Closing the connectivity gap in Asia

With the frantic pace of growth across Asia today, it is almost impossible to imagine that it was not so long ago that the region was devastated by world war. Back then few predicted the extraordinary economic rise of Asia and the equally extraordinary opportunities that growth is creating for business.

I recently delivered the 2016 “Weary” Dunlop Asialink Lecture in Sydney. It was an honour to speak at an event named after such a great Australian. Weary Dunlop was a true leader through some of the darkest times of the Second World War. And he was a leader in better times, after the war. His legacy includes fostering a deeper understanding of Australia’s place in the world, and especially our place in Asia.

Many people are familiar with Weary’s story but while preparing for the speech I came across a not so well-known story of another hero. Staff Sergeant Ted Cawthron was a radio mechanic with the Post Master General (PMG) – as Telstra was then – when the Second World War was declared in 1939 and he fought in the bitter guerrilla campaign against the Japanese in Timor.

He was captured there in February 1942 and ended up on the Thai-Burma railway alongside Weary Dunlop, and thousands of other Allied prisoners of war. The conditions were appalling and yet despite the knowledge he faced almost certain execution if discovered, he managed to build a short-wave radio receiver out of scavenged materials. The aerial was a short piece of copper wire hidden in a length of bamboo. He hid the radio beneath the false bottom of an old coffee tin and powered it with batteries smuggled in by friendly Thais.

While primitive, the radio meant Ted could tune in to some of the regular broadcasts of the day – including Radio Australia – and pick up news from the outside world. It is hard to imagine what being able to receive news from the outside world via Ted’s coffee tin radio would have meant to those men – but it would have been a lifeline for many. Ted Cawthron came back to work at the PMG when the war ended but sadly died a few years after being repatriated.

The thing that strikes me about people like Ted Cawthron and Weary Dunlop is that their achievements often combine an incredible strength of character, a personal commitment to helping others, and a real sense for the bigger picture. For Weary Dunlop in particular, what made him so extraordinary was his advocacy for international cooperation in the decades that followed the war, and his capacity for compassion and forgiveness. He saw the enormous potential in Asia and, in many ways, we now live in the world he imagined.

In little more than a generation Asia is a region transformed. Current estimates have the Asian middle class doubling to more than 1.2 billion households by 2030 (with China adding 330 million middle class households and India 170 million) as populations shift from subsistence living to people and families with serious discretionary spending power.

This social change has given rise to an extraordinary increase in the demand for connectivity. Of the 63 million new mobile subscriptions added across the world in the first quarter of 2016, four of the top five countries were in Asia and included India, Myanmar, Indonesia and Pakistan. Latest estimates indicate Asia Pacific will account for more than half of all smartphones to be sold between 2015 and 2021, with China alone adding 210 million new mobile subscribers in that time.

However, this predicted growth in connections does not mean that growth more broadly in the region is guaranteed. As the economies shift from agrarian to industrial and services, technology will become increasingly important.

As the middle class grows the access to cheap labour will diminish, meaning innovation, productivity and efficiency will become critical.

Telecommunications sits at the heart of this. There is virtually no technology innovation happening today that does not fundamentally rely on connection. Cloud computing, internet banking, autonomous driving, precision farming and thousands of other innovations are all clever technologies that all depend on connectivity.

The challenge for large parts of Asia is that, as the demand for connectivity grows, the capacity and technology of its networks keeps pace. In many regions of Asia there is no fixed line infrastructure and much of the mobile infrastructure is still 2G and 3G based, with little or no data transmission capacity. As more and more people in Asia today connect to the Internet for the very first time, many of them are doing so from a mobile device rather than from a desktop. In fact many people in Asia will probably never use a desktop.

The challenge is to close the gap between the demand for connectivity and the extent of the infrastructure that provides it. 4G is still relatively under penetrated in the region but the roll out is accelerating. As the next generation of 5G and Internet of Things technologies enter the market Asian countries, including South Korea, Japan and China, are expected to sit alongside Australia and the US as the predominant users by 2021. Asia is expected to have the most number of IoT connected devices, rising to more than 5 billion by 2021.

There may also be some options for cheaper and broader coverage in the future through technologies such as low orbital satellites, drones and even balloons – albeit unlikely to provide the data volumes and speeds we experience today. Nonetheless they are interesting areas of research and could have an important role to play.

Telstra understands the opportunity and challenge of the explosion in demand for data and bandwidth. Our focus is on providing enterprise services – cloud computing, managed security and unified communications and the underpinning international connectivity across the region through our submarine cable network.

We already provide much of the infrastructure that underpins Asia’s connectivity within the region and to the rest of the world, particularly Australia, so we are witnessing it firsthand. 

Our network reach means we are playing a direct role in the rapid growth of digital technology in the region, and helping to provide Australian businesses their own growth opportunities. 

One of the many tributes paid to Weary Dunlop when he died in July 1993 was from a fellow POW and former Australian Federal Parliamentarian Tom Uren. Tom said that Weary continued to grow as a human being all his life. It was comment that called out his openness to change and his incredible eye to the future, and to Asia. For all of us with an eye to the future, and to Asia, his ideas are just as relevant today as they ever were.