Smart Decisions: 4G or not 4G

Shakespeare’s Hamlet famously said, “2B or not 2B, that is the question”. More than 400 years after the first print of this Shakespeare play, 4G or not 4G is today’s question. I take liberty in using “sms-speak” as we now live in a tech-savvy world where no one writes out “to be” any more. If you are lucky to have a pretty good service provider you may be able to stream all the YouTube videos you need to watch. Or, perhaps, you can send big data files from a government facility to a centralised processing hub relatively easily. So what is the big deal, you may ask? Understanding the difference between 3G and 4G can be difficult. I asked an IT specialist that very question and they said to me that the speed of connection from a 4G network is 20-30 times that of 3G network. Mobile phone companies give the speed as being 10 times faster. Those numbers didn’t make it concrete enough for me. But, one day I had to download quite a large file. With one service provider, the download tracker shifted between saying 2 hours 30 minutes to 9 hours 7 minutes then to 3 hours 20 minutes. Twelve hours later, I still had no file to work with as after several failed attempts, it only succeeded in transferring 10% of what turned out to be an unusable file. I switched to a different service provider and the download tracker said 6 minutes. Not hours, minutes. Five minutes later I had the whole, large, file downloaded on to my computer. A back of the envelope calculation of my efficiency deficit, taking into account the cost of my time, electricity, air conditioning, potential late delivery penalty for this un-downloadable work, showed that I could have paid for a few nights stay at a several starred hotel. Multiply this inefficiency loss by the hundreds or thousands of workers not able to perform their tasks under similar circumstance and, over time, you could have a small dent in the country’s Gross National Product. The country is positioning itself as the IT hub for the region on a backbone of fibre optic network and mobile broadband technologies. Reducing the cost of 4G access is one of the initiatives the government is engaged in. Encouraging local web hosting has been suggested as one way to significantly reduce the time it takes to download material from sites located overseas as it increases the cost of access for users. But there are many ducks that need to be lined up in a row first before local hosting becomes a financially viable option. The government is a big user of Information and Communication Technologies, ICTs. Sectors such as health, education, energy, financial services and agriculture rely heavily on technology; especially to reach the “last-mile” clients in remote places using. Businesses, the creative sectors and others are also heavy consumers of IT services. “I have wifi: I will now build a hotel around it”, should be the way it goes quipped a friend. The word, “hotel” could be exchanged for school, hospital, airport, military base or whatever your area of operation. In other words the starting point is internet access. Technology is king! There are interesting ideas being bandied around to encourage technology uptake and investment. Hotel’s star ratings could be based on the quality of their internet access provision. As can schools, hospitals, or any other facility serving a public. The bottom line is that poor or inadequate IT has implications on the cost of doing business, and for the user experience of accessing services provided by either the government or private sector. In Hamlet’s soliloquy, he contemplates death and suicide following the murder of his father. He “bemoans the pains and unfairness of life but acknowledges the alternative might be still worse”. In the real world, for the entrepreneur, business person, creative, IT specialist, government decision-maker, the alternative may indeed be worse. Yes, the price of 4G internet access is costly, but not having it may indeed be akin to suicide in a world that only has greater and greater demand for speed. This could be even more critical for a country that has shown the world what speed can do for achieving it’s dreams. With the roll out of 4G in November 2014, the question 2B or not 2B a 4G country is redundant. Moving forward, 4G and more 4G, that is the answer. Currently based in Rwanda, the writer comments about people, organizations and countries whose stories create a chrysalis for ideas.

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Smart Decisions: 4G or not 4G