Deep Impact meets The Day After Tomorrow; Broadband in the Post COVID World
Deep Impact and The Day After Tomorrow are two well-known disaster-genre movies from the 1990s. When the reality of COVID-19 started to become clear, many remarked: “It feels like I’m living in a movie.” It was ironic: at the very time the virus prevented the world from going to the movies, our daily lives began to resemble a Hollywood potboiler. The rapid escalation of events, the spiraling daily death toll, and the near-global need to self-isolate – all conferred a drama and unreal quality that made many feel like they had woken up in the middle of a misadventure movie.
The screen metaphor is a particularly apt one because for many, home confinement, isolated from all but partners, children and pets, meant that the sole window on the world became a screen. Not the big screen, but the more diminutive screens of phones, tablets and computers. Those of us lucky enough to have a broadband connection are using our screens for work, for entertainment and distraction, and to keep connected to distant friends and loved ones. And while our attention tends to be on the screen itself, what actually connects us – what is ultimately feeding our screens with all that content and interactive capability – is our remarkable, powerful, and until now, perhaps underappreciated, broadband networks.
COVID-19 has demonstrated how vital reliable and fast internet really is. Without getting bogged down in technical jargon, broadband is simply fast internet. Sufficiently fast to download large work files, view graphics-heavy webpages without long delays, play internet-based games, stream audio and video, or interact over video-conference platforms.
5G promises to bring ultra-fast broadband not only to mobile phones, but to billions of other connected devices. 5G broadband will make possible such innovations as smart cities and self-driving cars. Behind every 5G infrastructure – or indeed, any broadband infrastructure – is a mountain of research, standardization and other international agreements, and regulatory work. This is the domain of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UN specialized agency for digital technologies, based in Geneva, Switzerland.
For 155 years, ITU’s mission has been “to connect the world”. ITU was born back in the days of the telegraph, and while communications technologies have evolved and multiplied, the organization’s basic raison d’être has never changed. Nor is its work anywhere near done. Despite the organization’s instrumental role in helping connect more than half the world to the internet, the reality is that just under half of the world has yet to be connected. Around the world, an estimated 3.6 billion people remain still totally shut out from access to online health, education and government services, online marketplaces, vital web-based information resources, and the ability to connect and exchange with family, friends and colleagues.
There is already widespread recognition that progress towards many of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) could be greatly accelerated through digital solutions. That is why, almost a decade ago, ITU and UNESCO set up the Broadband Commission for Digital Development, in response to the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon’s call to step up efforts to meet UN development goals.
Now renamed as the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, to reflect core UN goals, the Commission comprises more than 50 high-level Commissioners from government, international organizations, world-leading businesses, and civil society organizations, who work together to promote broadband connectivity for all. The Commission stresses the importance of developing a clear strategy – beginning with a National Broadband Plan – that focuses holistically on the “4 i’s”: infrastructure, investment, innovation and inclusiveness. As we embark on this final Decade of Action towards the SDGs, one thing is clear: connecting the second half of the world’s population will be less straightforward than hooking up the first, and will require innovative and intelligent interplay between these four elements.
If COVID-19 has shown us anything, it is that we are all connected. Any ‘walls’ we put up are fictitious, easily brought down by a microscopic virus that recognizes no boundaries. Tackling this global health challenge, and the many other challenges that face humanity, will mean embracing this connectedness. No one can do it alone. Enabling everyone to get online and access to life-enhancing and life-saving services will require private and public partnerships and international cooperation, knowledge sharing and support.
When the Broadband Commission was created ten years ago, it launched with the campaign B More with Broadband, highlighting how fast internet could make life safer, more interesting and more meaningful. Now, ten years and billions of connections down the road, the Commission is launching a new campaign – The Right to B – recognizing that broadband and the many benefits it brings is a resource that should be equally available to everyone, regardless of location, income, gender, language or ethnicity.
Addressing the tremendous challenges facing the world right now, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called on society to ‘build back better’ – that is, take this current crisis and use it as an opportunity to create a better, safer and more egalitarian world. Expanding on this theme, we are calling on the world to ‘build back better with broadband.’ COVID-19 has demonstrated that being connected to fast internet and the services and information that it delivers in real time, is no longer a luxury. It is a necessity for everyone, every community and every society. Connectedness ultimately makes us stronger, safer and – if we do it right – better.
We will eventually emerge from COVID-19. Perhaps we will still say, “I feel like I’m in a movie” – but this time, not of the disaster kind. In many a romantic comedy, the protagonist ultimately falls for the love interest who has been there the whole time, unrecognized and underappreciated, until a crisis shines a new light. Perhaps COVID-19 is the crisis that will shake our world up enough to enable us to finally see broadband as more than just an attractive friend, and to recognize it as our indispensable life-partner, enhancing our world, and everything we do. Wouldn’t that be a better ending to this movie we’re currently all starring in? And doesn’t everyone, everywhere, deserve a ‘happily ever after’?