The United Nations agency for information and communication technology (ICT) examined a report by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in which they highlighted the unique nature of the telecom environment in Asia and the Pacific. Globally, a little over 51% of the population had access to the internet at the time of ICT’s report. For Asian and Pacific Nations, this number goes down to a meager 45%. It goes further down to 36% for those living in rural areas.
This is more than just internet access. Even the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals mandate deploying rural connectivity. In the current age, access to the internet is the driver of financial growth in communities and towns. With rural areas falling behind, the youth there is left with little choice but to move to urban areas. This internal migration within the Asian States is putting a lot of strain on already stretched government services, leading to unsanitary and irritated living conditions.
With current economic models based upon digital education and online connectedness, the rural areas are falling behind and a gap is appearing between their condition and the digital boom being witnessed in urban cities.
One team of entrepreneurs who know the Asian market well founded the Santa Clara-based software company LotusFlare. Sam Gadodia, Terry Guo, and Shao Xia worked as engineers at Facebook until 2014 when they left the social media giant to found LotusFlare. During their tenure at Facebook, Guo and Gadodia had spent quite a bit of time in the emerging markets in Asia and developed a passion for making the internet more accessible for people living in those locations.
Their company works with mobile and broadband operators to implement solutions that improve the user experience for them and their customers. It uses existing technology and infrastructure to make the internet more accessible and affordable for people in remote locations. LotusFlare’s aim is to extend internet access – both mobile and fixed – by building cloud-native software that simplifies technology and lowers the complexity and cost of operations for communication service providers (CSPs). By helping CSPs in this way, LotusFlare delivers valuable outcomes that help them improve service and access for their consumer customers.
Due to their vast experiences in Asian markets, LotusFlare’s founders know that for a majority of these customers who haven’t used the internet ever or a lot before, usage units such as megabytes are unfamiliar terms. Therefore, LotusFlare gives customers the option to buy data bundles in terms of hours and minutes. This way they don’t need to know or guess how many megabytes browsing a website or checking their email would cost.
LotusFlare is doing groundbreaking work in trying to expand internet access to remote locations. Their initiative has the potential of bridging the wide gap of development we see between the rural and urban areas in the Asian nations.
