Digital Divide in Asia:

The Asia-Pacific broadband market boasted 158 million broadband subscriptions in 2008 and research firm Strategy Analytics says that it will grow an additional 21 percent this year. The firm predicts broadband subscriptions for this region will surpass 394 million by 2013. Another research firm, Forrester, predicts double-digit growth rates in Asia while forecasting the global online population to hit 2.2 billion by 2013. In its report "Global Online Population Forecast, 2008-2013," the research identifies Asia as the largest global Internet growth engine and says that 17 percent of the global online population will be in China by 2013. Forrester Research attributes this immense growth to an increase in online population and more spending capacity among Asian consumers. China's online population is currently the biggest in the world and will continue its spectacular growth, rising by around 11 percent each year over the next five years. India, Indonesia, Pakistan and the Philippines will also experience significant online growth in the coming years.

However, not all regions enjoy high-speed Internet access and some areas still have to deal with slow connections that affect their work and personal lives. ITU's 2008 Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Report for the Asia-Pacific region clearly shows the digital divide in the region. While consumers in some Asia-Pacific economies enjoy ultra high-speed broadband access, some of the region's poorer countries have to deal with low-speed and limited Internet access. These issues have to be addressed by service providers, as research has proven that ICTs and broadband uptake facilitate the growth and development of those regions. ITU World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators database shows that most of the Asia-Pacific's low and lower-middle income economies are only offered expensive high-speed Internet access that is typically limited to urban areas. People complaining about the high costs will not do so if they come to know that Internet access is often not available in poor economies. It may be surprising, but the minimum advertised broadband speed in Japan, Korea and Hong Kong is faster than the maximum broadband speed in Bangladesh, Cambodia and Tonga. An OECD report notes that Japan and Korea offer the fastest broadband among the OECD countries. At 1 million Mbps, Japan has the fastest advertised fiber speeds followed by Korea at 100,000 Mbps. However, the Internet, which touches so many people's lives, is still unavailable to people living in some mountainous regions and remote islands. Service providers are not very keen on serving sparsely populated regions with difficult terrains, as the fixed cost of providing broadband access is often too high for these regions. They are also challenged by the limited demand that ultimately decrease the profitability of the venture.

The speed of the Internet becomes extremely slow whenever Asia is hit by typhoons. In August, Typhoon Morakot hit Taiwan, resulting in very slow Internet speeds across Taiwan, China and Hong Kong. The typhoon also impacted certain parts of Southeast Asia, including Singapore and the Philippines. News from asia.cnet indicates that this disaster damaged as many as six of the important undersea fiber-optic cables as it passed Taiwan.

Under these trying circumstances, the service providers try to restore services to the customers by using backup systems and other cables, but still have to face clients' genuine complaints. These slow speeds cause havoc in the life of people who are heavily dependent on the Internet for connecting to clients on a daily basis. People recovering from the aftereffects of the typhoon were in for a rude shock when Taiwan was shaken by an earthquake, which measured 6.5 on the Richter scale. As a result of this quake, users were unable to access many foreign websites from Hong Kong and China and battled with very slow bandwidth speeds. People complained that they were also not able to chat using MSN and Yahoo during this period.

Governments and organizations seem to realize the importance of improving Internet speeds for Asian countries. A new 20,000 km undersea fiber optic cable has been rolled out to connect a number of countries and remote islands including Malaysia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei and Vietnam. This cable was built for a whopping US$550 million with the aim of providing higher data throughput to Internet users in Asia and the United States. This new Asia-America Gateway (AAG) will soon become operational and allow regional carriers to deliver quality communications throughout Asia. The carriers also hope to leverage the Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technologies to deliver video and other multimedia services across the Internet.

Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) is also a member of the consortium that built this network, according to BusinessMirror. The island nation will greatly benefit from the construction of AAG and will use it for regional and trans-Pacific connectivity. This will also give a boost to the country's e-commerce, which has boomed with outsourcing activities. The growth of BPO's across the country has resulted in an increase in the need for bandwidth and it has thus decided to invest in infrastructure that addresses these burgeoning needs. PLDT said they will use this cable facility for broadband applications (data, video, IP and other multimedia services) and enhanced international connectivity. What makes AAG unique is its ability to provide protection from natural disasters such as earthquakes that result in highly inconvenient service interruptions to broadband services. In order to boost the nation's economic development, PLDT is also planning an 8,000 km long international undersea cable system within the Asia-Pacific Region that will link Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Taiwan, China, Japan and Korea. The proposed cable system will be ready for service in 2011 and will serve as an alternative route to existing cable systems in the region.

More efforts are underway to increase Internet speeds across Asia. Last year, Japan announced the launch of a satellite to provide Internet access when terrestrial infrastructure fails due to natural disasters or other issues. According to news from AFP, Japan developed this high-speed Internet communications satellite and expects it to be in use for five years. The nation has spent around US$342 million on this device in the hope it will deliver super-high speed data communications of up to 1.2 Gbps. It seems the nation acted on previous disasters that affected the Internet infrastructure of Asian countries. While commenting on the launch, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) explained that this satellite will also be used to serve customers in remote or mountainous areas. Other nations like Bangladesh are also making efforts to improve Internet speeds in the country. Recently, Grameen CyberNet, a major Internet service provider in the nation, collaborated with Ericsson to install a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network to provide advanced broadband services to its customers. The network is leveraging Ericsson's GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) solution and was seen as a milestone in the evolution of broadband services in Bangladesh. Ghulam Mohiuddin, managing director of Grameen CyberNet, said they decided on the move to offer high-quality, feature-rich broadband services to the home.

The European Union is also pitching in to reduce the digital divide across the Asia-Pacific and invested US$25 million this year in a new TEIN3 high-speed research and education data-communications network in Vietnam. An initiative of the European Union and Asian partners, this investment will support collaboration between research centers, educators and students across the region and the globe. These people will leverage the high-speed broadband network for the fields of telemedicine, e-learning, disaster warning, crop research and other areas benefitting society. TEIN (Trans-Eurasia Information Network) is focused on creating a large-scale research and education network for the Asia-Pacific region. David West, TEIN3 project manager, said in a statement to the press that this launch marks the opening of a major new chapter in research networking across the Asia-Pacific region. He expects the new network will connect more countries at higher speeds and deliver faster collaboration that benefits both researchers and society.

In July, delegates including policy makers, regulators, academia and the private sector assembled to discuss the importance of broadband in bridging the digital divide in the Asia-Pacific region. The members of the ITU Regional Development Forum (RDF) for the Asia-Pacific Region met in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and discussed relevant issues from July 27-29. All of the participants of the event discussed the challenges and issues pertaining to the development and deployment of next-generation network (NGN) and high-speed access technologies across the Asia-Pacific region. Initiatives and events like these will definitely bridge the digital divide in the coming years and contribute to the economic prosperity of the entire region.

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hibri'>From the 1970s to this decade, nuclear energy has not been a priority for most nations. From the high cost of building a power station, to safety concerns - especially following the events at Three Mile Island in the U.S. and Chernobyl in the Ukraine - and the "not in my backyard" (NIMBY) protests, there was little political will to proceed with new facilities. But the tide has turned in the past decade. Increasingly dire fears of global warming due to greenhouse gases has given nuclear energy a second wave of popularity. According to IAEA figures, nuclear power emits 10 grams of CO₂ emissions per kilowatt-hour (g/kWh), solar energy (57 g/kWh), liquefied natural gas (549 g/kWh), oil (782 g/kWh) and coal (991 g/kWh). It is clear that nuclear energy is an essential strategy to meet the world's increasing power needs without contributing to global warming. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, nuclear plants may contribute about 200 gigawatts of the 4,800 gigawatts of new capacity needed by 2030.

The Middle East has emerged as a substantial market for nuclear power development. The United Arab Emirates plans to build between 12 and 16 nuclear units over the next 20 years, a huge nuclear power market whose value is estimated at between $40 billion and $60 billion. In June 2009, then-South Korean Prime Minister Han Seung-Soo and U.A.E. vice president Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashed Al Maktoum signed an MOU on nuclear cooperation. The U.A.E. is on track to become the second country in the Middle East to produce nuclear power. Korean companies hope to be closely involved in this historic process.

As of September, the U.A.E. has not announced the winner of the contracts for the building of their first reactor facility. A consortium of French companies lead by Areva, a Korean consortium including KEPCO, Hyundai Engineering and Construction and Samsung C&T Corporation, and a Japanese and American partnership between General Electric and Hitachi have been vying for this deal. Early in the process, KEPCO was considered by many industry analysts to be the frontrunner. Whether the Korean company wins or not, the fact that they have been viewed as a major competitor to the long established companies from Europe and North America is a considerable feat in itself.

Jordan, likewise, has signed agreements with several countries including South Korea. The Kingdom received an offer from KEPCO for light water reactors, desalinization plants and related infrastructure. Other agreements have been signed with other countries. With these agreements, Jordan hopes to be able to develop its nuclear energy program without large-scale U.S. involvement.

Saudi Arabia is moving forward with nuclear power ambitions, followed by Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Bahrain. France has signed agreements with Morocco and Qatar to begin developing their domestic nuclear programs. Tunisia, Libya, Jordan, Egypt and Yemen have also expressed interest in pursuing nuclear energy. Each of these countries represents lucrative markets for Korean companies, though concerns about the proliferation of nuclear capability must be considered. Egypt, Libya and Algeria have been accused of violating proliferation protocols in the past.

In August, Nuclear Power of India Ltd (NPCIL) and KEPCO announced that they will begin a study into the feasibility of licensing and exporting Korean-built reactors to India. Russia, France and the U.S. have exported facilities to India in the past, but with India's rapidly increasing power demands, more power will be needed. The study will examine KEPCO's APR-1400 reactor model, which has been offered in various markets, including Belarus and Poland. MOUs have been signed between NPCIL and KEPCO regarding the development of nuclear projects, operation & maintenance, nuclear fuel and other topics. However, until there is a bilateral agreement between the governments of India and South Korea, no transfer of equipment or knowledge can be conducted. A licensing relationship between Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power (KHNP) and Westinghouse may need to be resolved as well, as 5 percent of the components for the Korea Standard Nuclear Plant (KSNP) OPR-1000 and APR-1400 reactors rely on Westinghouse intellectual property.

A complication to expanding civilian nuclear power use is the Korea-U.S. pact, negotiated in 1974 and expiring in 2014, and the Inter-Korean Declaration of Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in 1992. The pact dictates how South Korea can use nuclear technology, especially the reprocessing of spent fuel. These restrictions were in place to keep the Korean peninsula free of nuclear weapons. However, waste material from Korea's 20 reactors will strain storage capacity by 2016. If South Korea is allowed to reprocess spent fuel, 95 percent of spent fuel can be recycled, drastically reducing waste. Thus far, the U.S. has not been seen as amenable to granting South Korea the same exemptions granted to India, Japan and the EU. Talks will begin in the coming months to begin resolving this sensitive issue.

Senior Vice President Chang Moon-hee of KAERI said, "Korea will be ready for technological self-sufficiency to become a nuclear power exporter by 2012, but a huge number of such projects must be mandated by national political and diplomatic support."