Internet connections in villages are not necessary.

The Universal Service Obligation (USO) is a program run by several government departments to provide villages with basic telephony services (fax, dial-up internet and low speed data transfer of 9600 bps) based on the principle of “Community Access Within Walking Distance”. Each village is to be provided with at least one Line Unit (Universal access), at normal rates but with certain additional costs (such as frequency use, interconnection) temporarily waived. unescap

Marsudi Wahyu, said to be an information technology expert, however says that the USO program is a waste of time, people in villages need schools, health centres, and fertiliser for their crops, not telephones, computers and internet.

If farmers need to check current market prices for their produce then listening to Radio Republic Indonesia will provide them the information, he said.

Marsudi went on to say that information technology experts like himself were embarrassed with the results of a similar program to the USO, the SMA 2000 program, which provided many schools with free computers and internet access. 80% of the bandwidth used by students was in search of porn sites, not knowledge, he said.

We forget that in America children speak English fluently from a young age so accessing the internet is more meaningful for them – things are different in Indonesia, there’s a language problem and what’s more the language of pictures is universal and more attractive.

The money collected for the USO program, targeted at 1 trillion rupiah per year, would be better put to use on development and infrastructure projects, he said. antara