3 Investigating The Last Mile Problem

This book interrogates a particular definition of the Last Mile: one that weds the term to what we might, after James Scott, call seeing like the State. In its classical form, the ‘last mile’ is a communications term defining the final stage of providing connectivity from a communications provider to a customer, and has been used as such most commonly by telecommunications and cable television industries. However, with the birth of several modern State ideologies, the term has come to mean something much more. The term has, as much in India as elsewhere, seen technology mapped onto developmentalist-democratic priorities: combining the two into a devastating cocktail of technology, development, governance and markets characteristic of communications technology since at least the invention of the radio in the 1940s. For at least 50 years now, the last mile has become the privileged mode of a techno-democracy, where connectivity has been directly translated into democratic citizenship. Technology seen as not capable of such claims has had a hard time defining its legitimacy (community ham-radio, for example, as we shall see later).

What I hope to do is to provide a historical account to argue that the theory of the ‘last mile’ has been founded on several major assumptions around just what this bridge constitutes. Further, to argue that these assumptions have been derived from a particular technologicalization of democratic theory, and thence perhaps, the purpose of technology as primarily a delivery mechanism. It has required its practitioners to assume an evolutionary rather than distributive model for connectivity. This in turn has made a significant differennce to the deployment of authorized technoogies. It has introduced a major bias for broadcast (or one-to-many) modes as against many-to-many peer-to-peer formats.

The book hopes to argue the following

1. It expects to show the difficulties posed in introducing human resource as an integral component to the last mile. Contrary to the relentlessly technologized definition of the last mile, the communications barrier may well be most appropriately seen as also, and even perhaps primarily, a human resource issue. This is not a new realization, but it is one that keeps reproducing itself with every new technological generation, with ever newer difficulties. The endemic assumption, derived from the broadcasting origins of the definition, is that it is primarily the sender’s responsibility to bridge the divide, that technology can aid him to do so on its own, and that such technology can negate the need to define connectivity as a multiple-way partnership as it reduces the recipient into no more than an intelligent recipient of what is sent (the citizen model). On the other hand, it is possible to show how previous successful experiments bridging the last mile have been ones where recipients have been successfully integrated into the communications model both as peers and, even more significantly, as originators as well as enhancers of data. Importantly, I hope to show, this has been evidenced even in one-way ‘broadcast’ modes such as film, television and radio: but equally importantly, such enhancement has been historically seen as transgressive, against the grain, or shall we say contrary to the authorized technology usage manual.
2. This book will make a strong plea for historically revisiting one-way broadcast versus peer-to-peer versus two/multiple-way debate. The need to redefine the beneficiary of a connectivity cycle as a full-fledged partner tends to come up against a bias written into standard communications models – and therefore several standard revenue models – that consistently tend to underplay what I will call the significant sender/recipient (as against the citizen). While both terrestrial and satellite systems require some level of peer-to-peer transmission systems to facilitate last-mile communications, it has been a common problem that unless either a clear focus exists on geographic areas or significant peer-to-peer participation exists, broadcast models inevitably find themselves delivering large amounts of S/N at low frequencies without sufficient spectrum to support large information capacity. While it is technically possible to ‘flood’ a region in broadcasting terms, this inevitably leads to extremely high wastage as much of the radiated ICE never reaches any user at all. As information requirements increase, broadcast ‘wireless mesh’ systems small enough to provide adequate information distribution to and from a relatively small number of local users, require a prohibitively large number of broadcast locations along with a large amount of excess capacity to make up for the wasted energy.

This problem, importantly, springs as much from a built-in ideological commitment to one-way broadcasting formats, as from technological limitations. The technology itself poses further problems given the bias of different systems to different kinds of connectivity, and with it different types of peer-to-peer possibilities. Rather than attempting a one-size-fits-all model for all models to follow, this book will suggest, what is needed is to work out different synergies between broadcast-dependent and peer-to-peer-enabled platforms.

This book, on the way, will study the history of peer-to-peer and multiple-way structures as systems where sending has become a component part of receiving. The need to revisit the technological community is therefore critical. The key question is one of how technological communities have been produced, and how they may be sustained. In defining the last mile as to do with the recipient-as-sender, and thus the community, this paper will focus on a history of community action along specific models of connectivity. Key technological precedents to the present definition of the sender-communication ‘partner’ would be community radio, low-power transmission-reception systems (most famously the Pij experiment in Gujarat conducted by ISRO), and various internet-based networking models.