IGF 2022 Day 4 Networking Session #22 School Connectivity 101

>> JOSEF NOLL: Hello everyone and welcome to School Connectivity 101. Excuse the first slide which I only want to use for setting the scene simply because the background here is that we have done school connectivity together with partners in 14 countries in Africa, and in the discussion which we had had, we had seen a lot of challenges coming up may be transferable to other rural areas. So to set the scene, I'd love to bring a short introduction of where we are and what we came up ‑‑ sorry ‑‑ what our history are and what we actually see. From the starting point of view, my name is Josef Noll I come from the university of Oslo at the department of technology systems and had the pleasure of taking over the office from Pal Spilling, one of the Godfathers of TCIP protocol which he developed together with Yngvar Lundh. What you can see in the top is that the aim back in 1972 was to connect Europe and that connection was through our building. From that point of time I remember that the discussions which I then had with Pal on the history of the internet, June 1973. The younger participants in the room won't probably notice.

So what we have seen is when it comes to school connectivity, it is much more of the framework condition which comes up. That is why from the University of Oslo where we started to build a foundation to put the focus on connecting everyone. The concept we want to bring across and discuss with you is the concept from how we can connect schools and then from connecting schools, connect the communities. So in short terms, those of us who are now here in Addis, the island in the north is, as we say Norway, the ice island where the polar bears are still at home, but where we actually ‑‑ well, I don't know how long they will be there. So when I plot Norway across Tanzania and Kenya, then you actually see that though our main road is 2,576 kilometers long, ranging from the border to Sweden, up to the border to Russia. Our coastline is like 25,000 kilometers simply because the water area of Norway is about seven times the water area of the land. You see the land is little, but the water area which also captures these areas is quite big. When you put that in the surrounding of Africa, you see that basically it's nothing. It's what I call the shit of a fly. It's nothing. We went from building a coverage network towards a capacity network. Three years back we had 8,500 base stations covering the internet there. It simply asks me, when I look at both the big wide areas in Africa and the number of people living there is whether our connectivity is actually helping us to reach the goal of getting everyone with us. I discussed that on the last world summit of the information society with Houlin Zhao and Mae Lynn. We said would we reach the goal of connecting everyone to the internet or is that goal simply an ambition which we don't really stand the chance given that Africa and the global ‑‑ Bangladesh is a bit specific, if I may say so from my visits, because you really have the challenge, where will I find land for all my people, especially when climate crisis hits in and the huge parts of Bangladesh ‑‑ ‑‑

>> Who have small villages, connectivity is such a problem, but all Bangladesh territory, 98%, but the problem is there is the ‑‑ connectivity. When we are connected in the city ‑‑ when I move out there's mobile ‑‑ 2G, 3G is up and down there. The villas are too much broad. Broadband connectivity trying too much but we're struggling right now, broadband activity.

>> JOSEF NOLL: Thank you. That was a good introduction here from the room. Do you want to ‑‑ sorry, do you want to tell us a bit more of your connectivity challenges in your area?

>> Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Let me first introduce myself. I'm Victor from Mozambique. Mozambique is next to South Africa. My language is Portuguese, but I'm going to explain in English. I consider that first I'm working at national education network for Mozambique. I am network administrator. My job is connecting the universe ‑‑ in 2022 now, we have ‑‑ is 195 institutions divided by two groups. The first is education ‑‑ second is tech ‑‑ so I would love to have one question because a lot of institutions paid by the world bank. The world bank, they can pay, for example, for two over one over five years. That's the kind of connect we're paying for. If we manage to pay in that five or two years, I would like to know about your experience. How can we do to take this connected, to continue this connected, because we cannot pay for five years and then five years finish and we have no ideas how to continue. Thank you.

>> JOSEF NOLL: 000 to build sustainability connectivity is the question we're facing everyone. There's one question about building the CapX. Your example from Bangladesh, the typical example, we build services where the services are used and where we get the return on investment. If we don't get the return on investment, unfortunately the result is that we don't build the network out there because the network which is not used is underutilized. When we come to the entrance, is that part of or where is your NREN located to?

>> Thank you, again. We're a member of the boot alliance. We have the conference in 2017 in hotel even here at Addis Ababa. Thank you.

>> JOSEF NOLL: Thank you. The reason I bring that up is that the connectivity challenges are so big that we can't leave it over to simply one operator or one partner. So we really need to bring the partners together. The way we bring the partners together is really, A, building the political attention. If we go back to the slides, the political attention like the ITU now looking into the GIGA connect for school connectivity into the ITU and Unicef together going for the pledges for connectivity. But also then invite the mobile operators to actually come up with specific businesses models for what we call the non‑profitable services. Hello. So nice you're coming in the first table. We had already around here talking about the challenges in Bangladesh with the rivers and the bad connectivity in the rule areas and the input from Mozambique and connecting the schools. If you would like to contribute to the challenges in your country on connectivity.

>> I guess from our part, for the connectivity for schools, certainly we have quite challenges having connectivity inside schools, but with Tunisia, since we represent, the three of us, Tunisia, what is existing is the three operators we have including the national one, develop the services of 3 and 4G. So we have a good ‑‑ let's say good rate of mobile penetration. So most of the use are using mobile connectivity in order to be connected, but still the initiative to the digital in the school are really at the very early stage.

>> Okay. Maybe I will add something. Recently I be present with the minister of education about school connected for primary schools, they make like a platform for teachers to have like a ‑‑ presenting their classes and how to connect with parents in the school for ‑‑ to follow their children. And it was interesting because they owe committed ‑‑ they're a rural community, parents that cannot use this platform. This was my question for them, how you implemented such a platform and how you will reach this community in rural which lack this platform as you want ‑‑ especially after COVID crisis, they needed to be in digital space and digital connection. Thank you.

>> Thank you. If I can add something to what Michael said. As I said, in terms of internet connections, in the center at least, most of the schools have internet connections. Some regions have ‑‑ it depends. Many regions doesn't have connectivity in schools. I think what we need to work more on is the programs in the schools, digital literacy and other program, this is what we need to work more on other than the infrastructure itself. This is what we miss, the programs we're having in our schools are still basic. That's what we need to work on more. Thanks.

>> JOSEF NOLL: Thank you so much. Do you want to tell us a bit about the challenges in your country.

>> AUDIENCE: Good afternoon. As was stated with Bangladesh School of Internet Governance. We connect school for multi‑stakeholder participants. We request applications from the participants and evaluate and select among the applicants and then we try to engage them in activities. I have a question. Since we are facing ‑‑ our technologies are evolving day by day. We're getting new technologies, new subject, so many things. We need to get some soft data on the training curriculum for our school so we can connect with our local people with the relevant activities.

>> JOSEF NOLL: Thank you so much.

>> >> AUDIENCE: I want to give a short statement. Thank you very much. From Tunisia, a teacher/counselor from the Ministry of Education and also Africa representative in ICANNS. I'm here because I'm wearing two hats about connectivity in schools. I just want to make a suggest maybe. So there is always a question about should it be top‑down, bottom‑up. I think it should be ‑‑ the two processes should go hand in hand and at the same time. We need the top‑down to have the legislative and legal framework for any initiative, but also to have the right education and the right training for teachers and for students. And really we must go to schools actually because sometimes we feel at these conferences we are speaking to ourselves all the time. We're not going ‑‑ we're not doing field work. So we had some initiatives in Tunisia with ISOC and Mozilla Firefox. It came to our school and gave training to our students. So just my suggestion, we have to do some field work and to work together all of us in a multi‑stakeholder model. Thank you.

>> JOSEF NOLL: Thank you so much and thank you for all your inputs. Could we jump back to the slides? What you just said about the challenges which we have, this is actually what we see basically all over the world. We are working with communities here in 14 countries here in Africa and have school connectivity ‑‑ I've just come back from a lunch with the head of Safaricom to discuss school connectivity in Ethiopia. The first is the goals of connecting all schools, the second is the framework conditions, and the third is how do we engage the partnerships because without the partnerships we don't get anywhere. That has been our ‑‑ when you say top‑down, we have ITU, GIGA connect talking with the country heads and we have the bottom‑up where I would call the schools and the communities who want the best for their children and we have to give them an offer of how we can do that.

I want to tell you a bit about our experiences, at the same time a bit of our challenges. Let me first start with the demand for the telecom operators. The telecom operators are purely commercial. They have the CSR department which is basically to initiate ideas, but not necessarily to cover the whole school connectivity. So what we do often with the telecom companies is to tell them, look, if you want future customers, you have to educate them starting from schools. Thus, if your customer acquisition costs you a lot of money, that money you should use for connecting the schools. By the way, delivering megabits and gigabits ‑‑ it's connectivity which you give us for your cost price. Having said that, in Tanzania we're still at the path where the operators gives us like 50 GB per month for saying this is what the school takes and we pay 100% the first year, 50% the second year, 25% the third year, and by that we transfer the costs getting over. What we reached with Safaricom in Kenya is a complete new model where Safaricom says we don't talk about bundles in terms of 10, 20 GB. We talk about giving you a sim card with 5 megabits per second. That sim card currently costs us $58 which is a bit too expensive, I have to say. I would love to get that down to $20, $30, but it's a good start. When we have a school with 900 children, then the 5 megabits per second is a good starting point. From the political point ‑‑ and I want to bring two aspects in, the aspect of the 5G network was built up to have industrial use cases. More broadband, massive IOT as the one use case and the reliability ultra low latency communication for industrial processes.

What we're suggesting to the operators is to build a network slice where you say, when the technology allows you to have network slices ‑‑ sorry. I see that you always have to ‑‑ where technology allows you to introduce what we call the digital pedestrians and the digital cyclists where we say, hey, we need someone building the roads, but once the roads are built, pedestrians and cyclists can use the roads for free. You don't earn money but supporting text pictures and low bandwidth javascripts, no Ballywood, premier league whatsoever. But just the basic text pictures such that the schools themselves get a local school server and the teachers then can download the YouTube videos which are of interest down to the school. The infrastructure we're using for schools is that we in the remote areas rely on the mobile network because there is no other network around. And then we make the deal with the telecom operators to actually say you provide us with your sim cards with the specific rate, and then we transfer the broadband content which we need down to our schools, and we leave a thin pipe to the internet such that search, news and that information still goes down for students at the school. By that one we ensure that we can still live with a 10 or 20 GB package per month which then brings us down to $20 for those schools who really don't have the capability to pay. Once we see the take‑up, then we can switch to the similar cards with the 5 megabits per second. Also the willingness to pay for that is a bit higher.

We're currently discussing here in Ethiopia to actually have dedicated links in the network. To give you an example, the whole 5G‑6G business in the Nordics is to replace the copper. In Norway, a very high‑priced country once you've been there, we get 100 megabits per second for $79 as compared to Kenya, 5 megabits per second for $58, and 500 megabits per second for $130. That is all available through the new 5G technology. This is the political statement. Now I go to the practical statement. The practical statement, and that's where our friend from Mozambique comes into the game. When we look at our Africa connect which is co‑sponsored by the European Union and all the alliances of bringing academic research and education networks, the so‑called NRENs out. The process we're discussing not here, but Bangladesh ‑‑ sorry, I'm a bit confused. We should discuss it in bang Des. Where we discuss in Dar es Salaam, we take the university, at the universities we build regional competence centers A for connectivity, B for content, so the content for the schools is actually created by the universities and the con fig is done by students to have practical work. We ask the students to go with us out into the field and connect schools.

My highlight was when one of our students who was part of the regional competence center found a job in Zanzibar. He said I knew everything about the micro tech equipment which they use. So the practical experience which we often forget when we talk about universities is given through the regional competence centers.

Now, the next step is what we want to suggest. So the first steps are really to ask our universities to go back to basics and support the communities by making the knowledge and the content which we need for connecting schools, and then get their fingers dirty and make it.

The suggestion here for the national research and education networks is actually go to your universal service communication access fund, to your regulators, talk with the telecom operators and say you want the use case for 5G. We built the use case for 5G together with us. You loan us your frequencies, and on these frequencies we connect through a 5G tower the schools so that we turn the 5G away from a 5G hand set towards a 5G distribution fiber replacement.

The reason this is so successful is 5G has a technology called multi‑mimo which means it concentrates the power in a direction where the power is needed. Which means that from this tower, you say I have, like, eight schools within the 20 kilometer range, and the power goes to all of these eight schools, and thus it allows me to connect and brings further.

I hear some question marks.

>> AUDIENCE: I'm trying to understand. I'm not so technical, but I wanted to know ‑‑ it will be like a 5G, and it's like internet for the university?

>> AUDIENCE: Actually the question was about the technology used. It is like real 5G antenna, or it's an extension or something very specific.

>> AUDIENCE: Go to your picture. Show your picture. Here is connectivity?

>> JOSEF NOLL: This is the university. This is the school.

>> AUDIENCE: This university is connected where? Cable connectivity, fiber connectivity.

>> JOSEF NOLL: We assume our research institutes are connected to the national research and education network which is the networks where we see, amongst others, at least here from the European perspective to have a support for these networks in Africa and where we see an interest by the African countries. The big question is how sustainable is that network, right?

>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. Again, I'm Veta from Mozambique. First, I would like to try to explain, for example in South Africa we have the UbuntuNet alliance. There's a member, for example, like ‑‑ is it 15 years ‑‑ 15 countries. In Tanzania ‑‑ that is the national recession education network. We have the alliance and the UbuntuNet internet alliance ‑‑ they give out ‑‑ 4 gigabits for internet. How we can do, that's our question, to transport that bandwidth to our institutions. We connect to the minister of the science of technology. So we do by our providers, by lease lines. For example, we have three providers. One provider is Mozambique telecom, the second is ‑‑ and the other provider is ‑‑ so we paid that provider to take the lease line to all the situations, and World Bank paid for five years. Now it's ending. The question is how it can be sustainable to continue the service. So we make submitting with the orders institutions to contribute and they are contribute and we are paying. I think that is the way that we are able to continue with the service.

For another example, during the COVID‑19 period, we had to send database contained all students at national level. So that access is free and we located to the provider. This is done because all universities at national level are not yet connected through our service. Thank you.

>> JOSEF NOLL: The challenge that the lease lines has not yet set up regulations for saying that universities, research institute need a line, need the internet to actually function, that is a demand which I would bring immediately out to the commercial operations and say, look, this is part of the license conditions. Every now and then you are asking for a 5G license or 6G license or new frequencies, and that is the entry point where you then can bring up the demand of saying a certain amount of bandwidth or of your capacity needs to go to the universities. At the end of the day, yes, universities can contribute with some funds, but the one where the universities can contribute is actually knowledge and empowerment. If you let all the work for school connectivity be done by a commercial actor, it will cost you quite a lot. If you transfer that down and say we actually ‑‑ we all know we need to go to digital communities, but we still have this big amount of non‑commercial services. The way we approach that is actually saying that from the national research and education networks to the schools and to the companies. Where we don't have the NRENs, that's where we go directly to the telecoms and saying instead of having this antenna being an antenna taking down the network from the university, which by the way can also be a direct microwave link, we can also ‑‑ alternatively, we can take in the network via the other mobile network. That's a project know, a scale‑up where we started with ten schools across Tanzania, then another 50. Now we're with 300 schools. By 2024 we got already the okay from the operator and the Universal Service Fund to have up to 1,500 schools. At the end of the day, with all the installations covers 1.8 million people in the wide country of Tanzania. We had similar experiences in Kenya, though there we had a bit ‑‑ what should I say, the competition challenge because the government connecting schools and what I would say a grassroots initiative from the community in connecting schools.

So that's the idea of bringing the partners together and really build this alliance of partners. We've seen that is quite a successful idea. Now, what I would like to hear from you is where are the questions or the challenges or the comments which you'd love to discuss. Maybe we also can take the second microphone.

>> AUDIENCE: Hello. Thank you. My name is Momad Abdullah. I have some observation. Is the challenges is so many things. Bangladesh challenge is lower income country. Here is a device, mobile phone, smart phone purchasing, high price, one problem. Another problem is rural area is school is not connected to internet because there is mobile connectivities are too much horrible. Internet connectivity doesn't here. Another challenge is cost. Mobile capacity cost, bandwidth cost is too much high, and mobile data more than high. This is the challenges. Thank you.

>> JOSEF NOLL: Do you want to jump in first or should I give the first answer? Okay. You had the three aspects. One is the device challenge. And on the device challenge, what we do in Tanzania and Kenya, we go to low‑end tablets and have like ten tablets per school. These tablets, when it comes to the price, we get sponsored by the Universal Service Fund. The reason why we use tablets is simply because you get a lot faster into the tablets to actually make use of them.

And the second, they are not that vulnerable to power outage as PCs are. If there's a power outage, it needs to reboot and all the kind of stuff, whereas as long as we have the power for our school server up and running, then also our internet at the school is up and running, and it doesn't matter elsewhere in the connectivity handling. The last one is the costs. That's the point where the $20 per school is the operational costs which we then need to ask the communities to contribute to. But so far, that is a model which is working. We've seen that where Unicef came in and connected for 225 U.S. dollars per month. One of the challenges is the CapX meaning the initial investment to connect the schools. Our equipment is around the ‑‑ this is the pilot which we're out after. Currently we simply take the mobile network, build a water pipe, a six‑meter water pipe with the antenna. The antenna costs $150. The router is $70. The school server around $110. So for around $350 including cables, so on and so forth, that is our CapX costs to connect the school. Then comes training, installation and so on and so forth. So we are currently heading to about $1,100, $1,500, a bit dependent on where we are for connecting the schools. For that CapX that is where we go out and ask either the Universal Service Fund, ask the government, the World Bank or others. I don't think the CapX is the real killer, it's the operational costs per month. Sorry it's taken so much time. Your turn. Introduce yourself.

>> AUDIENCE: I'm Beth from the telecom sector. You've addressed everything I was about to ask. One thing I'd like to learn about is a successful case study, a use case you have in Africa, in a developing country similar to Ethiopia where you've managed to implement a cost effective way of connecting schools and you've seen a real impact that's measurable.

>> JOSEF NOLL: Are you here from Ethiopia?

>> AUDIENCE: From Ethiopia.

>> JOSEF NOLL: I just had lunch with Dr. Groom ‑‑

>> AUDIENCE: My colleagues.

>> JOSEF NOLL: Good. The use case which you were addressing are the use cases we have both in Kenya and Tanzania where in Kenya we work together with Safaricom who gave us five megabits per second sim card for $58 a month. In Tanzania we work with Vodacom mainly who gave us a 50 GB bundle and have a use case of saying 100% paid by Vodacom in the first year, 50% in the second year, 25% in the third year. We hope by then we can make the transition towards the fixed costs ‑‑ sorry ‑‑ the fixed bandwidth costs. Actually our biggest challenge is to teach schools what is 10 GB, what is 20 GB. I think that is a lost case. Sorry. Because if it's you and me, we can say one hour of Zoom, so if you have ten hours of Zoom, your GB is gone. Rather than give out vouchers where the teachers can have the vouchers. That's the way we handle it. It's still the frustration when the teachers at school run out of bandwidth and they don't stand a chance of seeing that directly. That is the driver towards this 5 MB.

What we discussed today at lunch was whether we should head first for the 25 megabit per second dedicated lights with all the investment costs it has, as compared to an approach where we start with, let's say just the antenna and the router, and then do the best effort on the LTE with a cap of 4 or 5 megabits per second. I would suggest we continue on that during the break.

>> AUDIENCE: Actually, I have two questions. The first one is about the impact of such technology on the community. Here maybe you can share with us more about what the experience of the parent and the community around the school and how they kind of benefit ‑‑ benefit from this connectivity.

My second question is, did you consider ‑‑ are you aware of what Mozilla Foundation offer as ‑‑ for connecting the community? If yes, does it worth it or can we use it instead of the sim card?

>> JOSEF NOLL: What we do with Mozilla Foundation, you have to help me a bit, we do a bit on the voices of the communities, where we actually use our schools to record local languages and local voices.

>> AUDIENCE: But also, what ‑‑ I know they have little equipment to connect the unconnected places.

>> JOSEF NOLL: On the latest one, I would be very interested that you connect us afterwards so we can share. For us, the main driver was that we use the universities to configure the devices. In order not to make ‑‑ because when we started all this business, we configured in Norway, we shipped to Tanzania, we deployed in Tanzania and that was a lost case financially. That is why we now say, wherever we go, we first build the regional competence centers together with the universities, and then we identify at the schools digital friends. The reason for identifying at the schools two digital friends is simply with two you have redundancy, and they also discuss with each other. And then from all the digital friends at the schools, we build local WhatsApp groups so the digital friends from our schools can talk to other digital friends. So far I have to say we haven't been at the point where we did a real scientific analysis of the effect on the community because this last part here, the community involvement and the extension towards a community learning living lab, that is something which our we discussed starting from two weeks ago simply because our big question was there are so many groups, first of all women, in the rural areas who are left aside from this digital transformation. That would solve a need, not only to talk about school connectivity, but reaching it further to the communities.

Here again, towards the commercial operators, that we clearly see and hopefully you can confirm a protest that it takes time to build the skills up such that not half of the population is left aside. That's when we say we build specifically this community learning living labs where the focus is not ‑‑ there's no premier league, no sex, drugs and rock and roll.  It's just empowerment learning health information. We started it in Ethiopia with Bahir Dar University and ‑‑ I've forgotten ‑‑ on digital health courses to create health content which is applicable and valuable for the communities.

I feel I haven't captured all of your questions. The experiences, what it means for the community, I haven't really answered ‑‑ my point was, when we connected the school, I gave some girls a tablet. I showed them where to make the photo and how to search on the internet. I went out for an hour, and after an hour I came back and then asked them what was the first thing you searched for. What would you think?

>> AUDIENCE: I don't know really. His name? Search his name or her name?

>> JOSEF NOLL: It was Mt. Kenya. I hope it have it here on my last slide. This is our superstar Catherine back in 2020 when she connected the village. She came to me saying, Josef, you have to come to me, protect the girls from the internet, from misuse. I said, well, let's first connect them and put out servers with information on empowerment.

This guy here is ‑‑ I forgot his name ‑‑ is the chief of the village of Mamba in the Serengeti. He lives in a place where there's absolutely no internet. He's thrown his weapon away and replaced it by a fantastic smart phone holder. He had a smart phone. You don't have an internet here, you don't have mobile broadband here. We drove with a car and it's like 23 kilometers away.

He said, Josef, you're right. Once a week I come to a place where I can lift up my smart phone and I can sync my WhatsApp, and that's how I do it. Once a week he comes to places to sync his WhatsApp messages.

That comes to the connection of how far can you reach. With building this pipe up with a directive antenna. Up in the Serengeti we reached 22 kilometers. We're now testing antennas of 18 DBI where I would expect we reach 30 kilometers. That's the answer to your rural bad connectivity where I really say go six meters with the water pipe up, put a direct antenna out, and we have that in the village of Azazie in Tanzania which is behind a mountain ridge. You had minus 110 DBI, you didn't have any connectivity. We put the antennas out, reached plus 18 DB. We came down to minus 92 DB. And on the 3G network, I did a speed test and it told me 20 megabits per second. That was a very specific time. I've never seen 20 megabits per second later in the 3G network. It tells us that we can reach out to places where nobody believes that we can do it.

The reason I went there was simply because the universal service access fund, Peter told me, Josef, in Azazie, it's a lost cause. I said I'm a telecom guy, radio guy. That's my baby and that's where we jump in. You had a question. And then we can take the last round of questions and then we close it please.

>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. I'm from Ethiopia. I work in developing educational technologies. I started with reaching resource to the underconnected parts of the country. Also I know it's very difficult to have the same entrance exam for those who has no resource at all. To make that equity or to make the difference or to bridge that gap.

What we have done, we have tried to upload or load all the curriculum content into the tablets. And then the rest into the school server. From the school server we just connected that into the wireless network. It's miraculous around the school what we have done. But when we tried to connect with the central server through the internet, the internet is not that much ‑‑ whether it is 100 megabits or 10 megabits, sometimes you don't know the difference. Because it's a shared one and it might take a lot of time to update in the school.

Therefore, is there any method or ways that measure, instead of 5 megabits per second, 10 megabits for second and you have to pay per month, to pay whatever you used, the data used, upload or download, so you pay what you are connected? Most of the connection in the school, they are not what they expected. Therefore, they just pay every month for the connection, not for what they use.

Second question, is there any ‑‑ I missed maybe your first part, what you call ‑‑ what you give about your solution. But is there any means that we can use to connect what you have in the school with your solution? Thank you.

>> JOSEF NOLL: The first question is I would say pay for what you get is a bit hard because that again means you have an understanding how many megabits or gigabits you get over. I would rather turn that around and say it's a chicken and an egg problem. In a society where nobody uses data, it's not worthwhile to build a network. So what we need to do is we need to really foster the uptake of data. I love your approach. That is actually tap approach which in the schools ensures the quality of service in the wi‑fi network with the services you have on your school server or on the tablets. The quality of the network will increase. I can just tell you, our network of Telenor in Norway has 75.3 megabits per second in average, 75.3 per second. That's simply driven by the quality requirements of people in Norway. We actually say, you know, we want high quality on our mobile links. It's not completely the answer which I can get you yet.

When we were at lunch, the CEO of Safaricom told me, now we've rolled out 600 base stations. We're scaling up to 7,000 base stations. And the trick which I can tell you, is when we put up this external antenna higher up at the building, we actually increase the signal‑to‑noise ratio in the telecom network substantially. By that, we also see a lot better quality than if I just have a router in the school. So the external antenna on the house wall pointing to what's the tower is really the trick to make it.

I see that time is up, and I want to excuse for being the professor for whom you give a key word and he talks for 45 minutes. Any last comments?

>> AUDIENCE: Hello. Is it working? Can you hear me? In my country there's frequent power outage. So there should be some backup plan like using radio link or something and creating LAN for the end user.

>> JOSEF NOLL: The answer would be ‑‑ answer for me would be ‑‑ what we did, we said when our school server is a ‑‑ it works on small watts, 30 watts, 40 watts, what we can cover with a battery. When the energy is there, we charge the battery and ensure our battery is working. Even if the power drops, the brownouts, the blackouts which we experience, you can still live.

Last comment.

>> AUDIENCE: Thank you for this opportunity again. Not a question. It's an opinion. I'm absolutely sure the problem with the internet access exists in almost all countries and especially in the poor countries. I think that all government in the world should sit down and think of universal model for internet access service to be free for education and research. An international model can be created so international providers have to specify the prices only for education. In Africa, there are many educational institutions that I'm able to pay commercial operators, for internet access server. We cannot have any quality educations for all. I think that we must think about this. Thank you.

>> JOSEF NOLL: Thank you for that, and I'll take that into the recommendations, though I'm not professor since the last 15 years before I was in telecom. I know both sides of the coin. Thanks everyone for being here and enjoy the last hours of the IGF 2022.