Pro-poor. Pro-market. Recommendation on Making



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Pro-poor. Pro-market.









Recommendation on Making

Broadband Affordable in Asia









Abu Saeed Khan

Senior Policy Fellow, LIRNEasia

January 2014

Please direct all correspondence to: abu[at]lirneasia[dot]net


Table of Contents


Table of Contents 2

1. Background 3

1.1 Preamble 3

1.2 Summary 3

2. Submarine cables 6

3. Internet gets centralized in Asia 14

4. Asia’s fragile Internet infrastructure 24

5. Why Asian Highway 30

5.6 TASIM – Trans-Eurasian Information Superhighway: 36

7. Consider beyond the highway 37

7.1 Rail and Power infrastructure: 37

7.2 TransTeleCom (TTK), Russia: 37

7.3 RailTel Corporation of India Ltd. 38

7.4 Power Grid Corporation of India Limited (PGCIL) 39

8. Policy recommendations for ITU 41

Endnotes 42


1. Background




1.1 Preamble

LIRNEasia is a pro-poor, pro-market think tank working across the Asia Pacific. Our mission is

 "Catalyzing policy change through research to improve people’s lives in the emerging Asia Pacific by facilitating their use of hard and soft infrastructures through the use of knowledge, information and technology.
The availability and affordability of high speed, reliable broadband services is vital to the economic development of countries. It is particularly vital for citizens of the emerging economies we work in. Our work has therefore focused on the availability of affordable and reliable band-width at all parts of the broadband value chain. In this report, we focus on our work on international internet bandwidth, a key bottleneck faced by emerging economies. We have been partnering with the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia Pacific (UN-ESCAP) on a possible solution to this problem.
We believe the initiative detailed in this report can form a vital part of ITUs mission to make ubiquitous and affordable broadband networks available across the world.


1.2 Summary

LIRNEasia’s research has detected that median wholesale Internet bandwidth in Asia is more than thrice expensive than Europe. As a result, although 60% of the global population lives in Asia; only 38% of them have access to the Internet while fewer can afford broadband. Unlike North America or Europe, the Asian countries are solely interconnected through submarine cables. The undersea cables are very expensive to deploy and maintain. They are also vulnerable to natural disasters, accidents and suspected sabotage.


Over-reliance on submarine networks, therefore, keeps Asia’s international bandwidth pricier. As a result, it hinders universal access to broadband. LIRNEasia believes a cross-border terrestrial networks, with open access, can bridge Asia’s digital inequality. And “Asian Highway” is the most suitable platform to achieve that goal.
Asian Highway was initiated by ESCAP in 1959 to promote the development of international road transport in the region. This 141,000-kilometers highway network of 32 Eurasian countries spans from Japan to Turkey.
Therefore, LIRNEasia has urged ESCAP to consider the construction of a fiber network along Asian Highway to make broadband sustainably affordable across the developing Asia. Adding redundancy and diversity to submarine cable networks is central to LIRNEasia’s proposal along with following broad objectives:

  • Fiber along the Asian Highway also inherently creates a domestic transmission network for every country. Therefore, it will reduce the cost of domestic backhaul, which has been also a barrier to Asian bandwidth markets.




  • Open access will be critical to the success of entire initiative. All the carriers’ access to this proposed telecoms infrastructure will drive national broadband initiatives through FTTx, 3G and 4G/LTE. Besides, the Asian carriers will solidify their position in cloud computing, which is increasingly becoming central to broadband.




  • Fiber along Asian Highway will cease the landlocked countries’ isolation from the mainstream of Internet. Asian Highway members like Indonesia and Philippines will be greatly benefitted from the reduced costs of IP transit at the major Asian hubs. Ripple effect of competition will immediately influence the satellite carriers and the small island developing states (SIDS) will have universal access to broadband.

As a result, ESCAP has decided to conduct in-depth studies on broadband infrastructure and connectivity across Asia. In early 2013, LIRNEasia has entered into a partnership with ESCAP to review and strengthen the latter’s policy recommendations. LIRNEasia is also assisting the ESCAP secretariat in developing well targeted and policy relevant briefs that lead to actionable recommendations aimed at senior policy makers.


ESCAP has been fostering the Asian Highway. All the members of this multi-country highway network are also by default the member states of the ITU. Therefore, LIRNEasia underscores the importance of partnership between ESCAP and ITU to materialize the concept of “Asia-Pacific Information Superhighway”. Because, this initiative truly captures the Broadband Commission’s spirit of “Policy Recommendations to Maximize the Impact of Broadband.”1
This document is the result of LIRNEasia’s engagement with ESCAP. It intends to highlight the problems pertaining to cross-border connectivity being the major cause of digital divide. Most importantly, it highlights the diminished functional differences between terrestrial and submarine cable networks in long-haul telecommunication applications.



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