Free access for everyone:
We have service providers, our people have computers. Almost every Estonian has a cellphone — or two of them — and most have laptops. It’s already becoming impossible to work or to study without a laptop. But universal coverage is not the same as universal access.
I have an idea which hasn’t been suggested yet. It takes advantage of the fact that we already have good coverage but our “free” Wi-Fi isn’t really free. To my mind, this is mission critical. The idea is to open a certain amount of bandwidth to every citizen of Estonia. It would be limited in speed, to 128 Kbps maybe. This would be a government supported service for every Estonian who authenticates himself to an ISP with either his cellphone or his national identity card — it wouldn’t matter which. So the idea is that if you authenticate yourself to any service provider, they will give you bandwidth-limited free service. Your online time will be logged and at the end of half a year, the government will reimburse each service provider according to how much free access they gave. The important thing is to preserve competition even in a market with subsidies. That means giving each user the freedom to choose any ISP, and giving each ISP an incentive to serve nonsubscribers.
Such a system would be easy to set up and run, I think. We don’t need to build any new networks and everybody wins: The government increases Internet penetration, the service providers attract new customers by giving out “free samples” and the public gets a basic “life-line” service. This is a wider and more powerful idea than free hotspots. It would be open to any technology and any ISP. We just log the data and compensate the providers afterward, according to the free use of their bandwidth.
