain global information and transparence of the coordination group activities.
-Consider the diffusion of the knowledge about networking the task of each one, and maintain openly accessible all the documents generated by the development process.
-Wehter there is a node installation phase with external support, or a Telecommunication company global offering, be organized to start technology transfer and introduce it as part of the agreement.
7.1.2.3 FINANCE
-Get International Agencies or bilateral cooperation support for the development and the education.
-Get the maximum support from National Telecommunication Operators, in particular in term of X25 access and international links.
-Try as much as possible to get your internatinal traffic flow via a neighbor country.
-Get time limited free offering for commercial Scientific Data Bases from the main vendors.
-Get national industries support for operational costs.
-Get hardware gifts from vendors.
-As a rule of the thumb, it is much preferable to formulate sponsor requirements than to receive non requested donations [we all know cases of offers of hardware where the additional costs in equipment is higher than the whole bill of purchasing a complete appropriate solution].
-Other rule which better respects freedom of selection and independence is to get donation in form of contracts with a symbolic fee.
-Establish sub-regional and regional agreements for the minimization of international connection costs.
-If exist regional training structures functioning, use them.
-Keep some level of auto-financing as a sane objective, and establish an Institution subscription fee.
7.1.2.4 TECHNICS
-Minimize the number of nodes. For countries where users count in few thousands try to manage a unique node model.
-Use UUCP as the more affordable entry solution. Introduce TCP-IP in the plan and stay open for OSI out-coming.
-If there is a reliable X25 network, enforce the usage to get to the node. If not, and if the telephone system is particularly on bad shape, consider a VSAT hub system as an alternative.
-At the user level, encourage the use of PC's as the natural way of accessing the node. Get the best free PC interface available.
7.1.3 STEPS
Four main steps are distinguished.
a] SENSITIZATION
START: Whenever somebody shows the interest of research networks to some part of the research community, being at a personal or institutional level.
END: When every potential user have reached the right level of awareness. That implies this step will overlap all the other one's for quite a while!
OBJECTIVE: Get the maximum potential user awareness.
KEY WORDS: Learning curve. Awareness.
TASKS: Operations of demonstration and promotion via different type of medias. Direct contacts with key people and Institutions.
CRITICAL PATH: Maintain the motivation of the first interested people if the process is slow. Trade-off between the will to satisfy the created expectatives and the awaiting of the critical mass.
COMMENTS: Depending of the level of maturation of the country the process may stay at this level from several months to few years. It should be taken advantage of this step to build a pattern of mutual understanding with the telecommunication operators. It should be obvious to show that most of the promotional operation beneficed to them, and it is recommended to ask for punctual sponsorship during the shows [free data network use for show for example] so that to create the natural habit.
b] CONCEPTION
START: When there is an homogeneous, representative and motivated group of end-users ready to meet toward generic objectives.
STOP: When the critical mass of participating users is such that have appeared a coordinating steering committee and the need for task division in other committees.
OBJECTIVE: Form a user group. Get consensus inside the user group on the main objectives of the whole process.
KEY WORDS: Group meeting. Motivation. Participation. Dynamic. Federation.
TASKS: Large group meeting to get agreement in basic principles. Global diagnostic and strategy for the various components [networking efforts, telecommunication, computers, research].
CRITICAL PATH: The managing of group dynamic phenomenon in term of struggle for power, leadership or hidden interests.
COMMENTS: A well rhythmed action plan is necessary to maintain the necessary momentum. The process consist to progressively transform the unstructured levels of intention of the participating users into organized and articulated committees which very concrete objectives. Note that the nature of the proces is as much important as the results, in the sense it builds the user group dynamics.
c] DEVELOPMENT
START: When the previous one stopped, meaning sub-groups meet toward specific and coordinated objectives.
STOP: When both the User Association and the network service are launched.
OBJECTIVE: Form the user Association and the network service.
KEY WORDS: Committees. Action.
TASKS: Get a coordinated action plan. Get done all the elements for the association [statutes, logo, signatures, etc]. Prepare technical solution functioning.
CRITICAL PATHS: Maintain the participation while changing to a more hierarchical form of organization. Maintain the active transparency pattern from the steering committee to the whole group. Obtain Institutional support on a user group. Obtain the right mixture of people skills and institutions in the steering committee. Distribute the sensitization process to avoid bottleneck and negative effects on development schedules.
COMMENT: This is a no joke step! There is a lot of thing to do and the point of no return after take-off is reached. The group have to go from a spectator to an actor pattern. This is very selective: during this step are going to appear the key people able to incorporate the first board of direction of the association.
d] INITIAL USE
START: When the network service is ready.
STOP: When the number of active users cross the line of 10% of the potential base and a stable operating budget is in function.
OBJECTIVE: Check of the basic elements of the model and adjust parameters.
KEY WORDS: Benchmark. User training and support. Tuning parameters.
TASKS: Formalize the pending agreements. Execute systematic user training plans. Get offices. Get a workable accounting scheme. Get a systematic diffusion scheme. Get a growth plan. Enroll employees.
CRITICAL PATH: Maintain the group motivation meanwhile they are not yet provided network accesses. Link the user training and the access providing. Create new habits for user support and avoid the telephone bottleneck. Organize systematic access distribution.
e] STABLE USE
START: When the network service is stabilized and the user growth reach a steady pattern..
STOP: Hopefully never...
OBJECTIVE: Maintain quality of the network services and serve additional user requirements.
TASKS: All the tasks involved in network operation.
CRITICAL PATH: The user satisfaction.
7.4 DRIVING PATTERNS AND OTHER INGREDIENTS
The key to the success is to maintain the cohesion and the dynamics of the group of participating people thru all the steps. Some ingredients have been identified as essential for that purpose.
A] A right trade-off between leadership and participation.
The experience have shown the need for leadership to conduct the process. The leader should be an experimented networker with an orientation toward the end-user [rather than towards technics]. It is better than the leader, who will concentrate on making happen the convergence of efforts from people of areas with different objective and interest, be clearly identified as above or aside these sectorial interests. It may be easiest to obtain from a person from an International Agency [it helps too if there is a real belonging pattern to the country] but that should not be necessary. It is required a lot of communicating enthusiasm, a good negotiating skill, and the ability to make the other participates.
Developing people participation without economic incentives is not an easy task. The success elements are the ability to make people feel they are participating to a nation-wide priority action and a permanent attitude of active transparency. The last is a very heavy objective to maintain without the use of a network! If it has to be done again, we should have opened a BBS, at the conception step, to kill two birds with one stone: provide permanent open information and start the telematic learning curve.
It is of the outmost importance to leave always the door open to other people involvement. Since all the participants offer their times on a benevolent basis, the experience shows than the level of involvement of individuals varies during the different steps of the process, the key point being that there is always a critical mass present.
B] A right trade-off between people and Institutions.
Although people are, by definition, key in the process of building a user group, institutions are the necessary foundation of the targeted result. The key people are those who manage together the end-user and the institutional points of view. They have the capability to get official representation from their Institutions when required. It should be payed attention not to leave out a complete sector because of the lack of motivated people. Finally, the success indicator is the ability to obtain Institution official support on a user based methodology. In the case of the Dominican network, the 25 Rectors, Directors or Manager of the Institutions founding the Association were asked to express formally their compromise both on the Statutes of the Association and on the name of their representative: 20 of them formally agreed upon.
C] A federative attitude implemented in the acts.
It is key to obtain, as far as possible, the identification and implication of all the persons who have an history of trying to build networks in the country and to make all the current intents join a national coordinated effort.
Experience have shown in the Latin America region a natural tendency for multiplication of national solutions and, as a consequence, some level of tensions derived from centralist attitudes.
The difference between centralistic attitude and federative is fundamental but very tricky to determine from the outside. The centralist wants to promote his/her solution as the unique solution and tends to act in order to make the competitive one's disappear. The federative wants to conglomerate the various potential solutions in a pattern of commonality, where the originality of each contribution is preserved as far as possible.
Since it is useless and endless to enter in polemics about who is really who, it is strongly recommended to maintain a coherent attitude in the action plan:
-negotiation with competitive action to try to federate efforts, -if the negotiation succeeds, do integrate [vs assimilate] the originality of the federate actions [and, of course, the people],
-if the negotiation does not succeed, maintain in the facts a cooperative and transparent attitude with competitive actions.
One should never forget that the real goal is to give access to the maximum number of satisfied users. Every solution which concourse to this objective should be treated with respect and cooperation. The competitive pattern, if sometimes difficult to understand in countries lacking resources, does provide some advantages, and at the end, the answer belongs to the users.
Each solution will eventually be measured in term of the satisfied user bases and not in term of national or international political alliances.
D] An efficient participation of national networkers residing in foreign countries having network access.
Use must be made of national researcher residing in foreign countries to support the effort, in particular for the initial use step. It is logical than new users get a bit tense on using a new communication tool. The best way to start the learning curve is the use of national cultural distribution lists involving nationals living abroad. The use will provide a natural and progressive learning mechanism and create opportunities for direct contacts. It is strongly recommended to maintain from the beginning user directories and to publish them.
VII CONCLUSION
This article will hopefully get obsolete in a few years time-frame when all the countries will have gain consistent user's base accessing research networks. Once this is done other challenges await the networkers to make their users satisfied: like, for instance, keep on with the technology, develop applications, maintain directories, provide good training and user support.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY:
1. "The Matrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems Worldwide", J.S. Quaterman, Bedford, Digital Press, 1990.
2. "International Connectivity", L. Landweber, Internet Society News, Vol 1, Nx2, pp49-52, Spring 1992.
3. "Latin American and Caribbean, networking perspectives", D. Pimienta, Internet Society News, Vol.1, Nx1, page 8, Winter 1992.
4. "E-Mail for Developing Countries- What they never tell you about it", I. Chukwudozie Ezigbalike, Shem J. Ochuodho, presented at AITEC South Conference, Harare, Nov 1991.
5- Various papers related to research networks in "Calidad, Tecnologia y Globalizacion en la Educacion Superior Latinoamericana", UNESCO/ CRESALC, July 1992.
5.1- "Preface", G. Lopez Ospina
5.2- "Dimension tecnologica de la calidad en la educacion superior", J. F. Silvio,
5.3- "Un nuevo modelo de acceso al conocimiento", M. Cartier
5.4- "EMEREC, la comunicacion audio-scripto-visual y la telemediatica", J. Cloutier
5.5- "Calidad y tecnologia informatica en la educacion superior latinoamericana", M. Casas Armengol
5.6- "Impacto de la informatica en la educacion superior de America Latina y el Caribe", H. Castillo-Bescanza
5.7- "Integrar la comunidad academica latinoamericana: un desafio para las redes telematicas", D. Pimienta
5.8- "Nuevas tecnologias e integracion academica en America Central: experiencia de la red universitaria centroamericana de informacion cientifica (REDCSUCA), E. Richards
5.9- "La red CUNET y la integracion academica en el Caribe", R. Loran Santos, R. Perez Colon
5.10- "Uso de redes electronicas y cooperacion hemisferica en la educacion superior", S. Lanfranco
5.11- "Hacia una Universidad Global Electronica Latinoamericana", T. Utsumi
5.12- "Un modelo conceptual para el analisis del mercado potencial de servicios telematicos", P. Liendo
6- "Guidelines for a computer network interconnection of the African Countries", Unesco, IIP Program document.
7- "Special edition on information and research networks", Carta Informativa NTC/NCT, Vol VI, Nx 14, Lima, IPAL (Instituto para America Latina
8. "The South American Scientific Network: an attainable, low cost, high yield reality", S. Ruth, F. Utreras, R. P. Brescia. Interciencia, Vol.15, Nx5, Sep-Oct 1990.
9- "Main Science and Technology Indicators", OECD Publication, 1992.
10- "Statistical Yearbook", UNESCO, 1992.
11- "Encuesta para el Diagnostico de la situacion de la investigacion en America Latina y el Caribe", Academia de Ciencia de America Latina, ACAL, 1991.
12- "Vision Cuantitativa de la Eduacion Superior en America Latina y el Caribe", UNESCO/CRESALC, April 1991.
13- "Telecommunications and Economic Development", R. J. Saunders and al., Washington, World Bank.
RESEARCH NETWORKS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES:
ANALYSIS, METHODOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES
AND GUIDELINES FOR STARTING
By Daniel Pimienta, REDALC Project Director, Union Latina, Santo-Domingo, e-mail: dpimient!pimienta!daniel@redid.org.do
TRIBUTES
The article presents the synthesis of a part of years of personal and team activities. Several people have participated directly or indirectly in the conceptualizing of the ideas produced by the REDALC Project. Jose Soriano, actual Manager of the Red Cientifica Peruana have more specifically contribute to the thematic expressed in this paper.
ABSTRACT
The paper presents a structured set of guidelines to help starting and operating research networks in developing countries. The proposed methodology is the result of a combination of studies and field experiences in Latin America since 1989 [REDALC Project]. The introduction identifies the key factors for the success of research network creation in developed countries. A comparison is made on the respective industrial and developing countries environments which calls for a different approach. A summary list of the activities linked to network building and operation is shown which demonstrates the bulk of activities is more in managerial tasks than in technical one's. A hierarchical approach for problem solving is described, from politic, to organizational, to financial and, last, technical types. The different levels are described and to each it is associated a set of guidelines. Finally, some success prone ingredients are presented.
KEY WORDS: Research networks, developing countries, Latin America and Caribbean, methodology, guidelines.
I INTRODUCTION
The traditional success story for network creation have proven the unbeatable superiority of the bottom-up approach for the network building process. The putting in place of an initial kernel of users have always been followed by the emergence of a nation-wide network. The mechanisms which allow the growth from this basis have usually been considered as an inherent part of the environment.
A slight detail, among others, makes the method not necessarily transportable from industrial countries, where it have demonstrated its validity, to the developing countries.
MONEY: FINANCIAL CONSIDERATIONS IN RESEARCH NETWORKS
If one analyzes the factors of the growth of the EARN/BITNET model, he will discover, from the bottom to the top, the presence of this efficient tool:
-the money invested by large computer manufacturers to offer the first years telecommunication costs and telematic equipments,
-the money invested by the governments to keep on paying part of the telecommunication infrastructure,
-the money collected from subscriptions by the research institutions,
-and maybe, tomorrow, more money by the last group to pay the bill of transport networks becoming less subsidized... Money was of course not enough. Some other factors were keys to the success.
DETERMINANT FACTORS IN DEVELOPED COUNTRIES
-the existence of good national telecommunication infrastructures,
-the high level of organization and management of the research institutions [mainly the universities],
-their capacity for negotiation in front of the computer industry,
-the existence of pioneers who were able to manage the idea, create the condition of the network emergence, make it happen and keep the effort ongoing.
All that process have created a wide consensus among networkers about the validity of the "pragmatic", "realistic", bottom-up approach against the "planned", "theoretical" top-down approach.
The network architects could have been more inclined, by their profession skills, towards the second approach. However, they were put in the situation of being always in advance compared to the standard authorities, thus encouraged to build on the path and maintained an "advance technology" type of attitude.
The only low rated points of the research networking emergence are the natural consequence of a technology driven situation:
-lack of standardization,
-low involvement of the end users,
-few global efforts for structuring the application level.
PROJECTING THE MODEL INTO DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
It is not the point here to argue against the obvious validity of the historical approach. However, although we are part of the consensus on that very point, we do want to warn the reader about the illusion of projecting that truth, very specific to the industrial world, to a quite different environment: the developing countries.
On one hand, the lack of money may prevent the "growth mechanism" makes a start-up realization evolve naturally toward a national solution. On the other hand, beside money, and beside the time elapsed since the beginning of the application of the technology [should necessarily the new networks be built the same way as 10 years ago?], there are other good reasons why one should think differently in term of solutions. We will show them hereafter.
In counterpart, the experience of the emergence of research networks in developing countries should not leave indifferent the networkers of the first world: although they believe their concern is now on fat pipes and "applications" [in the OSI sense of the term], they may have to learn something, for their own future, from the experiences conducted in developing countries!
Indeed, the signals are clearly appearing of the coming of the time where research networks will evolve to a market driven growth pattern, and hence, situations where the managing power and the budget expenses will drastically switch from networking infrastructures toward end-users considerations [training, support, interfaces, user's applications]. This is why the experiences and considerations of the emergence of network in developing countries may be of special interest for the industrial countries. It may teach something about that key transformation which concern the whole world.
AN APPROPRIATE MODEL
This paper aims to identify a set of factors which argues, to a more balanced approach in developing countries: something which merge the best of the top-down and of the bottom-up approach, something which design is specifically based on the characteristics of this different environment.
And to keep "pragmatism" as a healthy premise to network activities, we present a methodological tool which is applicable in the field, and which have been successfully applied already in two concrete cases [Peru and Dominican Republic].
II BACKGROUND
The proposed methodology is the result of a set of in-depth studies conducted, since 1988, by the author, his team and his Latina y Caribe] is a project from Union Latina, a Governmental Organization aiming at the defense of Latin language and culture, looking for a steady, regional and comprehensive solution for research networks. The study was first conducted from Europe in 1988 and 1989. Then an EEC funding was obtained in 1990 to conduct a 2 years feasibility study in the field. In mid-1991, Unesco [PGI and CRESALC branches] joins the feasibility study to address more specifically the information network content aspects. ACAL [Academia de Ciencia de America Latina] participated in the Unesco studies. Some other related studies or activities are also conducted by the REDALC team of Union Latina: a research network impact study in French West Indies, the coordination of a "listserv" informing about regional networking activities [REDALC@FRMOP11.BITNET], the coordination of the development of a state of the art, PC-based, multi-lingual, network type independent, interface [MULBRI], and last, but not least, a central participation in the launch of two national networks so far [Peru and Dominican Republic].
All this process have made involved the concept of the Latin American network since 1988, from a simple EARN projection to the region, toward something more specific and appropriate to the economical and structural reality of the region [REDALC model].
The paper, which uses the spirit of the results collected by some of the studies, is directly derived from the diagnostics made in Latin America.
We tend to believe that a large part of the experience is applicable in other regions. Readers have to check if the conditions in other regions [Africa, Asia, Middle-East, Eastern Europe] are similar so that the methodology is applicable.
III INDUSTRIAL COUNTRIES VS DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
3.1 FIGURES BACKGROUND
We gather hereafter a set of facts which we consider very significative in giving the readers a close idea of the figures involved in building research networks.
-EARN take-off was obtained between 1985 and 1987 thanks to an IBM grant for the support of international telecommunication costs, of an order of magnitude of 10 millions of US $. Note, on the way, this interesting economical fact: the research networks have allowed a large and indirect transfer of money from the computer private industry to the telecommunication national public operators!
-National networks require yearly operational budgets of the order of magnitude of the million of US $, where the main part is directed toward telecommunication cost. So far, telecommunication is the largely predominant part of the visible side of the [basically manpower and resources given free by universities] is spent in user support, hardware, programming services, local administration and national telecommunication. Yet, the largest part of the "real budget" is used to pay telecommunication cost [guess estimate between 60 and 70%]. However, the amount [and quality] of free-ware produced on behalf networking, is something worth noticing and if one could evaluate on a price basis we could be surprised by the economical importance.
-Brazil current network level [which serves less than 20% of the potential users] is strongly supported by the State of Sao Paulo which pays a yearly bill of few millions of US $.
-One of the first experiments of EARN in Africa was conducted in Ivory Coast. The level of investment for having few users gaining access was in few thousands of US $ [order of magnitude of 10,000 US$ investment per user].
-The ratio researcher population vs national population is, depending of the countries, measured in a figure between 1 and 10 for 1000 in the industrial world, let's say 10 times higher as the same figure in the developing countries.
-The Science and Technology population for France is around 200,000 persons. The same population for all Latin America and the Caribbean is also estimated at 200,000 [with much loose criterions].
-The monthly salary for a teacher in Latin America averages 150 US$.
-The salary for researchers in Latin America may in some case reach the industrial world pattern of few thousands of US $, but the bulk of the monthly salary distribution is in few hundred of US$.
-The building of the Porto Rico research network consumes a budget of the size of 20 Million of US $ [the result is a state of the art network, with multi-protocol support, full optical fiber at T1 speed between campuses, where terminals, with remote logon facility at fraction of second response time, are spread over the various campuses of several universities].
-Twenty millions of US $ is sufficient to build a Latin America proprietary regional backbone. The figure is obtained assuming a satellite transponder provided by the region as counterpart to an International Agency investment in terrestrial equipments and costs of technology transfer. The existence of such backbone will allow the decrease of the telecommunication operational yearly operational costs of an order of magnitude, says few hundreds of thousand US$.
Note: the fact the two figures are presented sequentially is not the result of a mere coincidence! That comparison says it all island of 4 millions habitants have built a state of the art research network for its 4000 research networks users [a 5,000 US$ investment per user]. With twenty millions the whole region could reach the level of basic services for its 200,000 potential users [100 US$ investment per user]. Of course, it would be unfair not to say that the first budget includes every thing from the terminal to the optical fiber, and that the second concentrates only in the backbone infrastructure and implementation costs. But anyway, it is important to identify that this is the amount of money required by the region to definitively solve the problem of generalized affordable research networking.
3.2 SOME OBVIOUS FACTS ABOUT THE DEVELOPED COUNTRIES
Hereafter are gathered a set of facts which are an obvious part of the research environment of industrial countries but are hardly verified in the developing countries.
-The researchers are generally and naturally part of the Academic world, where they split harmoniously their activities between teaching and researching.
-The salary level of the researchers [several thousands of US$] allows them to be full time employees of their institutions with no much incentives for looking for more jobs.
-The large majority of the Academic institutions offers appropriate characteristics in term of budget, administrative and managing skills, computer and telecommunication skills to conduct a node creation and operation.
-The market size of the academic world for computer products justifies global national marketing investments from manufacturers of hundreds thousand of US $ yearly.
-The national packet switching networks have been developed independently of the research networks.
-The Public Administration Education and/or Science and Technology budgets are such that the support of telecommunication costs for networking is rather marginal.
If is feasible to check, one by one, if these facts are also verified in specific developing countries. Of course, the result varies depending on each country, but, in average, the large majority of these facts are not verified in most developing countries.
These obvious facts are the implicit building foundation of the research networks in the developed world. Would it be wise to use the same building model in an environment so different?
IV HOW TO GET THE MONEY FOR BUILDING AND OPERATING NETWORKS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES?
A full scale national network unit cost is on the size of the million US $. How can the required money be collected?
Directly from the using Institutions? The large majority of research centers cannot afford it, and it there is a general agreement on the need for networks to be democratically and openly accessed.
From Public Administration? Of course, the Governments should participate in financing such activities prone to contribute to the global development. But it is hopeless they can support it all: their budgets are narrow and they have to complete more urgent tasks in the Education and Research domains, like, for instance, improving the alphabetization rate and completing the creation of basic education infrastructures [one of the more urgent task being to increase teacher's salary].
Is there a hope to get strong enough contributions from the computer industry? Time have changed and the marginal benefits have become thinner for that market segment! And, anyway, the expectable return of investment does not justify "no free lunch gifts" of that level of magnitude for most developing countries.
Three alternatives remain:
1] Regional Integration. Substantial scale economies could be obtained by building regional transport infrastructures in a coordinated fashion. Furthermore, regional agreements must be obtained for the suppression of taxes on national and international telecommunications used for research networks. Last but not least, dedicating channels in a regional satellite is an appropriate way to offer a regional stable and independent solution.
A lot of money have been and is still expensed by EEC to pave the ground toward European integration in term of networking, primarily with the reinforcement of the normative politic and also with the financial in joint venture on specific advance technology domains. The motivations, both political and economical, are medium term oriented.
For developing regions, integration is an immediate financial urgency.
2] Trading with Telecommunication Operators. Most of the developing countries have very recent data network infrastructures or are on their way to build them, together with the value added services. The key importance of telecommunication infrastructures for the development have not to be demonstrated any more. Developing countries cannot afford what have been the rule in the industrial world: a rather Telecommunication entities. Furthermore, it is the interest of the Telecommunication marketers to use that tiny segment market which have a huge multiplicative factor on the whole market to help solving the chicken and egg problem which prevents the arising of the telematic market. Indeed, it appears to be more cost effective to invest in offering to the research sub-market than in commercial campaigning and advertising for the whole market...
There is a crucial area of common interests between the Telecommunication market players, the world of Science and Technology and finally the whole country development areas.
3] Multilateral Cooperation is probably the only financial way to trigger the process. The international Agencies may provide the funding to fulfill the basic regional infrastructure and act as reinforcing agent for the two first factors within regional programs framework.
Of course, one could still argues [ref 8] it is easy and cheap to build a network node, and, for the telecommunication costs, no problem: the end-user can pay a bill which is one order of magnitude cheaper than international communication by more traditional means [telephone, telex, fax]. One should also accept that this model would, without doubt, conduct to a "only-who-can-pay-research network" exclusive to the minority of third world rich universities. Is that the real credo of networking? Furthermore, is it fair to have the third world researchers pay the bill their homologous of the industrial world had subsidized?
V A PRIVATE HOT TUB VS A PUBLIC SWIMMING POOL: INTRODUCING THE TASK OF BUILDING A NETWORK
There is a common false idea resulting from the dogmatic believing toward the bottom-up magics: create a node with few users, connect it to another network and you will automatically get a network. The transformation from few users on a node toward a real national networking requires a lot of organization and engineering, and also, a lot of money!
Let's use the analogy of the hot tub and the swimming pool. You, of course, can get wet in both of them, but it is not very realistic to believe than you can offer a collective bathing service to a large community... in your personal hot tub! And if your plumber says there is no technical problem to do the transformation of your hot tub into a swimming pool, just tell him that the most delicate problem may no be the water delivery but some managing one's where he may be not skilled for, like, for instance:
-marketing the customers and their requirements in term of bathing,
-defining a billing pattern for the use of the swimming pool and
-offering swimming teachers and watching teams,
-organizing the administration and the accounting of the business,
-insuring the quality of the water, the security of the customers, and their privacy for changing clothes,
-defining a traffic pattern and hence deriving the algorithm for purification and recycling of the water,
-preparing to solve new customer requirements [towel, drinks, foods, music, sun bathing, etc.].
-and so on, and so on.
Finally, you realize that the amount of job and money necessary to transform your apartment in a public swimming pool may be such than you decide to consider professionally the problem...
This analogy does not mean to shower the intents of seeding networking by small realizations: they are necessary actions participating to the learning curve process. The point is to avoid the confusion between a 10 users mail system with a nation-wide solution!
A bad habit have been created of flagging the countries which got network access with no consideration of percentage of served users. This is a consequence of the weird solution-oriented accounting system: counting the nodes. Who really cares about the number of nodes? Product salesmen! What really matters is the number of users. The outstanding task of identifying the world accesses by country [ref 2] should evolve toward some level of user's penetration measurement. Why not distinguish at least, below 1%, below 10%, below 25%, and below and above 50%. The lack of user survey and maintained directories is not a good excuse no to do so: a best guess is better than nothing. The difference of accessing users and using users is probably more delicate, but statistical laws should apply.
The other point we want to make with the pool analogy is to struggle against the myth of the technical gurus. They are many steps to build a national research network, and the set up of the technical infrastructure, if important, is timely and money-wise predictable. Furthermore, the percentage of manpower required for a simple node connection and installation, compared with the whole task set, is rather marginal. Finally, the tasks involving organization and human relations, being much less deterministic, are more exposed to delays or failures.
Building a network have much more to do with the gathering of people under a common and structured organization scheme than installing hardwares and software!
VI WHAT IS A RESEARCH NETWORK?
A research network is a set of telematic services offered to a large user population. Beyond the setting of a network node connected to several users on one hand, and to other need be performed before the result should be qualified as such:
Briefly, superficially, and far from being exhaustive:
-Users base and needs identification [diagnostic, quantification, population growth pattern recognition, surveys, directories,...].
-Users federation within an associative structure [status, rules, partnerships...].
-Users awareness and diffusion strategy.
-Users training and permanent education.
-Users support [documentation, help desks, ...],
-Users and Service administration [profile management, security, confidentiality,...].
-Services Operation [connections and node supervision],
-Financial management [accounting and budget],
-Maintenance [prevention, detection, problem solving,...]
-Traffic Analysis and networks resource provisioning [telephone lines, X25 ports, international links, memory, modems,...].
Beyond the basic functions of e-mail, distribution lists, conferences, remote logon, file transfer, special attention must be paid, from the beginning, on the application level [directories, information networks, data bases].
Such a system is characterized by the quality of the service. The quality is a concept which summarize the global user perception of the services in regard with various system's components.
-System availability [in general for such networks, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week].
-System reliability [the confidence than the data does not get lost]
-Response times
-Maintenance [mean time between failure, mean time to solve a problem]
-Users interface quality [time to learn them, easiness in using them, functionality]
-Users support quality [mean time to resolve a user problem, confidence from the user to have his problem considered and fixed, clarity and efficiency of the documentation]
-quality of resource provisioning [if there is too much of them compared to the real traffic the bill is too high, if not enough it can seriously affect other quality factors as response time or availability]
-Migrability [ability to plan and conduct harmonious upgrades in answer to technology moves and traffic increase]
-System security
These quality concepts translate in complex engineering and managing requirements on the system, like for instance:
-benchmarking,
-system components duplication,
-remote maintenance procedures,
-queuing theory modeling for resource provisioning,
-telecommunication interfaces [protocols and hardware] strategy,
-least cost routing strategy,
-plan and control procedures.
Everything explained here-before is in fact generic of any computer based services offered to a large user population, and one should never forget that, as for any of such system, the fundamental objective is to serve the maximum of the potential users at an appropriate trade-off level between cost and quality.
Let's now be much more specific and show a set of rules, steps and statements which have been specially designed for the launching of networks in developing countries and experimented twice.
VII GUIDELINES FOR BUILDING A NETWORK IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
WARNING:
Learning to build and manage a network is obviously a never ended task. What we want to share hereafter is the level our team have reached based upon our studies and experiments. We know there is still a lot of work to do to improve the method and we urge the readers to share with us its reactions, critics and suggestion of improvements. Of course also, the presented rules may need to be adapted to particular circumstances or specific regional or national contexts.
7.1 INTRODUCTION
We are presenting three group of elements which together we name "methodological tool".
1] PROBLEM SOLVING PRIORITY SCHEME: A logical and hierarchical grouping of the type of problems, usable as a priority scheme tool.
2] STEPS: A chronological organization of the development, a task scheduling tool.
3] OTHER INGREDIENTS: An identification of the driving patterns and the appropriate ingredients which contribute to success.
7.2 PROBLEM SOLVING PRIORITY SCHEME
The problems should be treated with descending priorityfrom the top to the bottom of the pyramid presented hereafter.
I POLITICS
I
I O R G A N I Z A T I O N
I
I F I N A N C E
I
I T E C H N I C S
I
POLITICS: What Institutional model? What areas of the civil society participate to the project? In what terms and conditions? What type of relationship with the Public Administration, the Telecommunication Operator, other regional networks?
ORGANIZATION: What form of Institution? What model of development? What model of operation?
FINANCE: How to get the money? How to expense it?
TECHNICS: What network architecture and design? What implementation choices?
The hierarchical point is based on these sometimes forgotten evidences:
-It is not very satisfactory to get a perfect technical plan if there is no money to finance it. Hardly technical arguments help to get the money for a project!
-Having the money without the appropriate organization is a risk of wasting the money without getting the result done. Next time it is going to be tougher to get the same money!
-Having the technical solution, the money to buy it, and the right organization scheme, without the political will to get across the development is probably the most frustrating situation!
This pyramid does not necessarily imply a chronological order but it does imply a priority scheme for problem solving.
Next, we present a set of guidelines, deriving from the diagnostic made, and associated with each level of the pyramid.
7.2.1 POLITICS
-Associate and federate in the same project Institutions from all the areas which host researchers: Public Universities, Private Universities, Academic Research Centers, Public Administration Research Centers and Councils, Non Gubernatorial Organizations, International Agencies.
-Manage a good trade-off for the development process, maximizing the level of independence from each group and, and, at the same time, the level of participation.
-Involve directly in the development process active researchers [future end-users] and obtain, on the way, political support from their institutions on the project and on their representativeness.
These three objectives represent together the biggest challenge of the whole process.
-Use, as a constant guideline for decision making, the regional integration factor, first at the sub regional, second at the regional level.
-Look for International Agencies and/or bilateral cooperation support in a non exclusive fashion, and manage, with independence, the federation of such contributions.
-Participate to the promotion of the national data telecommunication sector [mainly X25 networks]. Integrate representatives of this sector in the process. In counterpart, negotiate the best level of support in term of tariffs for national X25 access and international links.
-Develop cooperative relationship with the industrial sector.
-Maintain, as a side-objective, the support to the Science and Technology domain. In countries where exist official and strong structure avoid to appear as a competitive structure. In that case, develop a full integration with the Official sector. An important niche of responsibility remains where the Science and Technology Council [or other Official Institution] is a driving force for networking [for instance where it provides the technical layers]: the constitution of a networking user group which can and should orient the decisions in the direction of the users general interest.
7.1.2.2 ORGANIZATION
-Get participation of the end-users in each step of the development.
-Get all the concerned Institutions at the same level in the final organization.
-Offer the same right and obligations to the Institutions coming afterward.
-Establish a consensual juridical form on non-profit making Association. For the statutes, use models from other countries and adapt them.
-Start with an informal and open step where the institutions are non officially represented by future and motivated end-users.
-Only start to formalize the juridical structure when there is a good level of consensus and a good level of participation.
-Consider user training as prioritary compared to technician training.
-Consider from the beginning the integration on the network of national information networks. Use the momentum to catalyze the building of new ones.
-Change from an "assembly" to a "committee" pattern when a sound coordination group is formed and the number of active participants is too large to maintain efficient decision making assemblies.
-Maintain global information and transparence of the coordination group activities.
-Consider the diffusion of the knowledge about networking the task of each one, and maintain openly accessible all the documents generated by the development process.
-Wehter there is a node installation phase with external support, or a Telecommunication company global offering, be organized to start technology transfer and introduce it as part of the agreement.
7.1.2.3 FINANCE
-Get International Agencies or bilateral cooperation support for the development and the education.
-Get the maximum support from National Telecommunication Operators, in particular in term of X25 access and international links.
-Try as much as possible to get your internatinal traffic flow via a neighbor country.
-Get time limited free offering for commercial Scientific Data Bases from the main vendors.
-Get national industries support for operational costs.
-Get hardware gifts from vendors.
-As a rule of the thumb, it is much preferable to formulate sponsor requirements than to receive non requested donations [we all know cases of offers of hardware where the additional costs in equipment is higher than the whole bill of purchasing a complete appropriate solution].
-Other rule which better respects freedom of selection and independence is to get donation in form of contracts with a symbolic fee.
-Establish sub-regional and regional agreements for the minimization of international connection costs.
-If exist regional training structures functioning, use them.
-Keep some level of auto-financing as a sane objective, and establish an Institution subscription fee.
7.1.2.4 TECHNICS
-Minimize the number of nodes. For countries where users count in few thousands try to manage a unique node model.
-Use UUCP as the more affordable entry solution. Introduce TCP-IP in the plan and stay open for OSI out-coming.
-If there is a reliable X25 network, enforce the usage to get to the node. If not, and if the telephone system is particularly on bad shape, consider a VSAT hub system as an alternative.
-At the user level, encourage the use of PC's as the natural way of accessing the node. Get the best free PC interface available.
7.1.3 STEPS
Four main steps are distinguished.
a] SENSITIZATION
START: Whenever somebody shows the interest of research networks to some part of the research community, being at a personal or institutional level.
END: When every potential user have reached the right level of awareness. That implies this step will overlap all the other one's for quite a while!
OBJECTIVE: Get the maximum potential user awareness.
KEY WORDS: Learning curve. Awareness.
TASKS: Operations of demonstration and promotion via different type of medias. Direct contacts with key people and Institutions.
CRITICAL PATH: Maintain the motivation of the first interested people if the process is slow. Trade-off between the will to satisfy the created expectatives and the awaiting of the critical mass.
COMMENTS: Depending of the level of maturation of the country the process may stay at this level from several months to few years. It should be taken advantage of this step to build a pattern of mutual understanding with the telecommunication operators. It should be obvious to show that most of the promotional operation beneficed to them, and it is recommended to ask for punctual sponsorship during the shows [free data network use for show for example] so that to create the natural habit.
b] CONCEPTION
START: When there is an homogeneous, representative and motivated group of end-users ready to meet toward generic objectives.
STOP: When the critical mass of participating users is such that have appeared a coordinating steering committee and the need for task division in other committees.
OBJECTIVE: Form a user group. Get consensus inside the user group on the main objectives of the whole process.
KEY WORDS: Group meeting. Motivation. Participation. Dynamic. Federation.
TASKS: Large group meeting to get agreement in basic principles. Global diagnostic and strategy for the various components [networking efforts, telecommunication, computers, research].
CRITICAL PATH: The managing of group dynamic phenomenon in term of struggle for power, leadership or hidden interests.
COMMENTS: A well rhythmed action plan is necessary to maintain the necessary momentum. The process consist to progressively transform the unstructured levels of intention of the participating users into organized and articulated committees which very concrete objectives. Note that the nature of the proces is as much important as the results, in the sense it builds the user group dynamics.
c] DEVELOPMENT
START: When the previous one stopped, meaning sub-groups meet toward specific and coordinated objectives.
STOP: When both the User Association and the network service are launched.
OBJECTIVE: Form the user Association and the network service.
KEY WORDS: Committees. Action.
TASKS: Get a coordinated action plan. Get done all the elements for the association [statutes, logo, signatures, etc]. Prepare technical solution functioning.
CRITICAL PATHS: Maintain the participation while changing to a more hierarchical form of organization. Maintain the active transparency pattern from the steering committee to the whole group. Obtain Institutional support on a user group. Obtain the right mixture of people skills and institutions in the steering committee. Distribute the sensitization process to avoid bottleneck and negative effects on development schedules.
COMMENT: This is a no joke step! There is a lot of thing to do and the point of no return after take-off is reached. The group have to go from a spectator to an actor pattern. This is very selective: during this step are going to appear the key people able to incorporate the first board of direction of the association.
d] INITIAL USE
START: When the network service is ready.
STOP: When the number of active users cross the line of 10% of the potential base and a stable operating budget is in function.
OBJECTIVE: Check of the basic elements of the model and adjust parameters.
KEY WORDS: Benchmark. User training and support. Tuning parameters.
TASKS: Formalize the pending agreements. Execute systematic user training plans. Get offices. Get a workable accounting scheme. Get a systematic diffusion scheme. Get a growth plan. Enroll employees.
CRITICAL PATH: Maintain the group motivation meanwhile they are not yet provided network accesses. Link the user training and the access providing. Create new habits for user support and avoid the telephone bottleneck. Organize systematic access distribution.
e] STABLE USE
START: When the network service is stabilized and the user growth reach a steady pattern..
STOP: Hopefully never...
OBJECTIVE: Maintain quality of the network services and serve additional user requirements.
TASKS: All the tasks involved in network operation.
CRITICAL PATH: The user satisfaction.
7.4 DRIVING PATTERNS AND OTHER INGREDIENTS
The key to the success is to maintain the cohesion and the dynamics of the group of participating people thru all the steps. Some ingredients have been identified as essential for that purpose.
A] A right trade-off between leadership and participation.
The experience have shown the need for leadership to conduct the process. The leader should be an experimented networker with an orientation toward the end-user [rather than towards technics]. It is better than the leader, who will concentrate on making happen the convergence of efforts from people of areas with different objective and interest, be clearly identified as above or aside these sectorial interests. It may be easiest to obtain from a person from an International Agency [it helps too if there is a real belonging pattern to the country] but that should not be necessary. It is required a lot of communicating enthusiasm, a good negotiating skill, and the ability to make the other participates.
Developing people participation without economic incentives is not an easy task. The success elements are the ability to make people feel they are participating to a nation-wide priority action and a permanent attitude of active transparency. The last is a very heavy objective to maintain without the use of a network! If it has to be done again, we should have opened a BBS, at the conception step, to kill two birds with one stone: provide permanent open information and start the telematic learning curve.
It is of the outmost importance to leave always the door open to other people involvement. Since all the participants offer their times on a benevolent basis, the experience shows than the level of involvement of individuals varies during the different steps of the process, the key point being that there is always a critical mass present.
B] A right trade-off between people and Institutions.
Although people are, by definition, key in the process of building a user group, institutions are the necessary foundation of the targeted result. The key people are those who manage together the end-user and the institutional points of view. They have the capability to get official representation from their Institutions when required. It should be payed attention not to leave out a complete sector because of the lack of motivated people. Finally, the success indicator is the ability to obtain Institution official support on a user based methodology. In the case of the Dominican network, the 25 Rectors, Directors or Manager of the Institutions founding the Association were asked to express formally their compromise both on the Statutes of the Association and on the name of their representative: 20 of them formally agreed upon.
C] A federative attitude implemented in the acts.
It is key to obtain, as far as possible, the identification and implication of all the persons who have an history of trying to build networks in the country and to make all the current intents join a national coordinated effort.
Experience have shown in the Latin America region a natural tendency for multiplication of national solutions and, as a consequence, some level of tensions derived from centralist attitudes.
The difference between centralistic attitude and federative is fundamental but very tricky to determine from the outside. The centralist wants to promote his/her solution as the unique solution and tends to act in order to make the competitive one's disappear. The federative wants to conglomerate the various potential solutions in a pattern of commonality, where the originality of each contribution is preserved as far as possible.
Since it is useless and endless to enter in polemics about who is really who, it is strongly recommended to maintain a coherent attitude in the action plan:
-negotiation with competitive action to try to federate efforts, -if the negotiation succeeds, do integrate [vs assimilate] the originality of the federate actions [and, of course, the people],
-if the negotiation does not succeed, maintain in the facts a cooperative and transparent attitude with competitive actions.
One should never forget that the real goal is to give access to the maximum number of satisfied users. Every solution which concourse to this objective should be treated with respect and cooperation. The competitive pattern, if sometimes difficult to understand in countries lacking resources, does provide some advantages, and at the end, the answer belongs to the users.
Each solution will eventually be measured in term of the satisfied user bases and not in term of national or international political alliances.
D] An efficient participation of national networkers residing in foreign countries having network access.
Use must be made of national researcher residing in foreign countries to support the effort, in particular for the initial use step. It is logical than new users get a bit tense on using a new communication tool. The best way to start the learning curve is the use of national cultural distribution lists involving nationals living abroad. The use will provide a natural and progressive learning mechanism and create opportunities for direct contacts. It is strongly recommended to maintain from the beginning user directories and to publish them.
VII CONCLUSION
This article will hopefully get obsolete in a few years time-frame when all the countries will have gain consistent user's base accessing research networks. Once this is done other challenges await the networkers to make their users satisfied: like, for instance, keep on with the technology, develop applications, maintain directories, provide good training and user support.
========================================================================
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
1. "The Matrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems Worldwide", J.S. Quaterman, Bedford, Digital Press, 1990.
2. "International Connectivity", L. Landweber, Internet Society News, Vol 1, Nx2, pp49-52, Spring 1992.
3. "Latin American and Caribbean, networking perspectives", D. Pimienta, Internet Society News, Vol.1, Nx1, page 8, Winter 1992.
4. "E-Mail for Developing Countries- What they never tell you about it", I. Chukwudozie Ezigbalike, Shem J. Ochuodho, presented at AITEC South Conference, Harare, Nov 1991.
5- Various papers related to research networks in "Calidad, Tecnologia y Globalizacion en la Educacion Superior Latinoamericana", UNESCO/ CRESALC, July 1992.
5.1- "Preface", G. Lopez Ospina
5.2- "Dimension tecnologica de la calidad en la educacion superior", J. F. Silvio,
5.3- "Un nuevo modelo de acceso al conocimiento", M. Cartier
5.4- "EMEREC, la comunicacion audio-scripto-visual y la telemediatica", J. Cloutier
5.5- "Calidad y tecnologia informatica en la educacion superior latinoamericana", M. Casas Armengol
5.6- "Impacto de la informatica en la educacion superior de America Latina y el Caribe", H. Castillo-Bescanza
5.7- "Integrar la comunidad academica latinoamericana: un desafio para las redes telematicas", D. Pimienta
5.8- "Nuevas tecnologias e integracion academica en America Central: experiencia de la red universitaria centroamericana de informacion cientifica (REDCSUCA), E. Richards
5.9- "La red CUNET y la integracion academica en el Caribe", R. Loran Santos, R. Perez Colon
5.10- "Uso de redes electronicas y cooperacion hemisferica en la educacion superior", S. Lanfranco
5.11- "Hacia una Universidad Global Electronica Latinoamericana", T. Utsumi
5.12- "Un modelo conceptual para el analisis del mercado potencial de servicios telematicos", P. Liendo
6- "Guidelines for a computer network interconnection of the African Countries", Unesco, IIP Program document.
7- "Special edition on information and research networks", Carta Informativa NTC/NCT, Vol VI, Nx 14, Lima, IPAL (Instituto para America Latina
8. "The South American Scientific Network: an attainable, low cost, high yield reality", S. Ruth, F. Utreras, R. P. Brescia. Interciencia, Vol.15, Nx5, Sep-Oct 1990.
9- "Main Science and Technology Indicators", OECD Publication, 1992.
10- "Statistical Yearbook", UNESCO, 1992.
11- "Encuesta para el Diagnostico de la situacion de la investigacion en America Latina y el Caribe", Academia de Ciencia de America Latina, ACAL, 1991.
12- "Vision Cuantitativa de la Eduacion Superior en America Latina y el Caribe", UNESCO/CRESALC, April 1991.
13- "Telecommunications and Economic Development", R. J. Saunders and al., Washington, World Bank.
sábado, 25 de noviembre de 2006
PROBLEMAS CON TELEFONICA: 14 Sep 1996 22:01:25 ARG
notired: PROBLEMAS CON TELEFONICA (fwd)
Administrador del nodo (mailto:postmast@DESIGN.FADU.UBA.AR)
Sat, 14 Sep 1996 22:01:25 ARG
* Messages sorted by: [ date ][ thread ][ subject ][ author ]
* Next message: Andre Doumitt: "Off list"
* Previous message: Thomas Chuidian: "Re: Re[2]: motivation for participation in development"
Message-ID: <323b5565.design@design.fadu.uba.ar>
Date: Sat, 14 Sep 1996 22:01:25 ARG
From: Administrador del nodo
Subject: notired: PROBLEMAS CON TELEFONICA (fwd)
To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L
> > ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ
> > RED CIENTIFICA PERUANA INTERNET DEL PERU
> > ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ
> >
> > Estimados Usuarios:
> >
> > Desde hace 15 dias estamos sufriendo GRAVES problemas con
> > nuestras lineas telefonicas contratadas con Telefonica del
> > Peru, empresa bajo control de Telefonica de Espanha.
> >
> > Todas nuestras lineas - de manera aleatoria - o no responden
> > o atienden con musica, o se escuchan una especie de pulsos
> > que evidentemente impiden a los modems acceder a la red.
> >
> > Estos hechos han sido reportados tanto a Telefonica del
> > Peru como al Organismo Supervisor de Inversion Privada
> > en Telecomunicaciones, OSIPTEL, y se han establecido
> > pruebas sobre las mismas.
> >
> > Coincidentemente mediante resolucion expedida la semana
> > pasada OSIPTEL penalizo - por primera vez - a Telefonica
> > del Peru con 35 UIT ( Unidades Tributarias ). La sancion
> > corresponde a la controvercia iniciada por la Red Cientifica
> > Peruana sobre competencia desleal y es tipificada como
> > muy grave.
> >
> > Es a partir de ese momento que nuevamente estamos experimentando
> > todo tipo de problemas en los servicios prestados por
> > Telefonica del Peru.
> >
> > Como saben la semana pasada habilitamos 28 nuevas Lineas
> > telefonicas adicionales. Con esta nueva incorporacion
> > existen 201 lineas de las cuales 41 son de la empresa
> > Tele 2000 las que operan normalmente. Por ello recomendamos
> > comunicarse al 954-3727 .ESTAS LINEAS SON NORMALES Y NO
> > SUJETAS A LA MODALIDAD - EL QUE LLAMA PAGA - como de
> > manera maliciosa se ha hecho correr el rumor.
> >
> > Estamos trabajando - llamando a los telefonos de reparaciones
> > que no contestan - y a dirigentes de Telefonica del Peru y
> > de OSIPTEL para tratar de que se garantice el derecho de los
> > peruanos a tener una red nacional y competir en condiciones
> > de igualdad y sin el abuso de las practicas ilegales que se
> > estan utilizando para impedir una leal competencia.
> > --
> > un abrazo,
> > js
> > _______________________________________________________________________
> > PERULLAQTAMANTA LLAPANYACHANAQPA LLIKAN - RED CIENTIFICA PERUANA
> > Jose Soriano - Coordinador General - e-mail : mailto:js@rcp.net.pe
> > Av. Larco 770 - Miraflores - Lima 18 - Peru
> > Telefono: (511) 241 5689, (511) 954 4799 Fax (511) 241 1320
> > _______________________________________________________________________
> > La Libertad, Sancho,
> > es uno de los mas preciosos dones
> > que a los hombres dieron los Cielos;
> > con ella no pueden igualarse los tesoros
> > que encierra la tierra, ni el mar encubre;
> > por la Libertad, asi como por la Honra,
> > se puede y se debe aventurar la vida"
> > (Don Quijote II:58)
***** Fin del mensaje reenviado *****
Administrador del nodo (mailto:postmast@DESIGN.FADU.UBA.AR)
Sat, 14 Sep 1996 22:01:25 ARG
* Messages sorted by: [ date ][ thread ][ subject ][ author ]
* Next message: Andre Doumitt: "Off list"
* Previous message: Thomas Chuidian: "Re: Re[2]: motivation for participation in development"
Message-ID: <323b5565.design@design.fadu.uba.ar>
Date: Sat, 14 Sep 1996 22:01:25 ARG
From: Administrador del nodo
Subject: notired: PROBLEMAS CON TELEFONICA (fwd)
To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L
> > ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ
> > RED CIENTIFICA PERUANA INTERNET DEL PERU
> > ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ
> >
> > Estimados Usuarios:
> >
> > Desde hace 15 dias estamos sufriendo GRAVES problemas con
> > nuestras lineas telefonicas contratadas con Telefonica del
> > Peru, empresa bajo control de Telefonica de Espanha.
> >
> > Todas nuestras lineas - de manera aleatoria - o no responden
> > o atienden con musica, o se escuchan una especie de pulsos
> > que evidentemente impiden a los modems acceder a la red.
> >
> > Estos hechos han sido reportados tanto a Telefonica del
> > Peru como al Organismo Supervisor de Inversion Privada
> > en Telecomunicaciones, OSIPTEL, y se han establecido
> > pruebas sobre las mismas.
> >
> > Coincidentemente mediante resolucion expedida la semana
> > pasada OSIPTEL penalizo - por primera vez - a Telefonica
> > del Peru con 35 UIT ( Unidades Tributarias ). La sancion
> > corresponde a la controvercia iniciada por la Red Cientifica
> > Peruana sobre competencia desleal y es tipificada como
> > muy grave.
> >
> > Es a partir de ese momento que nuevamente estamos experimentando
> > todo tipo de problemas en los servicios prestados por
> > Telefonica del Peru.
> >
> > Como saben la semana pasada habilitamos 28 nuevas Lineas
> > telefonicas adicionales. Con esta nueva incorporacion
> > existen 201 lineas de las cuales 41 son de la empresa
> > Tele 2000 las que operan normalmente. Por ello recomendamos
> > comunicarse al 954-3727 .ESTAS LINEAS SON NORMALES Y NO
> > SUJETAS A LA MODALIDAD - EL QUE LLAMA PAGA - como de
> > manera maliciosa se ha hecho correr el rumor.
> >
> > Estamos trabajando - llamando a los telefonos de reparaciones
> > que no contestan - y a dirigentes de Telefonica del Peru y
> > de OSIPTEL para tratar de que se garantice el derecho de los
> > peruanos a tener una red nacional y competir en condiciones
> > de igualdad y sin el abuso de las practicas ilegales que se
> > estan utilizando para impedir una leal competencia.
> > --
> > un abrazo,
> > js
> > _______________________________________________________________________
> > PERULLAQTAMANTA LLAPANYACHANAQPA LLIKAN - RED CIENTIFICA PERUANA
> > Jose Soriano - Coordinador General - e-mail : mailto:js@rcp.net.pe
> > Av. Larco 770 - Miraflores - Lima 18 - Peru
> > Telefono: (511) 241 5689, (511) 954 4799 Fax (511) 241 1320
> > _______________________________________________________________________
> > La Libertad, Sancho,
> > es uno de los mas preciosos dones
> > que a los hombres dieron los Cielos;
> > con ella no pueden igualarse los tesoros
> > que encierra la tierra, ni el mar encubre;
> > por la Libertad, asi como por la Honra,
> > se puede y se debe aventurar la vida"
> > (Don Quijote II:58)
***** Fin del mensaje reenviado *****
La nueva alfombra mágica
La nueva alfombra mágica
Raúl Trejo Delarbre
Capítulo II
Nuevas realidades.
Un perfil del poliédrico ciberespacio
Crecientes conexiones en América Latina
Las redes no son ajenas a ningún país. Técnicamente es posible conectarse con ellas desde cualquier sitio en el que hayan teléfono, computadora y módem. Su desarrollo acompaña al de los equipos de cómputo.
Al tercer trimestre de 1994, la Internet Society, una organización que estudia, discute y promueve la expansión de la red de redes, estimaba que, en el mundo, había más de 3 millones 800 mil computadoras conectadas, en un crecimiento que había sido de 21% en comparación con el del trimestre anterior.87 Seguramente se trata de computadoras que a su vez tienen varias terminales, es decir, el dato no se refiere a equipos personales.
El explosivo crecimiento de la red de redes significó más computadoras enlazadas y, desde luego, mayor circulación de mensajes. En enero de 1988 había un tráfico de 85 millones de paquetes de datos cada mes. Para enero de 1995, ya eran ¡60 mil millones! de esos paquetes, en un solo mes.88
Se estima que, en América Latina, el mercado para equipos de cómputo crecería, entre 1994 y 1997, a un ritmo de 20% anual, de acuerdo con un estudio de la International Data Corp.89 No tenemos datos completos del crecimiento en el uso de servicios en red, pero no dudamos que esté aumentando, o lo haga muy pronto, con un ritmo similar.
La revista América Economía ha proporcionado la siguiente evaluación sobre la presencia de Internet en Latinoamérica.
Número de conexiones Internet
1 julio 94
1 oct. 94
Crecimiento %
Argentina
248
1 287
419%
Perú
42
114
171
Venezuela
399
657
65
Uruguay
101
153
51
México
5 164
7 641
48
Costa Rica
544
745
37
A. Latina y Caribe
16 619
22 535
36
Fuente: "¿Quién para a Internet?" en América Economía, no. 91, Nueva York, enero de 1995, pág. 28.
En el trimestre de 1994 descrito en el cuadro anterior es evidente el crecimiento que han tenido las conexiones cibernéticas en Argentina y otros países del Cono Sur. Llama la atención el rezago registrado para México, que solamente habría experimentado un desarrollo de 48%, poco en comparación con otros. Sin embargo, hay que tomar en cuenta que debido a su cercanía con Estados Unidos, a las expectativas que suscitó el advenimiento del Tratado de Libre Comercio y a la presencia, desde tiempo atrás, de numerosas empresas estadounidenses, en México el auge de las redes electrónicas ocurrió antes que en otros países latinoamericanos. Como puede verse en el mismo cuadro, la capacidad instalada que había al comienzo del periodo allí descrito ya era mayor en México que en cualquier otro país de la región. Lo que sí ocurrió después fue que la depresión financiera, junto con las dificultades políticas, experimentadas en México entre 1994 y 1995, significaron un descenso en el ritmo de desarrollo de las comunicaciones electrónicas. La devaluación del peso, en diciembre de 1994, implicó la cancelación o al menos posposición de numerosos proyectos que dependen de insumos de importación, como es el caso de las computadoras y del software para comunicaciones, salvo pocas excepciones. Además, la ausencia de una política de explícito impulso al sector informático, como se comenta más adelante, en el caso mexicano ha significado retrasos adicionales.
Junto con las recesiones, reestructuraciones o retrocesos en las economías latinoamericanas, la adquisición de equipos de cómputo ha crecido de manera constante. Por ejemplo, México, a pesar de ser considerado como la décimo tercera economía más grande del mundo, se había convertido --al menos antes de las vicisitudes financieras de 1994-1995-- en el sexto o séptimo mercado de computadoras, de acuerdo con una información periodística especializada.90 De toda la capacidad instalada en materia de computadoras a nivel mundial, México ha contado con 0.85%, una cantidad muy pequeña comparada con 48.6% que tiene Estados Unidos, 6.9% que corresponde a Japón y 4.2% de Francia.91 México, en el séptimo sitio en cuanto a presencia en la capacidad de cómputo, es el país latinoamericano en la posición más alta. Le sigue Brasil, con 0.59%. Sin embargo, en una evaluación del nivel de infraestructura en telecomunicaciones (medido en una escala del 1 al 10) Chile recibía 8.5 puntos, Brasil 5.96, España 5.74, Venezuela 4.7, Argentina 4.66, Colombia 4.38 y México, solamente 4.35 puntos. La tabla es encabezada por Estados Unidos, con una puntuación de 9.21.92
Ese rezago en el desarrollo de las telecomunicaciones, que contrasta con la adquisición de hardware, se confirma en el escaso crecimiento de las conexiones a las redes electrónicas, que ha sido lento, desigual y en ocasiones incluso estancado, en América Latina.
A comienzos de 1995 se estimaba que de solamente 0.3% de las conexiones a Internet en todo el mundo se encontraban en esta región. Una nueva evaluación, a fines de ese año, señalaba que de 6.6 millones de anfitriones en la Internet, apenas 28 mil 500, en números redondos, se encontraba en América Central, del Sur y el Caribe, en tanto que México tenía casi 8 mil 500. Es decir, en total, menos de 0.6%. Norteamérica (Estados Unidos, Canadá y, en esa evaluación, México inclusive) tenía un total de 4 millones 500 mil de esos hosts (solamente EU 4 millones 177 mil), en tanto que Europa occidental, poco más de un millón 530 mil (España, específicamente, contaba con 40 mil, en ese recuento).93
En contraste, el mercado latinoamericano de hardware y software representaba entre 2 y 3% del mercado mundial.94 Es decir, en América Latina el ritmo de conexiones a la red de redes es mucho menor al de la adquisición de equipos de cómputo. Tenemos máquinas incluso en abundancia en comparación con otras regiones, pero no contamos con capacidad para hacerlas comunicarse entre sí ni con las que hay en otros países.
Son pocas las naciones latinoamericanas que han emprendido una política específica para un deliberado desarrollo de las redes de comunicación electrónica. Lo más frecuente es que algunas universidades, especialmente las de carácter público y por ello con subsidio gubernamental, sean las que desarrollen los accesos de cada país en la Internet, pero más bien de manera aislada, o desordenada. Paulatinamente, otras instituciones se van incorporando al mundo del ciberespacio, pero sin una política de carácter nacional.
En Perú, desde 1990 funciona la Red Científica Peruana/Perú-Internet, que menos de un lustro después ya tenía 8 mil suscriptores y era considerada como una de las redes, en el mundo, de crecimiento más acelerado. Su fundador, José Soriano, ha explicado las posibilidades de expansión, incluso más allá de usuarios académicos, de la siguiente manera: "Creemos que la región va a desarrollarse si podemos extender una red de empresas pequeñas, medianas y de gran tamaño, a todo el mundo que comprenda que --más que nunca-- la información es poder. En otro nivel, consideramos que la información es una póliza de seguros para la democracia. Mientras más información tenga la población en general, más fácil será su elección. Actualmente sólo las élites tienen acceso a las redes --sólo personas que tienen la información pueden ganar más--. El objetivo de la red se diseminará en todo Perú y luego trabajará mediante un acuerdo regional que hemos creado con otras naciones andinas".95
La red peruana trabaja en colaboración con proyectos en Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia y otros países del Area Andina, para contratar conjuntamente servicios de satélite. Los costos llegan a ser mayores que en las naciones industrializadas. "Por ejemplo --dice Soriano-- conectarse en Estados Unidos en una línea exclusiva de alta velocidad cuesta aproximadamente 2 mil dólares por mes. En Perú se tiene que pagar entre 8 mil y 14 mil dólares. Políticas de ese tipo, frenan nuestro desarrollo tecnológico".96
___________________________
Notas
87"¿Quién para a Internet? en América Economía, No. 91, N. Y., enero de 1995, p 28.
88"The Internet's explosive growth", cuadro en PC Magazine, N.Y., 16 de mayo de 1995.
89>Holly Hubbard, "Latin American distribution channel borders en change...", Computer Reseller News, 16 de mayo de 1994.
90Paul Carroll, "Onto the highway: foreign competition spurs Mexico to move...", The Wall Street Journal, N.Y., 5 de julio de 1994.
91Les siguen, del cuarto al sexto lugar, Canadá con 2.95%, España con 1.66% y Corea con 0.87%. Datos del World Competitive Report, recogidos por Rossana Fuentes Beraín en la investigación "Construyen la 'autopista informativa" en Reforma, México, 30 de noviembre de 1994.
92Ibidem.
93"Internet Hosts by Country", estudio de la Internet Society de julio de 1995, "bajado" de la página de esa institución en la WWW.
94Adolfo Casari, "Internet", en América Economía, No. 95, mayo de 1995.
95David Schrieberg, "El tercer mundo ganará al usar la información en red", artículo de Newsweek, January 16 1995, reproducido en Excélsior, 16 de enero de 1995.
96Ibidem.
Raúl Trejo Delarbre
Capítulo II
Nuevas realidades.
Un perfil del poliédrico ciberespacio
Crecientes conexiones en América Latina
Las redes no son ajenas a ningún país. Técnicamente es posible conectarse con ellas desde cualquier sitio en el que hayan teléfono, computadora y módem. Su desarrollo acompaña al de los equipos de cómputo.
Al tercer trimestre de 1994, la Internet Society, una organización que estudia, discute y promueve la expansión de la red de redes, estimaba que, en el mundo, había más de 3 millones 800 mil computadoras conectadas, en un crecimiento que había sido de 21% en comparación con el del trimestre anterior.87 Seguramente se trata de computadoras que a su vez tienen varias terminales, es decir, el dato no se refiere a equipos personales.
El explosivo crecimiento de la red de redes significó más computadoras enlazadas y, desde luego, mayor circulación de mensajes. En enero de 1988 había un tráfico de 85 millones de paquetes de datos cada mes. Para enero de 1995, ya eran ¡60 mil millones! de esos paquetes, en un solo mes.88
Se estima que, en América Latina, el mercado para equipos de cómputo crecería, entre 1994 y 1997, a un ritmo de 20% anual, de acuerdo con un estudio de la International Data Corp.89 No tenemos datos completos del crecimiento en el uso de servicios en red, pero no dudamos que esté aumentando, o lo haga muy pronto, con un ritmo similar.
La revista América Economía ha proporcionado la siguiente evaluación sobre la presencia de Internet en Latinoamérica.
Número de conexiones Internet
1 julio 94
1 oct. 94
Crecimiento %
Argentina
248
1 287
419%
Perú
42
114
171
Venezuela
399
657
65
Uruguay
101
153
51
México
5 164
7 641
48
Costa Rica
544
745
37
A. Latina y Caribe
16 619
22 535
36
Fuente: "¿Quién para a Internet?" en América Economía, no. 91, Nueva York, enero de 1995, pág. 28.
En el trimestre de 1994 descrito en el cuadro anterior es evidente el crecimiento que han tenido las conexiones cibernéticas en Argentina y otros países del Cono Sur. Llama la atención el rezago registrado para México, que solamente habría experimentado un desarrollo de 48%, poco en comparación con otros. Sin embargo, hay que tomar en cuenta que debido a su cercanía con Estados Unidos, a las expectativas que suscitó el advenimiento del Tratado de Libre Comercio y a la presencia, desde tiempo atrás, de numerosas empresas estadounidenses, en México el auge de las redes electrónicas ocurrió antes que en otros países latinoamericanos. Como puede verse en el mismo cuadro, la capacidad instalada que había al comienzo del periodo allí descrito ya era mayor en México que en cualquier otro país de la región. Lo que sí ocurrió después fue que la depresión financiera, junto con las dificultades políticas, experimentadas en México entre 1994 y 1995, significaron un descenso en el ritmo de desarrollo de las comunicaciones electrónicas. La devaluación del peso, en diciembre de 1994, implicó la cancelación o al menos posposición de numerosos proyectos que dependen de insumos de importación, como es el caso de las computadoras y del software para comunicaciones, salvo pocas excepciones. Además, la ausencia de una política de explícito impulso al sector informático, como se comenta más adelante, en el caso mexicano ha significado retrasos adicionales.
Junto con las recesiones, reestructuraciones o retrocesos en las economías latinoamericanas, la adquisición de equipos de cómputo ha crecido de manera constante. Por ejemplo, México, a pesar de ser considerado como la décimo tercera economía más grande del mundo, se había convertido --al menos antes de las vicisitudes financieras de 1994-1995-- en el sexto o séptimo mercado de computadoras, de acuerdo con una información periodística especializada.90 De toda la capacidad instalada en materia de computadoras a nivel mundial, México ha contado con 0.85%, una cantidad muy pequeña comparada con 48.6% que tiene Estados Unidos, 6.9% que corresponde a Japón y 4.2% de Francia.91 México, en el séptimo sitio en cuanto a presencia en la capacidad de cómputo, es el país latinoamericano en la posición más alta. Le sigue Brasil, con 0.59%. Sin embargo, en una evaluación del nivel de infraestructura en telecomunicaciones (medido en una escala del 1 al 10) Chile recibía 8.5 puntos, Brasil 5.96, España 5.74, Venezuela 4.7, Argentina 4.66, Colombia 4.38 y México, solamente 4.35 puntos. La tabla es encabezada por Estados Unidos, con una puntuación de 9.21.92
Ese rezago en el desarrollo de las telecomunicaciones, que contrasta con la adquisición de hardware, se confirma en el escaso crecimiento de las conexiones a las redes electrónicas, que ha sido lento, desigual y en ocasiones incluso estancado, en América Latina.
A comienzos de 1995 se estimaba que de solamente 0.3% de las conexiones a Internet en todo el mundo se encontraban en esta región. Una nueva evaluación, a fines de ese año, señalaba que de 6.6 millones de anfitriones en la Internet, apenas 28 mil 500, en números redondos, se encontraba en América Central, del Sur y el Caribe, en tanto que México tenía casi 8 mil 500. Es decir, en total, menos de 0.6%. Norteamérica (Estados Unidos, Canadá y, en esa evaluación, México inclusive) tenía un total de 4 millones 500 mil de esos hosts (solamente EU 4 millones 177 mil), en tanto que Europa occidental, poco más de un millón 530 mil (España, específicamente, contaba con 40 mil, en ese recuento).93
En contraste, el mercado latinoamericano de hardware y software representaba entre 2 y 3% del mercado mundial.94 Es decir, en América Latina el ritmo de conexiones a la red de redes es mucho menor al de la adquisición de equipos de cómputo. Tenemos máquinas incluso en abundancia en comparación con otras regiones, pero no contamos con capacidad para hacerlas comunicarse entre sí ni con las que hay en otros países.
Son pocas las naciones latinoamericanas que han emprendido una política específica para un deliberado desarrollo de las redes de comunicación electrónica. Lo más frecuente es que algunas universidades, especialmente las de carácter público y por ello con subsidio gubernamental, sean las que desarrollen los accesos de cada país en la Internet, pero más bien de manera aislada, o desordenada. Paulatinamente, otras instituciones se van incorporando al mundo del ciberespacio, pero sin una política de carácter nacional.
En Perú, desde 1990 funciona la Red Científica Peruana/Perú-Internet, que menos de un lustro después ya tenía 8 mil suscriptores y era considerada como una de las redes, en el mundo, de crecimiento más acelerado. Su fundador, José Soriano, ha explicado las posibilidades de expansión, incluso más allá de usuarios académicos, de la siguiente manera: "Creemos que la región va a desarrollarse si podemos extender una red de empresas pequeñas, medianas y de gran tamaño, a todo el mundo que comprenda que --más que nunca-- la información es poder. En otro nivel, consideramos que la información es una póliza de seguros para la democracia. Mientras más información tenga la población en general, más fácil será su elección. Actualmente sólo las élites tienen acceso a las redes --sólo personas que tienen la información pueden ganar más--. El objetivo de la red se diseminará en todo Perú y luego trabajará mediante un acuerdo regional que hemos creado con otras naciones andinas".95
La red peruana trabaja en colaboración con proyectos en Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia y otros países del Area Andina, para contratar conjuntamente servicios de satélite. Los costos llegan a ser mayores que en las naciones industrializadas. "Por ejemplo --dice Soriano-- conectarse en Estados Unidos en una línea exclusiva de alta velocidad cuesta aproximadamente 2 mil dólares por mes. En Perú se tiene que pagar entre 8 mil y 14 mil dólares. Políticas de ese tipo, frenan nuestro desarrollo tecnológico".96
___________________________
Notas
87"¿Quién para a Internet? en América Economía, No. 91, N. Y., enero de 1995, p 28.
88"The Internet's explosive growth", cuadro en PC Magazine, N.Y., 16 de mayo de 1995.
89>Holly Hubbard, "Latin American distribution channel borders en change...", Computer Reseller News, 16 de mayo de 1994.
90Paul Carroll, "Onto the highway: foreign competition spurs Mexico to move...", The Wall Street Journal, N.Y., 5 de julio de 1994.
91Les siguen, del cuarto al sexto lugar, Canadá con 2.95%, España con 1.66% y Corea con 0.87%. Datos del World Competitive Report, recogidos por Rossana Fuentes Beraín en la investigación "Construyen la 'autopista informativa" en Reforma, México, 30 de noviembre de 1994.
92Ibidem.
93"Internet Hosts by Country", estudio de la Internet Society de julio de 1995, "bajado" de la página de esa institución en la WWW.
94Adolfo Casari, "Internet", en América Economía, No. 95, mayo de 1995.
95David Schrieberg, "El tercer mundo ganará al usar la información en red", artículo de Newsweek, January 16 1995, reproducido en Excélsior, 16 de enero de 1995.
96Ibidem.
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