International Internet connectivity or the lack thereof is contributing to a v ast a digital divide among members of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).
Preliminary research published by consultancy Terabit at CommunicAsia on Tuesday revealed that top-ranked Singapore enjoyed 3 Tbps of international bandwidth at the end of 2014, while bottom-ranked Laos had just 13 Gbps.
"There is a huge difference between the bandwidth-haves and have-nots," said Michael Ruddy, director of international research at Terabit.
Completing the top three are Thailand and the Philippines, which each have international capacity in excess of 1 Tbps, while completing the bottom three are Cambodia and Myanmar, which have 22 Gbps and 32 Gbps respectively.
Singapore also comes top in terms of capacity per capita, with 555.6 Kbps, more than 900 times more than Myanmar, which comes bottom with 0.6 Kbps.
This impacts on retail prices, Ruddy said. In Singapore, the annual cost, including installation, of a 1 Mbps Internet service as a proportion of annual GDP per capita is 0.1%. In Myanmar, it is 132.8%.
"There is a very small proportion of people who can afford broadband in those countries," like Myanmar, said Ruddy.
In addition, limited international connectivity is a "major obstacle to economic and human development," he warned.
The UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) has launched an initiative tasked with narrowing the digital divide by improving the underlying Internet infrastructure in the region. Called the Asia-Pacific Information Superhighway (AP-IS), it aims to bring regional governments together for the purpose of building new cable systems linking their countries with one another and other parts of the world.
Ruddy said ESCAP should focus on improving terrestrial links in Asia-Pacific, and deploy networks along existing infrastructure routes, such as energy distribution and road networks, to keep a lid on costs.
Even well-connected c ountries like Singapore would benefit from new cable routes, he noted, because they would add redundancy and avoid submarine cable bottlenecks in the Straits of Malacca and the Suez Canal, among others.
With improved infrastructure, there is a chance that new connectivity hubs will emerge and challenge long-established hubs like Singapore and Hong Kong – provided other favourable conditions are in place.
"It will take time but new hubs will naturally emerge," predicted Karlos Katsuya, head of telecom, media and technology for Asia at the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a unit of the World Bank that deals exclusively with private companies in developing markets.
However, "to become a hub you need the right regulatory framework, and other important elements like power supply and workforce," he said. "It’s a combination of factors."
