Government and Industry Leaders Address How Public-Private Partnerships Can Bridge the Digital Divide

Thanks to advances in wireless, fiber, and satellite technologies, many assume broadband access is ubiquitous. But that’s far from the case, as recent global events like the pandemic demonstrated.

Five industry leaders who took the stage at SATELLITE 2024’s Tuesday afternoon session on public-private partnerships addressed lack of access and other challenges, while stressing the need to boost collaboration and connectivity.

“We still have 2.6 billion people around the world that aren’t connected, and that can be because of access because of usability, or because of affordability,” said Isabelle Mauro, director general of the Global Satellite Operators Association (GSOA). “One of the things I wanted to highlight as needed during [World Radio Conference] 23 ... the importance of international cooperation, of regulatory clarity, technology, innovation in shaping really the future of satellite communications.”

Acknowledging the WRC’s progress in creating a connectivity roadmap at its 2023 conference, ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin said there’s more work to be done to bridge the digital divide and achieve universal connectivity by 2030.

“I think that the focus of this session is exactly where we need to focus, which is on partnerships and on collaboration,” said Bogdan-Martin. “Part of the challenge is an infrastructure challenge. It's getting to those hardest to connect and so that's where satellites have an incredible role to play.”

One area where Bogdan-Martin says the ITU sees a lot of value in partnerships is in the early warning systems domain.

“Today we have 50 percent of the world's population that are not covered by early warning systems,” she said, adding that the ITU is partnering with UNICEF and others to bring satellite broadband to rural villages across the globe, and supports the UN Secretary General’s ‘Early Warnings for All’ initiative. As part of the initiative, the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres in 2022 called for a global effort to ensure that early warning systems protect everyone on Earth by 2027.

“Satellite broadband brings tremendous opportunities” to meet these goals, she said.

Jessica Rosenworcel, chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), spoke at length about the United States’ digital broadband gaps, which were made more apparent during the pandemic.

“The pandemic year demonstrated that not everyone is connected,” said Rosenworcel. “We were told to go home, hunker down and live life online. Yet we still had children caught in the homework gap — who couldn't get online preschool, and people who couldn't get online for work. We had folks who were unable to keep up with their healthcare appointments because telemedicine wasn't available to them, because they simply didn't have the bandwidth.”

But while the U.S. legislature responded with billions of dollars to help support the construction of broadband in the United States to reach places that don't have that infrastructure, satellites are the key for reaching everyone, everywhere and anytime time, she said.

“There are so many places in the United States — deep dark forests where those terrestrial networks will never go,” said Rosenworcel. “There are so many mountaintops that are not accessible today [to] ground-based systems, and there are so many times we have climate challenges, storms, hurricanes and wildfires that reduce the effectiveness of terrestrial networks.”

To make it easier for satellite operators to work with wireless providers on joint solutions and services, the FCC recently built what Rosenworcel calls “the first framework for supplemental coverage from space.”

“Our goal is to make it a lot easier for satellite operators to work with terrestrial wireless providers and jointly provide service,” she added.

But in places like rural, sub-Saharan Africa, working with terrestrial providers and governments to invest in the right communications infrastructure is much harder, noted Kyle Whitehill, CEO of Avanti Communications. There are geopolitical obstacles, too, such as ensuring broadband grants get to the right destinations.

“For 17 years I've lived in India and Africa, living and working as a CEO in fixed mobile and satellite,” said Whitehill. “When I joined the satellite industry six years ago, I said if you want to connect the unconnected, the only people who can do that are the mobile carriers. They are the only people who have infrastructure in the country to deploy into non-urban and semi-urban environments.

But the economics of building a tower don’t work for most large mobile operators in a place like rural Nigeria don’t work.

“So the dilemma was — how are we going to incentivize mobile operators to deploy into rural villages where the economics don't work? How am I going to motivate someone's investment in schools when no one is going to do that on a noncommercial basis? For me, the answer is quite simple: the mobile operators have to be forced to take seriously their universal obligation to make everybody have access to the network.”

Additionally, while there are many funders internationally who want to connect schools, some do not trust African governments.

“They don't trust Africa, because if you give $500 million to an African government you don't trust that they're going to use that to deploy some form of connectivity in education. The vast majority of our company's coverage is in Sub Saharan Africa [we are] tirelessly working every day with people like MTN Nigeria to meet the economics of that network work.”

Eva Berneke, CEO of Eutelsat Group, stressed the potential of satellite technology to extend services and deliver high-speed broadband in underserved areas – and suggested that having a multi-orbit network could be the best route to expanding global connectivity.

She said the Eutelsat is the only global operator to effectively combine a Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) and Geostationary Orbit (GEO) network.

“Sometimes you have 5G and sometimes you have edge. Covering the globe is important for quite a lot of use cases,” Berneke said. “We do that both for the coverage aspects, but also for the financing capacity, which we think is better served with multiple networks, just like you have been in telecom.” VS