Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

When American civilian reconstruction teams entered Iraq in 2003, they found themselves in a telecommunications desert, and initial efforts to use satellite phones floundered as they discovered that the phones worked only if both users stood outside—needless to say, an inconvenient feature for a war zone. 1As a quick fix, the allies’ Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) gave MTC-Vodafone, a regional telecom company, a contract to install cell towers and establish services in the south of the country, while another telecom, MCI, got the nod in Baghdad. According to one former senior CPA official we spoke with, the towers were put up all over the country literally overnight, with officials and U.N. staff receiving thousands of mobile phones to distribute to important local political players. (Oddly enough, all the phones sported a “917” area code, sharing that distinction with New York’s five boroughs.) These efforts jump-started a moribund telecommunications industry in Iraq by building the physical infrastructure required, and within a few years, the sector was booming.

In Afghanistan, where the U.N. established a mobile network soon after the fall of the Taliban (with free service as an incentive for users), the mobile market has grown significantly in the past decade, thanks largely to the Afghan government’s decision to issue licenses to private mobile operators. By 2011, there were four major operators in Afghanistan, claiming some 15 million subscribers among them. The reconstruction teams who arrived in Iraq and Afghanistan found a blank canvas: poor infrastructure, no subscribers and dubious commercial prospects. Given the rate of mobile adoption around the world and how the telecommunications industry is expanding, it’s unlikely that anyone will ever encounter a similar blank slate again.

In Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, the primary communications task was not installation but widespread restoration of a badly damaged telecommunications infrastructure. Despite the devastation throughout the country, getting its communications networks up and running was a relatively fast process. The mobile infrastructure was badly damaged by the earthquake and aftershocks, but due to quick thinking and cooperation between local telecoms and the U.S. military, the carriers were able to restore functionality within only a few days. Ten days after the earthquake, the two largest mobile phone operators, Digicel and Voilà, reported that they were able to operate at 70 to 80 percent of their pre-earthquake capacity.

Jared, who was then with the State Department, remembers reaching out to the U.S. ambassador to Indonesia shortly after the Haitian earthquake for a debriefing on lessons learned after the 2004 tsunami that killed 230,000 people in fourteen countries in Southeast Asia. The message was clear: Get the towers up, get them running and overrule the people who think that telecommunications are secondary to emergency rescue. Fast networks aren’t secondary; they’re complementary.

Because the vast majority of cell towers in Haiti, even prior to the earthquake, relied on generators instead of electricity for power, maintaining coverage was often more a question of fuel than infrastructure. Donated cell towers had to be guarded lest desperate people try to steal their fuel. Still, the ability to maintain service despite the destruction and chaos proved vital in coordinating and sending aid organizations to areas and people who needed help most, as well as providing a way for friends and family to contact each other within and beyond Haiti. Some of the first images to come out of the country after the disaster were indeed taken and sent by Haitians using their mobile phones. Everyone involved in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake recognized how crucial working communications were in the midst of widespread physical destruction and human suffering.

The uprisings in the Arab world that began in 2010 represent another recent example of the advantages of a communications-first perspective. Vodafone’s speedy restoration of service in Egypt just before Hosni Mubarak stepped down as president foreshadows a more agile and shrewd telecom sector. Vodafone’s Vittorio Colao told us, “We had people sleeping in the network centers in order to make sure that we could be the first to offer service once the shutdown ended. We had food and water; we’d rented rooms in nearby hotels and we protected our premises, to make sure nobody could come and [disable] the network.” As a result of its efforts, Vodafone was the first operator to resume service—an important “first” for a company trying to reach a large Egyptian market that suddenly had a lot to talk about. Colao described a smart and empathetic strategy on the part of Vodafone to demonstrate value to its Egyptian customers: “We gave credit to our Egyptian customers so that they could call people at home, as a giveaway.” Vodafone also shaped the traffic load (that is, freed up space on the network for Egyptian users), “so that when the network came back up, we could make sure the first people using it could [make] twenty euros’ worth of calls to let relatives know [they were] safe.”

Today’s reliance on telecommunications is a reflection of how important this technology has become in even the poorest societies. In most cases today, when we talk about restoring the network, we’re specifically talking about voice and text services—not Internet connectivity. This will change in the next decade, as people everywhere begin to rely more on data services than on voice communications. After a crisis, the pressures to restore Internet connectivity will dwarf what we see today with voice and text, both for the sake of the population and because a fast data network will help reconstruction actors achieve their goals. If necessary, aid organizations will deploy portable 4G towers meshed together into a low-bandwidth ISP. Data can hop from a mobile device to the nearest tower, then from tower to tower until it reaches a fiber-optic cable connecting to the broader Internet. Browsing speeds will be slow, but such portable deployments will provide enough connectivity to accelerate rebuilding.

Dedicated leadership by the telecommunications industry will be a feature of the reconstruction prototype, with telecoms leading the way as nationalized entities or coalition partners if they are in the private sector. Today, Bechtel and other engineering corporations are often tasked with rebuilding physical infrastructure through government contracts, but as the world adopts a communications-first outlook, the telecoms will be first in—and, like others, they’ll come to make money. In postcrisis societies, solid networks are needed as soon as possible to coordinate search-and-rescue efforts; engage with the population; preserve the rule of law; organize and facilitate aid-distribution efforts; locate missing people; and help those who have been internally displaced navigate their new environment. Telecom companies will have clear and valid commercial motivations to invest their resources in building and maintaining a modern communications network. If the telecom sector is properly regulated from the beginning, the collective benefit for all parties will be quite high: The companies will earn revenue, the reconstruction actors will have faster and better tools, and the population at large will be able to access service that is reliable, fast and cheap (particularly if the sector is competitive from the outset).

The long-term benefit of a healthy telecommunications sector is that it promotes and facilitates the growth of the economy, even if the stability is slow to return. In general, direct investments in infrastructure, jobs and services offer more to the economy than short-term aid programs, and telecommunications is among the most universally lucrative and sustainable enterprises in the commercial world. Afghanistan’s largest mobile operator, Roshan, is also the country’s biggest investor and taxpayer. Roshan employs thousands in Afghanistan and provides nearly 5 percent of the Afghan government’s overall domestic revenue. This is true despite substandard infrastructure, low incomes and more than a decade of continuous war. In the future, smart actors in reconstruction efforts—governments, multinational organizations and aid groups—will recognize the telecoms’ value immediately and prioritize network building accordingly, rather than considering telecoms to be competitors or afterthoughts.