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09/06/2007Spaniards Ask, Is Wireless Internet a Private Business or Universal Right?
This past summer, members of the Spanish parliament blasted the government's telecom market commission for vetoing Wi-Fi hot-zone projects promised by political parties and funded by city councils. The Senate's Galician Bloc complained the loudest about restrictions on funding for free urban nets intended to tackle local "digital divides."  This issue has been hot in Spain at least since 2004, when the telecom market commission ordered Barcelona and several other cities to stop funding their free Wi-Fi services because these were said to compete unfairly with commercial ISPs. However, a few months later, the European Commission approved the Spanish government's €138 million program for subsidizing broadband in rural and remote regions. Such policy divergences led to confusion and frustration, even among public officials.
"As long as Internet access is not considered a universal right but simply a market, we will face similar situations," Barcelona's Jaume Oliveras commented. Antonio Rojo, head of new technologies in Atarfe, concurred: "Internet is like the education sector, we have to make sure that a basic, public service is available to everyone." Despite its critics, Spain's telecom market commission seems only to be applying EU competition policy, though the underlying logic only came clear as more cases were decided. According to Eric Van Ginderachter, head of the telecom/media sector in the European Commission's Directorate of Competition, the appropriateness of state aid in a particular situation depends on the presence or absence of broadband and the degree of competition. Almost any type of state aid is OK where no broadband currently exists. But where there are at least two competing networks, specific local conditions must exist to justify state aid. Where only the incumbent telco or only slow/basic services are found, closer study is needed to determine what level of state aid is acceptable. Such study adds months to the process of gaining DG Competition approval. In the case of Spain, commercial wireless Internet is not exactly thriving. Five companies offer Wi-Fi access in public spaces: Telefónica, KubiWireless, Swisscom, Vodafone and Comunitel. But their prices are high and users must purchase payment cards instead of paying by adding charges to an existing account. As a result, the EFE news agency reports, no major Spanish city has more than 300 public Wi-Fi access points (compared to the European average of 700), and most have far fewer. Therefore, one can argue that the market for wireless access in Spain is so frail that state aid must be minimized. Or one can argue that the market is failing, so state aid is appropriate even where there is competition. That's the crux of the problem: Is the glass half-empty or half-full? Spain has been recovering from zombiocracy since "El Caudillo" (Francisco Franco) died in 1975, after 36 years in power. Today it has one of Europe's most vibrant "third sectors" of NGOs, social clubs and nonprofit organizations. It is one of the few countries with a Wi-Fi users association, and even before free city-funded Wi-Fi was nixed, community wireless nets run by volunteers had already sprouted in Madrid, Barcelona, Guada, Lavapies and the Canary Islands. These have not been hindered by the telecom market commission — if anything, they have benefitted, growing into spaces that would otherwise have been taken by state-aided networks. Martin Varsavsky (of FON fame) has said he wants to turn Spain into one big FON zone, starting with Málaga, where he donated 2,000 routers to create "the world's first fonero city." (FON was founded in Madrid in 2006.) Last May, a community network from Osana - Guifi.net - extended its reach across Catalonia and into Barcelona, offering free Internet to anyone in range of a member's router. About 2,800 nodes are operating now, making it one of the fastest growing user-owned networks in Europe. The question of whether municipal wireless Internet access is a universal right or a private business is being debated now in many countries, but nowhere more intensely than in Spain. The answer in one place may not settle the question elsewhere, but it seems possible that the question will turn out not to be an either/or, at least in Spain: there the strength of the informal sector is such that urban nets might not need to be either a universal right or a private business. They can just be relations among neighbors.
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Comments
Robert Horvitz
An update: Mariano Rajoy, the Popular Party's candidate for the Spanish presidency, has promised to do alot more for public Wi-Fi if he is elected. According to <a href="http://www.lavanguardia.es/lv24h/20070918/53394593461.html">an article in <i>La Vanguardia</i></a> (18 September), he said that "not only all school buildings, government administrative centers, train stations and airports, but in 4 years all cities with more than 20,000 inhabitants will have open spaces where this technology is available."
09:30 AM, 09/19/2007
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