The Tragedy of The Unused Commons

Hope for the good sense and guts to grasp the nettle and take decisions that are bold as well as wise.

“The tragedy of the commons” as you may recall, refers in economics to the overexploitation of shared resources because of unregulated access. The tragedy results from shared resources being depleted or degraded because users pursue their own interests, contrary to the common good. This leads to unsustainable depletion or degradation. The atmosphere and oceans are examples of such shared resources.

There are also reverse situations, in which resources that are available for the benefit of society are unused, to the detriment of the common good. In such cases, there are opportunity costs from disuse that result in detriments, because the benefits of use are foregone. India’s abundant sunlight is a good example. Given its abundance, a reasonable expectation might be that extensive innovation and market organisation would be focused on harvesting this potential energy. Alas, India is a laggard in innovation relating to solar power.

Another resource that is neither depleted nor degraded by usage but underused is radio frequency spectrum. The opportunity cost for unused spectrum is therefore even greater than for a degradable mineral resource such as coal, resulting in an extreme tragedy of unused commons.

Some Issues Need Resolution

The situation today is that swathes of spectrum are unused because of our inability, perhaps unwillingness, to develop the appropriate regulations and organisation to benefit from them. This is true of all unused and underused radio frequency spectrum, although some of it is the most useful means for broadband connectivity for the majority of our rural and semi-urban population. It would also give more urban users less expensive access. For both sets, judicious use would enhance productivity and improve living conditions.

The entire thrust of the Digital India initiative requires these enabling policies and procedures, that is, the administrative rules and regulations that would enable the use of presently unused and therefore wasted spectrum. There are, of course, many other steps required than merely putting in place the regulations. The market structures and organisation have to be created under government leadership with other stakeholders in industry and civil society that would permit sustainable use of “the commons” — namely, the spectrum, if it were a shared resource instead of being apportioned in silos.

At present, private operators in this sector, except one, have too much debt, very low profitability, and insufficient network coverage. Services can be good in some locations, but countrywide, are spotty and not universally accessible. Yet, operators apparently want auctions, not now but at some time in the future (perhaps next year), for the essential resource that is the prerequisite for building the coverage that they don’t have although they are sorely needed, as they have been for years. While clearly impractical because of how auctions soak up capital, limiting subsequent investment in networks because of the deprivation of capital, operators reportedly want auctions in order to reduce competitive threats. 

Another baffling aspect of our reality is that the administration and regulator took no effective action to prevent the destruction of existing market structures in the telecom sector when there was a disruptive new entrant. Although, with overwhelming resources from unrelated activities, unsustainable strategies and tactics could be construed as jeopardising India’s current and future productivity. Meanwhile, the administration and the regulator dithered, debating theoretical concepts of what constitutes anticompetitive or predatory activity, and the judiciary remained on the sidelines.

Yet another aspect of puzzling inactivity is that there have been no steps to test certain promising technologies for permitting their use through appropriate policies in India, such as TV White Space or the development of MIMO — Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output — using arrays of antennas, yielding (a) greater throughput (b) over longer distances (c) to more users, thereby improving spectrum capacity for broadband. While initial tests for TV White Space, conducted after a delay of several years, have been promising (disclosure: the author was associated with some), proposals for larger follow-up trials have stalled. Without these, policymakers can’t even consider policies that would enable the development and use of TV White Space devices for extending optical fibre from gram panchayats to hundreds of thousands of village users.

In the press, confusing articles short on facts make policy formulation even more difficult and risky in this already technically and financially complex space. One instance is an article about Maharashtra’s Village Social Transformation initiative avoiding TV White Space because this technology has problems with security clearance, in addition to Foreign Contribution Regulation Act clearance for Microsoft’s sponsorship of the pilot. There's no mention of the real problem in India: getting permission to use TV White Space for purposes other than for Doordarshan’s broadcasts. The security risk in these frequencies is the same as in other frequencies, and transmission in any band can be monitored.

Another article suggests the government is considering allocating a high-speed wireless frequency band of unused spectrum (V band or 60 GHz, which is like short-range wireless optic fibre) on a first come, first served basis “which is a gross violation of the Supreme Court order”. Somewhere down the page is a surmise that since the Broadband India Forum is advocating de-licencing of this band and foreign companies support it, this “means that it should be allocated without auction on first come, first served basis”. The Broadband India Forum in its white paper clearly recommends aligning with an international standard, the Harmonised European Standard.1

 According to this, low power equipment within specified emission limits in this band doesn’t need a licence, like Wi-Fi, which is de-licenced spectrum that is open access and not allocated for exclusive use. Other de-licenced spectrum would not need to be allocated either, although in India, bands such as 60 GHz could be restricted to authorised operators.

It needs government intervention to cut the Gordian knot and initiate discussions on pooling spectrum for networks and working out practicable, sustainable options. Here’s hoping good sense and guts will help to make a start.

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Shyam (no-space) Ponappa at gmail dot com

1: "V band - 60 GHz: The Key to Affordable Broadband in India"

White Paper by Broadband India Forum, November 9, 2016

http://www.broadbandindiaforum.com/img/White%20Paper%20on%20V-BAND%20Revised%20Final.pdf

A Pathfinding Approach for Digital India

It's not only the installation of the OFC, but of ensuring quality and reliability.

Shyam Ponappa   |   February 1, 2017

Most people believe an optical fibre cable (OFC) connection is necessary for broadband. While largely true, this is often financially viable only in urban agglomerations. What is less known is that trading companies use wireless links between New York and Chicago for high-speed electronic trades [1]. For people outside urban clusters, wireless is a less expensive alternative to fibre. They get only a few megabits per second, but realistically, ubiquitous broadband at 2 Mbps would be great.

Three factors are driving internet access and usage in India. An overriding factor is the growth of wireless devices and traffic as a global phenomenon. Cisco estimated in June 2016 that in 2015, wired access comprised 52 per cent of IP traffic, but would reduce to one-third by 2020, while wireless access would increase to two-thirds. This trend is reinforced by another factor: Innovation that lowers costs and improves performance in mobile wireless (Chart 1).

Chart 1: Mobile Innovation Lowers Costs and Improves Performance

Sources: Cisco Visual Networking Index; International Telecommunication Union; IE Market Research; Motorola, Deutsche Bank; Qualcomm

Note: Data speed indicated the maximum downlink speed, not average observed speeds. The average observed speeds depend on many factors, including infra, subscriber density and device harware and software

The third factor is the combination of the geographic spread of our population, the concentration of broadband penetration (Chart 2), and the limited coverage of OFC networks. While major cities and their connecting links are covered by OFC, less populated and less commercially attractive areas between them are not.  In hilly terrain, there is considerable difficulty in laying OFC, which extends far beyond cost.  In urban areas, cost can be a deterrent because we lack reasonable, uniform charges for rights-of-way. Such procedures and practices are difficult to institute and enforce, but are essential for robust, viable OFC networks.

Chart 2: Broadband Penetration

Source:  http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/internet/The-India-wide-web/article14588938.ece

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It's not only the installation of the OFC, but of ensuring quality and reliability. OFC networks in India apparently suffer from 12 to 14 cuts per km per month, whereas the international benchmark is 0.7 cuts per km km per month. Apart from more frequent repairs, the capital expenditure in India is nearly three times as high as in Australia or the US. [2]
 

Estimates for installing OFC using standard procedures vary from about Rs 1 lakh to Rs 4 lakh per km. However, there have been attempts at getting costs down by radical changes in approach. For example, Andhra Pradesh considered an OFC installation of 22,500 km estimated at Rs 4,700 crore. By stringing fibre overhead along electric cables, however, the estimate was cut to Rs 333 crore, reducing costs from Rs 21 lakh to under Rs 1.5 lakh per km. It remains to be seen how this network will perform in terms of quality and reliability. Also, wireless technology is needed to extend connectivity from the fibre to villages, and cellular network costs rise with less bandwidth. For instance, one estimate is that excluding spectrum costs, a network using 5 MHz costs nearly 70 percent more than using 20 MHz.
 

For all these reasons, we need concerted action to redesign our approach to broadband, covering the fundamentals of infrastructure, spectrum and market design.  The exponential growth in mobile services has reached a plateau, and is complicated by the taint of the 2G spectrum scams. This has resulted in a mindset combining witch-hunting and paranoia in the press, the public, government departments, and the judiciary. This is not conducive for the coordinated, collective strategy and action that is required to extricate ourselves. Several proven wireless technologies are not permitted in India, although the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has recommended their use. Methods to increase connectivity like those listed below are urgently needed, with requisite environmental safeguards such as the use of renewable energy.
 

• 60 GHz (V band) wireless gigabit for short-haul; 

• 70 and 80 GHz (E band) for multi-gigabit backhaul up to 5 km;

• TV White Space for the middle mile from the fibre to users in villages up to 8-10 km away in a single hop;

Additional steps, e.g.: 

• Increasing unlicensed spectrum in the 5.8 GHz band from 50 MHz to 80 MHz to enable 866 Mbps per channel, or more for gigabit capacity;

• Enabling secondary sharing of spectrum bands such as TV White Space, which has the possibility of existing Indian IPR establishing domestic manufacturing and dominating this niche;

It is evident that despite intense efforts by the people involved, our existing approach is simply not getting us to where we need to be. This has been repeated by government and private sector representatives many times. There’s no substitute for developing a sound approach, collectively and participatively, with professional facilitation, cutting across government, industry (operators and equipment providers), users, and the judiciary, to devise whatever solutions will deliver better results.  We have to move away from adversarial deadlock.  

A good way to begin is by accepting facts, and considering the evidence before dismissing points of view. For licensing, we know that government collections from revenue sharing far exceed the auction fees foregone (“Breakthroughs Needed for Digital India”). We have the experience of building other infrastructure such as roads and airports on revenue-sharing principles.  We have to take a similar systematic, phased approach to designing and implementing broadband networks. Policies on infrastructure resource use including spectrum need to be rationalised, and the sector organised through participative path-finding and problem solving.  We have to build national champions in manufacturing to keep costs affordable, for instance, using TV White Space. India could set the standard with its IPR and products where OFC is infeasible or unviable for connectivity to villages and rural clusters. Both the administrative and political leadership need to do this, working with all stakeholders, and not treating any of them as adversaries, or cronies.
 

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                                                                                 Shyam (no space) Ponappa at gmail dot com

1. ‘Information Transmission between Financial Markets in Chicago and New York’,  Gregory Laughlin, Anthony Aguirre, and Joseph Grundfest, Cornell University Library, arXiv.org

2. Conference presentation, Sterlite, http://www.trai.gov.in/sites/default/files/Sterlite-Badri.pdf