Orientation for proposal

Permanent access and broadband involve the same stakes of access as traditional infrastructures. ADSL, WIFI, BLR and IPV6 tomorrow should be taken into account and efforts should be made to ensure that they do not become additional sources of inequality, between territories and professional and social categories. However, it appears increasingly that broadband will be reserved for urban areas and the rich. Regulations should be formulated in all countries where they do not already exist to permit the expansion of wifi, an inexpensive technology particular well adapted to local needs.

Context

The usual reaction is to assert that broadband is necessary for research and business and that traditional speeds are sufficient for the ordinary citizen and community networks. There is nothing innocent about this standpoint, since it reinforces a system that wants to reserve the action of creation for an elite. However, artists and community organisations, families and individuals, need to use multimedia applications : they can use them to aid problem children through artistic creation, permit illiterate populations and those with oral traditions to produce their own contents, implement co-production tools, help maintain family links for victims of diasporas, etc. All these activities require broadband.

Moreover the installation of broadband infrastructures should be done according to guidelines that give priority to the social ends mentioned above, via public consultation in which community interests are taken into account.

In particular, efforts should be made to encourage, support and publish initiatives from users and citizens networks at local level (municipalities, rural committees, urban districts) to define and own directly their own optical fibre broadband infrastructures. Joint ownership and "à la carte networks" exist in which the local architecture of local infrastructures, connections with Internet service providers and interconnections with similar independent networks are installed by community networks on the basis of their own needs. Systems exist that place community interests and hopes above those of telecom companies and service providers.

Many examples of this approach could be described as with the Canadian company, Canarie, with its "à la carte networks"and "black" fibre-optic cables. Regarding broadband in the United States, a recommendation has been made to create a regulatory framework to prevent the new conglomerates such as At & T and AOL Times Warner to censor contents and select the service providers that diffuse them.