Universal access and service (UAS) measures are usually targeted at rural areas that are unserved or underserved, and especially low-population density areas where provision of services is not viable. But UAS targets can also be focussed on very poor urban areas in large metropolitan cities, including slums.
Developing countries typically set the following universal access (UA) targets:
- A public phone for a certain size of community (e.g., for all communities larger than 2000 inhabitants);
- A limited walking distance to a public phone (e.g., 5 km for communities too small to have their own public phone);
- An Internet POP in districts centres, provincial capitals or towns above a certain size (e.g., above 20,000 inhabitants) that provides either high-speed or broadband capacity; and
- A public access Internet centre accompanying the Internet POP.
Increasingly, modest universal service-like targets are included in developing countries policies, such as:
- An overall telephony subscriber penetration of 20 per cent and a rural penetration target of 10 per cent within a specific time frame (e.g., by 2010); and
- Asking operators to provide a tariff option that allows households in the lowest income decile (10 per cent) a minimum or modest use.
To be useful,
targets need to have the following characteristics:- Targets should focus on needs that have clear indicators and high priorities so that efforts are not spread too thinly among too many targets;
- Targets should be designed to look ahead three to five years;
- Targets should be ambitious but realistic in the light of a country’s actual situation;
- Targets should be reviewed regularly (e.g., every two or three years) to remain ambitious but realistic; and
- Targets should be objectively measurable, so that progress can be assessed.
Ideally, targets should be in line with the goals set by the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) process in support of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These are discussed in
Section 1.5.1. The recommendations from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) [
1] cite an example of specific goals set on a regional basis by regulators.
While providing global and regional guidance, simply adopting general recommendations might not work for individual countries. The specific needs of each country will determine UAS goals and benchmarks. One country might set a feasible target of having a public phone in every community with more than 200 inhabitants for example, while another, such as Uganda, might wish to set a target of having one public phone for 2500 inhabitants. The same applies to Internet related targets and broadband.
Once achieved, new UAS targets can be set for the next phase of UAS. Thus, UAS targets for a particular country can be developed using the following general criteria:
- The current state of the sector and current levels of UA in the country;
- The resources available and required for achieving UA targets;
- Financial sustainability after implementation;
- The feasible quality of service (for uniform quality countrywide); and
- Planned periodic reviews in light of technological and market developments.
The UN Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development, set up after WSIS, established and defined a detailed set of forty core indicators, listed in
Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development: Core ICT Indicators [
2]. All countries that adopt these forty indicators are able to compare their status and progress to other countries’. For individual countries, these indicators are most valuable on a disaggregated basis so that the situation in different parts of the country or for different population groups is made clear.
End notes
- See ITU ICT Market Harmonization Project for ECOWAS/UEMOA (ITU, September 2004).
- www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/partnership/