e2001 Your Digital Future - Bangkok Post Special Supplement

THE INFORMATION AGE

The future is here and demands participation

Change is coming, resistance is futile

Tony Waltham

We are on the brink of a tremendous change in the way we live, in the way we work and in the way we interact with other people.

You may feel this is too sweeping a statement to make. That this is Thailand and hence its people are immune to the force of changes that are being driven by the ever-more-rapidly advancing progress of technology. If so, you would be wrong.

To be sure, the technological breakthroughs that are creating new ways of communicating and of doing business are largely occurring in laboratories in the United States, in Europe and in Japan.

But these innovations can appear in the form of new products on the shelves here in Thailand within months, or even weeks after their introduction elsewhere.

Today, mass communications and the Internet mean that trends, be they about fashion, entertainment or a new way of doing business, are a global phenomenon. There is no escape, and at best there is only a brief delay since resistance _ if there is any _ to technology-driven innovation is both futile and counter-productive.

Generally, these changes are subtle in the way that they emerge. But although they may arrive quietly, they quickly add up to bring fundamental shifts to our lives.

Take the Internet. Just six years ago it did not exist in Thailand. Today, there is scarcely a single newspaper page, be it the Bangkok Post or Thai Rath, that does not contain some reference to the Internet, whether this is in a news story or in an advertisement. No longer do readers have to turn to our Database section to learn of developments in this global network or to hear about new web sites.

Turn on the television, and you will see a URL such as <www.tv3.co.th> in the lower left or right-hand corner of the screen. Nor can people ignore the banks of personal computers in photo sticker booths or the game machines dotted around the shopping malls, or the proliferation of Internet cafes and Internet gaming shops that are springing up around town.

And yet despite this publicity, still only around one percent of the population of the country has Internet access, a woefully inadequate number when compared with the United States of America where half of all households now have a computer, as reported last month by the US Department of Commerce.

In the US, 41.5 percent of people now use the Internet, up 15 percent from last year, while the US Government report puts the US online population at 116.5 million.

Closer to home, the figures are similarly impressive for Singapore. Nielsen NetRatings estimated in May this year that there were 1.74 million Singaporeans online, or 41.91 percent of the population _ which would be a slightly higher percentage than in America.

Here in Thailand, the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec) makes a fairly generous estimate of one million people here with Net access, which is around 1.6 per cent of the population.

Clearly, the usually trendy and fashion-conscious Thailand has a long way to go to catch up when it comes to the Internet, which is undoubtedly the most significant global trend and the biggest agent for change that the world has ever known.

It is tempting at this point to try to find some factors to blame for this deficiency _ for I think that is the appropriate word to characterise Thailand's "blind spot" when it comes to the Internet.

For the low level of Internet access is certainly is one reason that Thailand has slipped economically, stumbling far behind most other countries in the ranks of global competitiveness.

Earlier, in June this year, Thailand was ranked second to last, being placed 46th out of 47 countries next to Indonesia, in a survey published by the Meta Group. This "Global New Economy Index" mapped the technological vitality of the countries surveyed, measuring five digital economy categories: the availability of knowledge jobs, technological innovation, the degree of transformation to a digital economy, economic dynamism and globalisation.

Thailand's Minister of Science, Technology and the Environment Arthit Ourairat has since referred to this low ranking and said in response that Thailand needed to develop its human resources, and he spoke of the need recently for more science students.

Dr Arthit has pointed out that while 1.2 million Thai children now entered primary school each year, only 120,000 students were moving on to either an open or a state university, thus pinpointing a critical shortcoming that the country now faces in the Information Age.

For, in order to successfully compete in a world increasingly influenced by an Internet economy, Thailand needs an educated workforce rather than merely an educated elite.

The economic crisis precipitated back in mid-1997 by the effective devaluation of the baht undoubtedly made things worse than they might have been, coming as it did just at the time when companies here should have been preparing to invest in the Internet and in an online presence.

As it happened, many firms spent the next two years hanging on for financial survival as they saw their assets frozen or rendered virtually worthless and their exposure to debt magnified with many facing uncompromising creditors.

Taking an Internet initiative at that time would have been an unaffordable luxury for many Thai companies, and economic constraints undoubtedly also kept many individuals away from computer terminals and from exploring the potential of the new phenomenon of the Internet.

However, there is no denying the fact that high Internet access charges, largely determined by the Government through the state regulator of international communications, the Communications Authority of Thailand, have continued to remain another big obstacle for many businesses. This is especially so if we look at the high cost of corporate leased lines.

These relatively high charges follow Thailand's state monopoly regulator's tradition of charging what the market will bear for data traffic ever since the early origins of packet-switched data networks such as ThaiPak.

The Thai Farmers Bank Research Centre, in a recently-published study into what it describes as Thailand's "e-crisis", also complains about the high cost of corporate Internet access, although it concedes a drop in the charges that individual users pay for access.

Critical questions hang over the commitment to the liberalisation of the telecommunications sector here. Singapore again scored heavily by comparison when it fully deregulated its telecommunications sector in February this year, long ahead of schedule.

Thailand is still stuck with an agenda that will not see full deregulation of telecommunications until 2006 under the terms of a World Trade Organisation treaty _ by which time the window of opportunity for aggressively deploying many of the critical broadband and wireless networking technologies will have almost certainly passed by.

The introduction of such technologies and the necessary infrastructure requires a massive investment, even a gamble that may offer uncertain returns in the short term. For this to be likely to occur needs a climate where there is fierce competition between different providers.

We can look to the irony of the situation today of a battle, so far a war of words, between the two players in Thailand's telecoms duopoly. The Communications Authority of Thailand (CAT) and the Telephone Organisation of Thailand (TOT) have crossed swords over Internet service provision, possibly providing an insight into the mindsets of these state regulators.

The TOT believes that it can offer a cheaper Internet service to people here _ indeed, it will be free access through independent provider Freei.net _ by using its links to Malaysia and that country's international access rights.

But the CAT is crying "foul" and is threatening to send police in and to take legal action to prevent this from happening, claiming that it has the sole right as the gatekeeper for international communications for Thailand.

Who loses here?

On another front, we can look at the hesitant and faltering start for broadband Internet communications in Bangkok.

Here, we have a cable television network that is the monopoly provider of cable television to over a million homes in Bangkok, one that is ideally placed to offer high-speed cable Internet access over this network.

Over a year has slipped by since the promised introduction of such a service from the TelecommAsia (TA) subsidiary Asia Infonet, with the launch date having been repeatedly postponed before a limited introduction last month.

Meanwhile, as a leading provider of fixed lines in Bangkok, TelecomAsia has not yet introduced DSL services over its network. Sources claim that it has the technology, but is holding back _ allegedly because introducing this might detract from the proposed cable modem offerings.

Indeed, it has been said that we might still have no DSL at all in Thailand were it not for the competition for a service from TA from rival TOT lines in Bangkok and courtesy of two providers here: UBT, a United Communications subsidiary, and Lenso Datacomm.

Economics 101 says that competition drives prices down and improves service, and these two real-world examples perhaps illustrate why Thailand's knitted-up bundle of telecommunications regulations needs to be unravelled as soon as possible _ and waiting for the year 2006 to deregulate everything could well be a recipe for economic suicide.

Some might say that Thailand does not need a fluency or capabilities in these new technologies, that these are foreign ideas and concepts, and might argue for a "head-in-the-sand" response to challenges posed by the need for global competitiveness.

Unfortunately, to pull out of the world's economy is never an option.

No community has ever been able to live in isolation or to be weak and to avoid being exploited _ be it economically, politically or militarily. Invariably, the best position for a nation to be in is one of strength.

In the industrial age, Thailand's economic strength and its relative wealth came from manufacturing and its possession of a strong and relatively cheap labour force, along with help from other vibrant sectors such as agriculture and tourism.

In the information age, which is where we are moving to at breakneck speed _ and some would say we have already arrived _ people no longer talk of a nation's strength in terms of the number of its unskilled workers or of how cheap they are. Rather, a country's strength today lies in the numbers of its knowledge workers _ which, very loosely described, might be characterised as people who can work at a computer terminal.

Clearly food exports and a thriving tourist industry will remain significant for Thailand, while the production of goods will continue to be important, although both agriculture and manu facturing are increasingly being auto mated. At the same time, countries like China, Bangladesh and India are getting more organised at providing cheap, unrewarding labour-intensive work.

In response to these trends and to meet the needs of the information econ omy, Thailand must transform its wor kforce as quickly as it can into a nation of knowledge workers. And this is no small task.

It must become a nation of computer-using, Internet-savvy people who can and do take advantage of the latest advances in modern communi cations and who are able to come up with creative ideas and innovative con cepts.

And it needs to be done as quickly as it possibly can.

Other sectors now seemingly far- removed from information technology such as agriculture or fisheries will ben efit from this. Villagers would be able to have accurate information on what crops would be best to cultivate or which fish or livestock to raise and, when marketing them, which buyer will pay the highest.

Indeed, coupled with a good means of delivery, it may well be that farmers here in future will auction their crops to the highest bidder, rather than be at the mercy of local middlemen, as most are today.

There are many ways that computer networks might help villagers, but obvi ously this is a non-starter if the people there do not have networked computers in the first place _ or if they do, but are unable to use them properly.

Certainly, providing the equipment is where a major part of the challenge lies today, and this includes the serious infrastructure issues that this involves.

But Thailand must not overlook the other related issue of delivering a rel evant education, with fluency in com puter use and basic English _ the global language of the Internet _ to everyone.

This clearly requires tremendous nat ional resolve for it probably involves making fundamental changes to achieve. Also, in order to overcome the natural resistance that people have to change, this probably requires an awareness at all levels: national and local, from the very top down to the village level.

Some might shake their heads and say that there is no hope that the majority of people living in rural Thai land would become computer literate, but I would say that to do this would be to write off the future of the entire country.

The term that is used today to speak of information-haves and the have-nots is ``digital divide'' and it is a very serious problem for any society to have to come to grips with, and in the United States it is already causing social problems. In Silicon Valley, the area in Califor nia just to the south of San Francisco, where a there is a very high proportion of web-based companies and where many software developers work long hours for very high salaries, everyone complains about the high rents.

Indeed, the rent for an apartment there has become so high that people working in the service industry, largely immigrants, have to live so far away from their jobs that it takes them up to two hours just to commute to work _ and they still get paid relatively low salaries, too. These are the victims of the American digital divide.

But this disparity of incomes in the US is having another effect: it is drawing in more and more skilled information workers, including many from overseas.

Just recently the US government eased immigration quotas to allow in more foreign skilled workers, and in a couple of weeks the expanded quota was already filled.

This also has a negative impact on developing countries such as Thailand which desperately need the few IT skil led professionals that they have.

The longer that there is a global short age of IT skills, so a country such as Thailand will continue to lose part of its investment in its people, while coun tries such as the United States, already rich in IT workers, will gain an even greater advantage.

One thing is certain: there is big, big change ahead for everyone _ regardless of where you live or work, or of the industry or the business sector that your employer is in. Most of the experts who look at business trends agree on this, saying that the world is heading towards uncharted territory that is full of uncer tainties. In one sense, this is what the future is anyway. Only today, the com puter networked world introduces so many new variables and fundamentally changes so many things about the ways that people do business that it is next to impossible to predict anything. Some people will win or will benefit from these inevitable changes ahead and others, the less fortunate and the less prepared, will be disadvantaged. So, while we certainly do not know what lies ahead, Thailand and its people should strive to be in the best position to take advantage of opportunities in this com ing Information Age.

In two words, my message for the future would be: ``Get connected,'' and take all the other necessary measures to enable this in terms of education and in the availability and cost of network access.

* Tony Waltham is Editor of Database.

Email: <tony@bangkokpost.net>.