Towards a 4G Ukraine
The national project “Open World: Creating an Information Communication Network on a National Level” has recently received some unexpected but substantial support. In Baku, during a meeting of the project’s director Ihor Kurs with the global director of Microsoft Joice Fernandes (within the framework of the international conference “Economic Success through Education and Technologies”), it was stated that Microsoft would become a strategic partner of the national project.
During the meeting a schedule and constituents of the project were presented. The project foresees establishing an educational infrastructure, on the basis of a fourth generation wireless network, and a centralized education and knowledge assessment system for 1.5 million students, and providing them with netbooks with preferential Internet connection. “Your country has ripened to such initiatives, and Microsoft is ready to become a strategic partner,” said Fernandes. According to him, the company is ready to provide technical assistance and share their experience of realizing such projects in technologically developed countries. He invited members of the workgroup to visit Portugal, where one of the most successful projects of this kind has been introduced. “We are interested in this project,” told The Day Dmytro Shymkin, the director of Microsoft Ukraine, “because we have been working in Ukraine for a long time, and this is a strategic country for Microsoft.” Shymkin reminded that on November 5 there was a meeting of members of the Ukrainian go-vernment with the director of
Microsoft Steve Ballmer, during which President Viktor Yanukovych thanked Ballmer for promoting the development of relations between the company and Ukraine, and the Deputy Prime Minister Borys Kolesnikov offered Ballmer to organize production in Ukraine.
In addition, on November 17, the Ukrainian government, according to Volodymyr Semynozhenko, the head of the State Committee for Science, Innovations and Informatization, planned to approve a conception and a plan of the electronic governance and also consider a bill on the IT system Electronic Government. In the opinion of Semynozhenko, all this will promote more efficient interaction between the state government bodies and citizens, facilitating access to state information resources for legal and physical entities, and will also allow shifting to the exchange of electronic documents between the state bodies. One can add that developing electronic governance will also strengthen democracy, and at the same time reduce corruption, since this way citizens will minimize personal interaction with officials.
As we see, a very important problem is being solved. However, strange as it may seem, the information sphere has no reports about the results of the consideration of the aforementioned documents. Perhaps ministers are too busy or maybe Semynozhenko, as they say, is too hot to trot.
The attention of the authorities to this project can be easily explained. Today Ukraine actually wallows in the third, the so-called industrial order of economy, while developed courtiers already start the sixth order. With the help of the program Open World and Microsoft, the country gets a chance to briefly take one of the leading places in the world in terms of the quality of education and computer literacy of the population, and hence increase its competitiveness. Thus, conditions will be created for the development of science and research-intensive technologies, the information society, and the national intellectual elite. At this, each citizen of the country is granted an equal access to knowledge regardless where he or she lives.
The economic expediency of the corresponding expenses (according to estimates of specialists, the cost of the project will be 650 million dollars, with 500 million dollars coming from the budget) is substantiated by the fact that introducing information technologies provides three fourths of added value and leads the country to an information-communication breakthrough.
However, our history already knows many statements about such breakthroughs that came to nothing. Budget expenditures do not address the costs for technical services, purchase of specialized software, or Internet connections. Suffice it to point out that at the end of 2009 the number of the Internet users in Ukraine constituted 18 percent, in Slovakia it was 65 percent, in Poland it was 53 percent, and in Russia — 32 percent. Without emergency measures directed at expanding Internet access, experts believe that the difference may become even greater.
In his conversation with The Day, the president of the Adamant company, the vice president and head of the Ukrainian Industrials and Entrepreneurs Union’s Commission for Science and IT-technologies Ivan Pietukhov stated that “the president of Ukraine called 2011 the year of education and development of information society. We welcome all international organizations and companies which are ready to help us. I think our Ukrainian companies will be able to contribute as well.” However, in the opinion of Pietukhov, the country lacks a body that would coordinate all these programs. Besides, the problem of information and personal data protection is not resolved at all. Pietukhov points out that under the current conditions, access to the Internet can be provided for students only in cities with over a million residents. It is much more difficult to introduce this program in rural schools where a notebook by itself does not mean anything. If one plans to use 3G-technologies, one should pay for this. The same goes for 4G-technology. Pietukhov says that even in the Kyiv Aviation University the system collapsed when 10 percent of students connected to it. “If someone,” the expert says, “can use 4G in a rural area, that’s great. But if they rely on the state, I’ll be the first to oppose it. In this case there must be a tender, and society must know why one or another technology is used. I fully agree with the president, who, while speaking at the Committee for Economic Reforms, said that private investors who participate in the program should cover 80 percent of costs, and there will be a state guarantee of a credit for the rest. This is a sound approach to private-public partnership.”
