[Chapter-delegates] Digital Adoption in 2018

[Dave Burstein]

Glenn

No disrespect, but there's a missing question in the survey.


How do you make sure the program works?

I wish it weren't so, but nearly all "digital inclusion" programs in the
$7B U.S. broadband stimulus failed except those that brought down the
price. (Pointers to programs with solid evidence of results welcome.)

I only know the U.S. data but I would expect similar many other places.
Reliance Jio brought the cost of a smartphone data plan under $3/month and
>100M Indians have signed up

By now, almost every literate person knows about the Internet. You can't
get a date in many communities if you don't have Facebook. Almost everyone
has friends and families. Indians working on remote farms do use
their phones to get news. Think how ubiquitous SMS'ing is in schools, even
in less affluent areas. WeChat is replacing that.

The data on (non-) results was very clear when you looked. Some were
poverty pimps, but most were idealistic people hoping to do good work. Like
all of us, their confirmation bias made it hard for them to see their
failure. The U.S. spent $100's of millions on "promoting broadband
adoption." The results were invisible in the broadband data. I looked at a
dozen programs more closely and none of them had good evidence they had
worked.*

If Digital Literacy programs taught people how to tell when the government
is lying, that would be a justification. But they shouldn't be promoted for
bringing more people online unless there's good evidence they work.

   Comcast's $10 for poor families with kids has hundreds of thousands of
signups, showing the power of low prices for many. Almost certainly that
program has connected more people than ten years promoting "broadband
adoption."
There are now something like 10M Americans now connected on smartphones who
weren't connected at home. Many of them are in the "Lifeline" phone plan
they want to cut back. ISOC should be active on that one. With what we
spend on D.C. advocacy, we could have an impact.

The failure of the adoption programs should have been easy to predict. The
telcos spent $tens of millions promoting broadband but discovered it didn't
have results. They shifted their advertising to product features "Cable
faster than DSL") because they couldn't find a way to make promotion work.

In 15 years reporting broadband adoption, I haven't been finding programs
that work. I've also asked the experts for any examples and they have
almost none in the U.S. (I don't have evidence outside the U.S.) Verizon
now charges > $70 for their cheapest FiOS connection. Nearly a thousand
dollars a year is a lot to many people, myself included.

    I'd welcome pointers from anyone to programs with solid evidence they
work. I asked some community network folks a similar question and found
some.

    Implicit in the survey summary was an assumption more effort should be
put into adoption programs. I hear similar in ISOC and other advocacy
groups.

    I think we should back off on promoting projects unless/until we find
some that work.

    Again, I'd much rather be proved wrong on the value here.

Dave

* Several programs gave results estimated by the amount they spent or how
many people might have listened to a radio program. They found some figure
somewhere for how many people would connect per dollar spent and
multiplied. The program was run by a good guy who was also a master cya
bureaucrat who encouraged this. The California program was so bad they
should have been investigated for fraud.



Editor, http://Fastnet.news http://wirelessone.news gfastnews.com
Author with Jennie Bourne  DSL (Wiley) and Web Video: Making It Great,
Getting It Noticed (Peachpit)

On Fri, May 11, 2018 at 5:48 AM, Prateek Pathak <pathakprateek28 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Great work,Glenn!
>
> On Wed, 9 May 2018, 18:21 Glenn McKnight, <mcknight.glenn at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> This is a survey by NTEN of Non Profits in the US
>> I converted it to a Ebook
>> http://online.fliphtml5.com/gnel/wvdl/
>>
>> Glenn McKnight
>> NARALO Secretariat
>> mcknight.glenn at gmail.com
>> skype  gmcknight
>> twitter gmcknight
>> 289-830 6259
>> .
>> _______________________________________________
>> As an Internet Society Chapter Officer you are automatically subscribed
>> to this list, which is regularly synchronized with the Internet Society
>> Chapter Portal (AMS): https://portal.isoc.org
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> As an Internet Society Chapter Officer you are automatically subscribed
> to this list, which is regularly synchronized with the Internet Society
> Chapter Portal (AMS): https://portal.isoc.org
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/private/chapter-delegates/attachments/20180511/ab9725c6/attachment.htm>