I was thinking of a way to celebrate One Web Day. A couple suggestions for a collaborative activity failed thunderously (lack of time and bad schedule), so I decided to go after a friend’s suggestion to put together a short note arguing why a government (in our case the Greek government) should invest/fund in FTTH infrastructure.
The interesting part is that there is this social collaboration platform called wikipolitics.gr. The guys at wikipolitics have created a topic called “100 days” that will gather citizens’ suggestions for the priorities of the government which will be elected in the coming elections and will distribute a summary by popularity/users preference. So I submitted the suggestion there and I look forward to see how collective participation will treat such an idea!
If you like it and wanna help visit this page and then click on the green arrow pointing up to give it a thumbs up!
Happy One Web Day!
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The government elect must quickly advance the construction of a public fiber open access network (FTTH) and expedite procedures accordingly to ensure Greek citizens’ open access to all electronic sources of knowledge, information, culture and innovation.
The issue whether and when to build an FTTH access network should be put in the correct perspective and the socio-economic impact of a national, open access FTTH infrastructure must be clearly identified (although measuring it can be much much harder). The problem here is not if we need the service or not, or if we should require a particular maximum speed to address the immediate/short-term needs of the end-users/citizens. The crucial pointis that other national economies have already developed, are developing or planning (in various mixes of public/private participation) for analogous fiber access networks. In the new global economy of knowledge and information where ever more (business and other types of) activities are being constantly replaced by their electronic alternatives, only the national economies equiped with integrated telecommunications infrastructure will be able to assume a leading role within the global electronic (yet also industrial) markets.
Optical access must be available throughout the entire Greek territory. Although this may not sound very feasible at first, long-term planning (oriented on the social dimensions of digital convergence) should include the gradual expansion of the network to all (more or less remote) areas of the country instead of simply serving the larger cities.
The feasibility study and sustainability assessment (at a national level) must not account only for the direct (albeit extremely important) benefits, for instance attracting immediate private investments or new jobs creation in an era of a significant economic downturn. Short-term benefits for the Greek economy pale before the medium to long term benefits stemming from a) the increasing international competitiveness of the country, b) the free access of the public to knowledge and information, c) the increased citizens’ participation, d) the innovation dynamics, and finally e) the true regional development that will reverse the stream of wealth towards the metropolitan centers and will attract new businesses and higher-paying jobs and occupations in the periphery etc.
There is absolutely no doubt that the development of FTTH infrastructure will play a key role in the development of the national economy compared to other initiatives aiming to channel money into consumer goods and imports without development impetus for the country. The FTTH infrastructure can synchronize with other projects (perhaps smaller in scale and targeting other sectors of the economy – not necessarily in ICT industry) that could promote new innovative models of sustainable (in economic, social and environmental terms) growth.
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