Tag: Airband Initiative

Today, as the US-Africa Leaders Summit is underway in Washington DC, Microsoft is announcing new plans to deepen our work and scale our commitments to providing digital connectivity and skills building in Africa.

First, we are expanding our Airband Initiative through new partnerships with local and global providers to bring internet access to 100 million Africans by the end of 2025. This includes a new global partnership with satellite provider Viasat that will allow us to quickly scale and reach new markets. This is part of a broader global ambition for Airband to bring internet access to a quarter of a billion people around the world by the end of 2025.

Second, as access to the internet grows, so does the need for cybersecurity experts to defend the growing ecosystem of providers and users. We will support this by expanding our Skills for Jobs efforts in Africa to include a new cybersecurity skilling program.

A growing continent: Africa’s opportunity and challenge

The opportunity for Africa is extraordinary – the continent is emerging as one of the most important markets in the world, with the fastest growing population, projected to grow from 1.4 billion to almost 1.7 billion by 2030. It’s the youngest continent in the world with a median age of under 20 and 60% of the population under the age of 25. But to harness this potential and drive innovative, inclusive and sustainable growth, it will be critical to help Africa close its digital divide.

Today, only 40% of the African continent is online, and nearly 600 million lack access to electricity, significant barriers to realizing digital transformation and hindering growth. We believe access to internet is a fundamental right and we’ve been working to help deliver internet access to all through our Airband initiative, in close cooperation with governments, local communications providers, international aid organizations and nonprofits. And we’ve seen results – globally, we’ve helped provide access to more than 51 million people including 9 million in Africa. Through Airband, Microsoft has been providing the technology know-how, seed funding and a proven business model to engage with partners, and with today’s announcement we will scale this ambition even further.

Airband: Scaling broadband access through partnerships

Our work to expand Airband will begin immediately, through a new collaboration with global communications company Viasat, where, for the first time, we will use satellite to reach remote areas that previously have had few, if any, options for conventional connectivity. This new partnership builds on our approach to use every technology available to deliver connectivity based on what is best suited for a particular community whether that is fixed wireless, TV white spaces, fiber optics or Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS).

Partnerships are foundational to the success of Airband and, by working with Viasat, we will extend internet access to 10 million people globally, half of that in Africa. We will deepen our work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria and prioritize bringing Airband to new places in Africa including Egypt, Senegal, and Angola to deliver much-needed connections, often for the first time.

Africa is a vast and diverse continent, and a solution that is suitable for connecting customers in one location might not work at all in another. Airband works through local and regional partnerships to think holistically about what solutions work best. For example, electricity is frequently unavailable, insufficient or unreliable in many parts of Africa. To address this, we are partnering with sustainable energy access providers like M-KOPA, paired with local ISP Mawingu networks to offer solutions that address energy and internet connectivity challenges in Kenya.  And in Ghana, we partnered with international ISP Bluetown to take a multi-technology approach – choosing fiber, microwave, satellite and TV white space (TVWS) to deliver solutions that meet local needs and take into consideration a community’s access to reliable power, proximity to a fiber connection, and geography such as hills or dense forest. Each solution is unique depending on a community and its environment.

Through Airband, we bring together an ecosystem of public and private organizations, including middle mile broadband providers, local ISPs for last-mile connectivity, energy partners, and organizations like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), that provides support, including for skilling work delivered through non-profits, so we can design and implement a local model in partnership with local governments.

Broadband is just the beginning

Beyond solving for internet access, as Africa increasingly connects to the internet, its citizens will also need to defend its growing digital ecosystem and protect new users. To help the continent’s digital capabilities continue to grow, we’ll help with needed cybersecurity skills. Microsoft will offer free access to LinkedIn cybersecurity courses as part of our Skills for Jobs program. This includes a new, free Career Essentials Certificate in Systems Administration from Microsoft and LinkedIn and multiple Microsoft courses in advanced cybersecurity. In addition, working with our nonprofit partners, Microsoft will provide 12 months of LinkedIn premium access for the first 10,000 African learners that complete a Career Essentials Certificate in Systems Administration, helping them connect to jobs in the cybersecurity field.

Microsoft has upskilled more than 4 million young people across Africa over the past five years through various skilling and employability programs including our Skills for Jobs program, which helped more than 1.5 million young people and jobs seekers in Africa over the past two years. We work with governments, nonprofits and international organizations as well, including the African Development Bank (AfDB) on the Coding for Employment program. And our government partnerships include our work on the Tawar w Ghayar (Develop and Change) initiative with the Egyptian government that has upskilled over 2 million young people, and our partnership with the Nigerian government that aims to reach up to 5 million across the country.

What’s next

Microsoft has been present in Africa for more than 30 years and, today, we have more than 21,000 partners and 12 offices across the continent. We also established the Africa Transformation Office, which partners with public and private organizations working across sectors, technologies and borders to foster partnerships and develop solutions that will have a lasting impact. With today’s announcement, we’re increasing our investments to help people and governments across Africa in enabling transformation and economic prosperity.

This is just the beginning of the next chapter.

We often say that you can’t fix a problem you don’t understand. Today, Microsoft is releasing a new Digital Equity Data Dashboard to help create better understanding of the economic opportunity gaps in towns, cities and neighborhoods across the United States. The new tool was developed by our Chief Data Science Officer Juan Lavista Ferres and the Microsoft AI for Good Lab, and aggregates public data from the Census Bureau, Federal Communications Commission (FCC), BroadbandNow and Microsoft’s own Broadband Usage Data. It goes census tract-by-census tract, examining 20 different indicators of digital equity – such as broadband access, usage, education and poverty rates – to create one of the most complete pictures of digital equity in these areas to date.

Access the dashboard here

Digital equity – access to affordable internet, affordable devices and digital skills – is a foundation for empowerment, digital transformation and economic opportunity. With states looking to drive historic investments in digital opportunity thanks to the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program, the Digital Equity Act and more, it’s clear we can no longer just consider the immediate lens of broadband availability as a major indicator of opportunity. The pandemic made clear that being digitally connected – either through broadband or mobile internet – is a fundamental necessity for every citizen, and not just for school and work. The last two years has acted as an accelerant, driving essential activities online, from everyday businesses and services, such as banking and telehealth, to simply ordering food at a restaurant.

The dashboard was created with the best data possible as a resource to assist policymakers in identifying key places and communities within their state so they can direct funding and programmatic investments. Take Ferry County, Washington, for example, where the FCC claims that only 0.4% of households lack access to broadband, which by itself provides a bright view of the county’s digital opportunity. But our dashboard shows that 97% of the county aren’t using the internet at broadband speeds. Furthermore, more than a third of households don’t have a desktop or laptop to use the broadband available to them.

The dashboard also confirms what we have long known: the digital divide isn’t just felt in rural areas – it also deeply impacts cities. In Los Angeles County, where we’re working with partner Starry to expand access to affordable broadband, more than a quarter of residents aren’t using the internet at broadband speeds, and roughly one in five households lacks a desktop or laptop computer, cutting off millions from the digital world.

The dashboard offers the opportunity to examine a city neighborhood-by-neighborhood, helping identify which areas most urgently need digital equity investments. Take my old neighborhood of Lindsay Heights in Milwaukee, Wis., for example, where as much as 65%, almost two-thirds, of households don’t have a desktop or laptop, and more than 50% don’t have a broadband subscription. Yet, just to the southeast, only 14% of households don’t have a desktop or laptop and 16% don’t have a broadband connection, a huge difference in just a few miles. By analyzing and illustrating the data at this deep level, lawmakers can now better identify where to focus time and resources to close these inequity gaps.

At Microsoft, we know technology can change lives, but only if it is available, accessible and affordable. Studies have repeatedly shown that investing in broadband infrastructure results in significant social returns, from new business formation rates to lower unemployment rates. We hope that this dashboard will empower the policymakers to implement programs that foster sustainable and inclusive economic opportunity and deliver on this fundamental need to close the digital divide. It is vital that states use the best data available to make targeted investments that translate into true long-term progress, otherwise more and more people will be left on the wrong side of the digital tracks.

Tags: COVID-19, digital access, digital inequity, Digital Inequity Dashboard, rural broadband, US government

Last year, a team of Amish-owned horses dragged a load up a ridge near Essex, New York. It was a normal scene for rural America – straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting – except that they were bearing telecommunications equipment to connect the local community to the internet.  

Essex is barely 12 miles across the lake from Burlington, Vermont, but broadband is scarce. In our increasingly digital and interconnected world, broadband is as important as electricity or water. Rural communities without broadband face higher unemployment rates and see fewer educational and economic opportunities. For the woman overseeing the horses, Beth Schiller, CEO of CvWireless LLC, this is a solvable problem. Together with Microsoft’s Airband Initiative, she’s bringing connectivity to her community. 

In the summer of 2017, we launched the Microsoft Airband Initiative, which brings broadband connectivity to people living in underserved rural areas. To eliminate the rural broadband gap, we bring together private–sector capital investment in new technologies and rural broadband deployments with public–sector financial and regulatory support. We set an ambitious goal: to provide access to broadband to three million people in unserved rural areas of the United States by July 4, 2022. At two and a half years since launch, we are at the halfway point of the time we gave ourselves to meet this goal and we feel good about the steady progress we’ve made and how much we have learned. But one thing we have learned is that the problem is even bigger than we imagined. 

The broadband gap is wide but solvable 

Beth’s horse-borne approach to connectivity may be unique, but the problem is not: According to the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) 2019 broadband report, more than 21 million people in America, nearly 17 million of whom live in rural communities, don’t have access to broadband.  

A recent study by BroadbandNow found that the number of unserved people is nearly double the current reported amount and more than 42 million Americans do not have access to broadband –especially in rural areas. Our own data shows that some 157.3 million people in the U.S. do not use the internet at broadband speeds. And while we are making progress and the reported number is down by six million people from last year, that’s still more than the populations of our eight biggest states – California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio and Georgia – combined. More must be done. 

As we’ve said from the start of the initiative, without accurate data we cannot fully understand the broadband gap. You cannot solve a problem you don’t understand. More accurate data will help deploy broadband in the places its needed. Because the government makes many funding decisions based on federal data, communities that lack broadband – but, according to FCC data, have access to broadband – have less access to resources needed to actually secure broadband connectivity. This is certainly a Catch-22, but it can be solved. We’re encouraged that the FCC has adopted new policies that should result in broadband providers reporting more accurate data and that Congress has worked on legislation to improve the FCC’s broadband data. It’s imperative that these policy changes are quickly and fully implemented so that people without broadband will get access to it.  

Steady progress to close the broadband gap

But the country can’t wait on perfect data. We’re moving full steam ahead in the areas where we know we can help and making steady progress against our 3-million-person goal. We’re now in 25 states and one territory, and staging pilot programs in two additional states. We’ve already reached a total of 633,000 previously unserved people, up from 24,000 people in 2018, and as our partners’ network deployments accelerate over the coming months, we will be reaching many more.

We haven’t made this progress alone. We have made it through building partnerships throughout the United States, learning more about local solutions that will close the broadband gap. Partners such as Wisper Internet will work to bring broadband access to almost 1 million people in rural unserved areas in Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma. In Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, our partner Watch Communications will bring high-speed internet access to more than 860,000 people living in unserved rural areas. Our partnerships also bring connectivity to historically underserved communities, including those residing on tribal lands. Sacred Wind Communications will help approximately 47,000 people on and off Navajo lands in New Mexico reap the benefits that come with access to the internet. Moreover, we have forged strategic partnerships with American Tower Corporation, Tilson, and Zayo Group over the last year that will further bring down the end-to-end network deployment costs for rural ISPs. We have also established a broad-based Airband ISP Program that provides ISPs in 47 states plus Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico with access to critical assets, helping them connect rural communities.

There’s good news about the cost of connectivity. The price of TV white spaces devices (TVWS) – a new connectivity technology that’s particularly useful in rural areas where laying cable simply isn’t an option – continues to drop. In the last year, the cost of customer equipment has plummeted by 50%, all while achievable speeds have increased tenfold.

At the same time, we’re pleased to see our partners in government make important, steady progress to enable these new technologies. We applaud Chairman Pai and the FCC for their vote last week to propose positive and necessary changes to TVWS regulations. Reducing red tape will enable ISPs to accelerate their progress in rural broadband deployment and help bridge the digital divide in rural America. We are also pleased that the FCC has announced plans to make up to $20 billion available in Rural Digital Opportunity funding to help ISPs bring high-speed broadband access to high-cost unserved rural areas. At the state level, we’re pleased that several state governments have created their own funding programs to support new broadband infrastructure, including Illinois, Indiana, Virginia and South Dakota.

What comes after connectivity?

As we’ve connected communities across the country, we’ve kept asking ourselves a central, key question: What comes after connectivity?

Broadband connections aren’t a panacea for all that ails rural America. Simply plugging in an ethernet cable doesn’t create jobs, increase farmers’ yields or provide a veteran with healthcare. Rural communities need resources beyond infrastructure to rebuild and lift themselves up. That’s why much of our work goes well beyond connectivity.

From education, agriculture, veterans to healthcare, we are working with local and national organizations to take the next step. For example, we are partnering with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to support their telehealth initiative. We are working with Airband partners to offer discounted broadband service to veterans as well as provide vital digital skills and employability training. Our work on Airband is enabling other Microsoft efforts – such as our TechSpark program, digital skills initiatives and even environmental sustainability – to flourish in areas we’d never be able to reach otherwise.

Take for example, agriculture. The family farm is the embodiment of rural America. Unfortunately, many American farmers have struggled in recent years, whether because of policy, extreme weather events and climate change, or falling crop prices. Farmers need help, and many have turned to new technologies to compete in the global marketplace. Our FarmBeats platform is one such technology that can give farmers a real-time view of their land using ground-based sensors and “internet of things” technology to track everything from soil temperature to pH levels to moisture data. This can create a modern “Farmers’ Almanac” to chart out the farm’s future, helping farmers predict what they should plant and where, increase yields, better utilize fertilizer and irrigate more efficiently. But a farm that lacks access to high-speed internet will be left in the past, unable to use these new technologies. That’s where Airband comes in: connecting rural communities to transformative technologies.

The effort to electrify rural America in the 1930s enabled new technologies to transform those areas, empowering farms, ranches and other rural places and improving quality of life and economic opportunity. Now, nearly 90 years later, broadband can similarly provide the infrastructure to lift up rural America, but we’re losing the race against time. While our investments and those of our partners are taking seed and we are beginning to see advances, technological progress doesn’t wait. If we don’t move faster, rural America will be left further behind. We can’t let that happen.

Tags: Airband initiative, broadband access, rural broadband

Last year, the world reached a major modern milestone – as of 2018, half of the world’s population is online with some form of internet connection. The bad news is that, despite this progress, this status quo still puts billions of people on the wrong side of the digital divide. Leaving half the world without access to the electricity of today’s age – internet access, and increasingly at broadband speeds – means that existing inequalities, poverty and insecurity will persist, worsen and become increasingly difficult to address.

Efforts to accelerate internet access globally, with a focus on developing nations, are not new. But it’s clear that the world needs a new approach to this work. The UN State of Broadband Report found that broadband adoption has slowed, and progress is especially elusive in low-income countries and rural areas across the globe. Most of the connected population relies on low speed, basic cellular services and only 14.1% of the global population has an in-home internet subscription.

That is why Microsoft is reaffirming our commitment to global connectivity today at the Devex Conference on International Finance. Through the new international track of the Airband Initiative, our goal is to extend internet access to 40 million unserved and underserved people around the globe by July 2022. We’ll concentrate our efforts to areas with significant underserved populations – initially, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa – that also have regulatory interest in solving connectivity issues. Extending internet access to 40 million people around the world in the span of three years is a big task – but it’s informed by our ongoing work in connectivity, experience with partners and engagement from development finance institutions.

In the past, we’ve done this work on a project-by-project basis spanning across Africa, Latin America and Asia. In the U.S., we formalized our connectivity work in 2017 by launching the Airband Initiative, with the goal of bringing broadband connectivity to 3 million people in rural America by July 2022, and today marks the formalization of the international work within the Initiative.

How the program will work

Like our work in the U.S., our goal is to empower local partners who know their communities’ geographies and needs to solve their community’s last mile connectivity challenges. Experience has taught us that diverse challenges require diverse solutions. What works in one part of South Africa may not be a fit for Ghana. A wireless technology or a business model that is suitable for connecting customers in one location might not be suitable for connecting customers in another location. Bringing broadband access to the world’s unserved communities will require much greater reliance on innovative technologies, regulatory approaches and business models. Our experience has shown us that a multi-stakeholder approach is needed to close the connectivity gap. While we might go faster alone, we go much farther together. For this reason, these programs seek to combine our and our partners’ expertise and assets.

Airband International will rely on a four-part approach:

• Removing regulatory obstacles to TV White Space (TVWS) and other technologies that help our partners extend their networks quickly in unserved, predominantly rural, areas.
• Partnering with local internet service providers (ISPs) to provide affordable, reliable internet services.
• Enabling rural digital transformation in newly connected areas, with a focus on supporting agriculture, education, rural entrepreneurship and telemedicine, as well as off-grid energy sources where necessary in order to improve rural productivity and livelihood.
• Building a larger ecosystem of support, with a focus on stimulating international financing, to scale connectivity projects beyond our own direct investments.

Early signs of success

We know that new technologies like TVWS can be incredibly useful in meeting rural connectivity needs at an affordable price. However, regulatory frameworks in many parts of the world have not kept pace with innovation. We’ve seen great progress from engagements to date. In Colombia, as we started our work to create a long-term solution for the Meta region, we sat down with the national spectrum regulator to understand the region’s needs, existing regulations and to determine any gaps. In Ghana, we partnered with government officials to ensure strong regulations were in place to deploy long-term solutions such as TVWS.

Once these hurdles are removed, partners around the world are poised to move quickly and deliver big results. BLUETOWN is a connectivity and digital content service provider committed to making broadband connectivity more accessible. With regulations in Ghana now permitting access to the TVWS, BLUETOWN is on a path to bring affordable broadband access to over 800,000 people living in the rural eastern part of Ghana who were previously underserved.

These large-scale gains in connectivity are not limited to smaller countries, nor does it stop at connectivity alone. In Colombia, with coffee company Lavazza, ALO partners, Makaia and Microsoft’s support, a small project connected two schools and five farms to broadband via TVWS technology – perfect technology for the region’s jungled and mountainous terrain. It has continued to grow, and now includes an agreement between Lavazza, Microsoft and the National Coffee Growers Association of Colombia that will result in the rural digital transformation for half a million small coffee farmers in the region. Additionally, Airband has co-invested with ISPs in Colombia to extend broadband access to 6 million rural Colombians – that’s 12% of Colombia’s total population.

This work was accelerated by a partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Additional financing is critical to bring these from small projects to scale. The partners invited IDB to join, and this support has helped create results and a blueprint that can be showcased in other countries of the region to accelerate this work.

Looking forward

To close the digital divide once and for all, we need to act to connect the world quickly. This will require the engagement of companies like Microsoft, but importantly, the financial support of international financing organizations around the world. Internet connectivity and technology infrastructure has made up a very small percentage of development bank funding historically, and that will need to change to bring connectivity to the more than three billion people around the globe who lack access to some form of internet connection. To help tackle these challenges, international financing organizations also need to be willing to make bets on local entrepreneurs deploying innovative new technologies and business models better suited to reaching the remaining unconnected communities.

Through our work and our engagement, we hope to not just connect people, but provide a blueprint for other public and private sector entities to think about connectivity as a core part of their investments in health, gender equity, water, energy or any other core area of sustainable development.

There are too many things that divide us in the world today. The internet can bring us closer together, foster new understandings and connections and remove structural barriers to opportunity and equality. Airband International is focused on doing just that, and we hope that you’ll add your support to these efforts as we move forward.

Tags: Airband initiative, broadband access, international

Today, internet access is as essential as electricity. It empowers entrepreneurs to start and grow small businesses, farmers to implement precision agriculture, doctors to improve community health and students to do better in school. But almost half the world’s population is still not online, often because they live in underserved areas, and therefore miss out on opportunities to take advantage of and become part of the digital economy. As a global technology company, we believe we have a responsibility and a great opportunity to help close this gap.

That’s why we’re excited to announce the eight early-stage companies selected for our third annual Airband Grant Fund. These start-ups are overcoming barriers to provide affordable internet access to unconnected and underserved communities in the U.S., Africa and Asia using TV white spaces (TVWS) and other promising last-mile access technologies. Our grant fund will provide financing, technology, mentorship, networking opportunities and other support to help scale these start-ups’ innovative new technologies, services and business models. The Airband Grant Fund is part of the Microsoft Airband Initiative, launched last year to extend broadband access across the United States and, ultimately, connectivity around the globe.

We are excited to partner with this year’s cohort of Airband grantees, which include:

These companies are improving life for some of the most underserved communities here in the U.S. and around the world. For example, approximately 35 percent of people living on tribal lands in the U.S. lack broadband. Tribal Digital Village wants to change that. With support from our Airband Grant Fund, they will use TVWS – vacant broadcast spectrum that enables internet connections in challenging rural terrain – and other technologies to deploy broadband to tribal homes on 20 isolated reservations in Southern California. “We realized that without access to the internet, tribal students weren’t going to have access to advanced opportunities that other kids had,” said Matt Rantanen, director of technology for Tribal Digital Village. “But there was no infrastructure on tribal land and no telecommunications companies wanted to work with us to build it out. So we had to build it ourselves.”

ColdHubs is another organization finding innovative ways to tackle the broadband access challenge. In Owerri, Nigeria, ColdHubs is transforming their refrigerated crop storage rooms into Wi-Fi hot spots using TVWS technology. The company aims to empower smallholder farmers with the ability to earn better livelihoods. Their solar-powered crop storage facilities help reduce food spoilage, which causes 470 million smallholder farmers to lose 25 percent of their annual income. Farmers who use ColdHubs can extend the freshness of their fruits and vegetables from two to about 21 days, reducing post-harvest loss by 80 percent. By turning these facilities into Wi-Fi “Farm Connect Centers,” ColdHubs will enable farmers to get online and access agricultural training, resources to improve crop yields and marketing and digital skills training.

Whether in the U.S. or around the world, we believe in nurturing innovative solutions by supporting local companies and entrepreneurs. We are eager to work in close partnership with these Airband Grant Fund recipients over the next year to refine and expand the reach of their solutions. And in the coming months, we’ll have more to share on the exciting progress we’re making on our Airband Initiative, and our goal to deliver broadband to 2 million rural Americans by 2022, and to extend connectivity to underserved communities around the world. Learn more about the Airband Grant Fund recipients here.

Tags: Airband Grant Fund, Airband initiative