In the UK, 2.7 million homes are still not connected to the internet. But this year, that could all begin to change. The UK is set to roll out 5G and, if deployed with those 2.7 million in mind, it could be what the country needs to enable equal access to the opportunities that come from faster connectivity.
“There’s a real opportunity here to reduce the digital divide,” says Chintan Patel, chief technologist for Cisco UK and Ireland. “The web has done so much good, and we have an opportunity to look at how, as the next 50 per cent come online, we can make it a better, more secure, safer place for people.”
Education is key – we must ensure everyone has the skills to make use of greater connectivity. But it’s also about showing what’s possible with those skills.
“People are highly optimistic about 5G giving better access to healthcare, for instance, so you can see the doctor you want, when you want,” says Patel. “Or making access to the best educators universal, so it’s not just based around the particular school you live near. We need to use the advances to help people with their everyday issues.”
“It also has to be a web worth having,” points out Adrian Lovett, president & CEO of the World Wide Web Foundation. “It’s not just about having a 5G signal – it’s about whether everyone can afford it, whether they have the skills that are important to engage with it and making sure there is relevant content.”
Half the world’s population is still not connected to the internet – the majority of those being women living in low- and middle-income countries, where 1GB of mobile data can cost up to one-third of a user’s monthly income. In addition, 54 per cent of the top ten million websites are in English, despite 75 per cent of the world’s population speaking different languages, according to the 2018 Case for the Web report from the World Wide Web Foundation. If we can achieve the kind of equality Lovett is speaking about – backed up by education – those individuals currently left out of the conversation will begin to create the kinds of content they want to see. New communities will be represented and engaged.
When Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, the original goal was to make information freely available to all. Today, the companies that have become the front door to the internet are, in theory, free – but people are actually paying with their data and identity. In addition, those companies’ algorithms are deciding who sees what, and when – a fact that has become all the more pertinent in recent years, with rampant misinformation potentially impacting free democratic elections.
But we are already seeing what can happen when communities are given control over their digital lives.
Cisco is working with farmers in Orkney, Shropshire and Somerset to deploy 5G radio frequencies as part of an initiative to transform agriculture, and in Somerset, farmers have adorned their cows with 5G-connected collars and ear tags that transmit biometric data on their health. This means they can keep tabs on their herds while letting them roam freely, and the gates to robotic milking systems open automatically when these cows approach, allowing the animals to be milked when they choose.
In India, Cisco has helped women selling pottery and other items in bazaars get online to market their wares. “It’s a business generally controlled by men, and they didn’t have access to the technology. But our local team helped these women think about how to market products online to a global audience.”
These kinds of initiatives show how greater connectivity point to a future of advanced collaboration and opportunity for rural communities. But for that to be realised, government, industry and local communities will have to tackle the challenges together.
“The web for all is not going to happen by accident,” says Lovett. “As with anything that’s for a community at large, it depends on how we all navigate each other in our towns. Take our roads, for instance: there is a job for government to set speed limits, a job for companies to build the vehicles and, crucially, there’s a job for all of us as citizens. We must establish social norms on how we will navigate this. Those norms in the familiar, offline world have taken millennia to evolve – it’s no surprise we’re struggling with that in the online experience, which is only 20 years old for many.
“Only if we get that balance of government, company and citizen responsibility, are we going to get rural communities benefiting from the opportunities we want to see.”
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For more, visit cisco.co.uk
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
