Intel's John Davies on Global Access to Technology | Big Think

Well, Intel wants to bring technology to everyone on the planet. And you need to do that in an affordable way, in a secure way, and you need it to be in a way that enriches and improves their lives; otherwise, they won't pay for technology. And do it in a way that can reach lower-income people as well, even if they share technology.

In my specific area, I focus on the digital divide, lower income, and spent a lot of time in the education world, primarily through government leaders, ministers of telecom, ministers of education, ministers of finance, to help them implement these programs in their countries. What we do is we work with the telecoms, we work with the regulators, the regulatory authorities, and we've worked on business models there where broadband has become more and more wireless these days. Rather than wired, it's 3G, it's 4G; that's what reaches the people.

And in that, we've worked with telecoms on lower-cost computers, tablets, so they'll take their business models and adjust them so you can have lower tiers of pricing in the prepaid model, just like what has happened with the voice phone. That way, you reach far, far more people. Now, if you're reaching far, far more people, people can take their computers home from schools, they can use them in the schools. The university students can afford laptops and capabilities in there, so it's really about affordability and reach.

And at Intel, we just build the communications capabilities into every platform. Well, obviously, over time, the price of computers has been coming down. You can get fantastic computer capability today for maybe $300 or $400. You can get entry-level computers for maybe $200, but then there are $100 tablets around, and there's lower cost than that, smartphones, and there's a spectrum of capabilities. Obviously, the higher-priced ones do a bit more, but you can do some great basic computing capabilities on an entry-level computer, a tablet, and a lower-cost smartphone.

Now, with that, we found over the years that the cost of the broadband can actually be much higher than the cost of the device. As we've worked with the telecom people on that prepaid model to drive that down. For example, in Africa, three years ago, the average price of broadband was $30 a month. Well, maybe two percent of Africans could afford that. Today, you can buy it in one-dollar increments when you have money. So, if you're not banked or you want fractions of a dollar increment and you're a university student who uses the LAN in the day and wants their 3G dongle just for a small amount of work in the evening, you can do that.

And pay one or two dollars a month and get everything you need there. So, that makes it much, much more affordable; rather than two or three percent affording it, maybe 30 or 40 percent can afford it, and that brings the technology to many, many more people.

Well, reach for Intel -- Intel is not in every country in the world. We have 100,000 employees, so we're a large company, but what we do is we work with partners, local partners, to integrate and implement. Around the world, we may have 200,000 or more channel partners that exist in every country on the planet, and those are the people that can take that technology to the end customer.

So, if you look at Nigeria, there'll be many small Nigerian companies that will take the platforms there. You look in Kenya, you look in the Middle East; each of them will have their own local companies that tend to have grown into local solution providers, local channel, local distribution, along with the local telecom, and the reach is by partnering with them because it's their direct customers and it's our indirect customers because we're the Intel Inside ingredient here.

Private/public partnership is absolutely critical in this because if you look at, say, trying to reach the schools, every teacher with a laptop to drive their education programs, or if you look to try to reach businesses that may be, you know, someone's home farm or someone's small business and there's a few people in this, you've absolutely got to reach those both with...