In the 25 years since the launch of the World Wide Web, about 2.7 billion people have gained Internet access. This connectivity has reinvented life on the road for corporate travelers and for their travel programs.
Some of this connectivity has been a good thing – itinerary management, duty of care and a host of other issues are reduced from a matter of days or hours to virtually real-time. However, there are nettlesome aspects of an always-on environment that give travel managers headaches – think open booking – and IT security specialists insomnia.
So in a world where a traveler can make a phone call from the Marambio Base in Antarctica and get data service in remote locations like the Cook Islands, we’ve come to expect that our business travelers will find connectivity virtually anywhere they go. But in reality, we’re still nowhere near fully connected: Only about one-third of the world has Internet access.
Internet.org is a non-profit group founded by some big names in connectivity, including the likes of Facebook, Samsung and Nokia. Despite the speculation about these companies’ vested interests (given most of the founding partners benefit from more people being online), the organization is doing plenty to highlight the inequities of global connectivity and level the playing field.
Connecting the Ground Game
It’s easy for us in connected regions to take connectivity for granted, but its lack can affect global business travelers. According to a Deloitte study sponsored by Internet.org, North America leads Internet penetration with 82 percent. Second to North America is Europe with 68 percent, a 14 percent drop. China and Latin America are at 45 percent. Southeast Asia and Africa hover at 21 percent and 20 percent respectively. In last place falls India at just 13 percent, a 69 percent drop from the levels in North America.
The MasterCard Global Destination Cities Index found in 2013 that travel to the global south was on the rise. Eleven of the top 12 cities that saw the fastest increase in air travel are east and south of Istanbul, a global region with low connectivity. India, which has the lowest penetration, is expected to see a 53 percent increase in business travel bookings in 2014, according to the International Management study.
Beside the obvious benefits of convenience and productivity, connectivity is increasingly a vital element of providing for business travelers’ safety and well being on the road. It’s become a key component in corporate risk management to mitigate the negative impact on employees who are caught in medical emergencies, politcal unrest or natural disasters.
For example, in the Middle East uprisings known as the Arab Spring or the days following the Japanese tsunami and nuclear disasters, the reliance on connectivity became acute as systems went down and global corporations scrambled to determine the whereabouts of their employees. Risk managers should know where an employee is at any given point in time and be able to contact them within 15 minutes. But when connectivity is broken – or just nonexistent – it underscores just how critical these links have become.
In addition, boosting connectivity around the world could bring economic benefits. According to Internet.org’s study from Deloitte, as many as 44 million jobs in Africa and nearly 65 million jobs in India could be generated by extending Internet access to levels seen in developed economies today.
There’s no clear answer to how the world gets connected. “More analysis will be required to identify rapid ways whereby governments, industry and the wider ecosystem across the economic, business, and social sectors can partner to reduce some of these constraints,” says the Deloitte report.
However, the analysis points to opportunities open to public policy makers, international and regional organizations and the telecommunications and technology industry.
“Coordinated [public] policy efforts are effective: countries with a National Broadband Plan benefit from mobile broadband penetration some 7.4 percent higher than countries without plans, once the potential impact of factors like higher average income per capita, market concentration and urbanization are discounted,” states the report. “International and regional organizations, as well NGOs operating in these regions, have an opportunity to drive the debate on how to best employ Internet access to deliver life-changing healthcare and education services, and enable social cohesion.”
The Deloitte report further recommends specific approaches that the telecommunications and technology industries should undertake: “By shifting their business paradigms to consider the needs of customers in developing markets, the industry can promote sustainable hardware and software solutions that support open source networks, affordable phones and data efficient software.”
One company in the space that is making connectivity strides around the world is AT&T.
“AT&T is working hard to bring additional connectivity to our subscribers who travel internationally,” says JR Wilson, vice president of partnerships and alliances at AT&T Mobility. According to Wilson, the telecommunications giant has a three-pronged approach to bringing more destinations online.
First, it’s working with carriers globally to launch LTE networks, which increase speed. AT&T was the first carrier in the US to launch LTE roaming for customers traveling abroad.
Second, AT&T is expanding its WiFi footprint of more than 1 million hotspots, making data roaming more seamless and allowing customers to better manage costs when traveling abroad.
AT&T’s third initiative involves growing the number of carriers in countries where AT&T might be the only roaming carrier available.
“Often times [a customer’s] mobile device is their only means of connectivity to home, so customers rely on their mobile device even more so when traveling,” concludes Wilson. “As the capabilities of the devices evolve, and the speed and quality of the networks continues to improve, customers’ expectations of what they can do with their mobile devices will continue to grow.”
Another telecommunications company working toward global connectivity is Truphone, a worldwide mobile network founded in 2006 by James Tagg, who is a noted inventor with patents on touchscreen technology.
Tagg developed the initial Truphone app, which uses WiFi to make voice calls, now known as voice-over-Internet-protocol or VoIP. Later through an acquisition, the company moved into wireless technology, which is Truphone’s core focus today.
“That’s the evolution of how our business came to be,” according to Pascal de Hesselle, vice president of marketing in the US at Truphone. “We still have voice-over-IP technology, but without sharing any confidential secrets, in our labs, we see great value in combining those assets with our network assets.”
Truphone offers roaming service in 223 of the approximate 240 countries in the world. The “Truphone Zone,” which offers standard rates and data, consists of eight locations: the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands, the US, Hong Kong and Australia.
This international system can be especially valuable to those traveling in Europe, where going from country to country is like going state to state in the US. Instead of paying roaming fees when going one country over, travelers in Europe pay their standard, day-to-day rate, de Hesselle explains.
Its benefits aren’t limited to Europe, though, he continues. If you regularly do international business with any of the countries in the Truphone Zone, then its network could yield significant savings of around 40 to 50 percent.
Truphone also lets customers have more than one number on their phones. For example, if you’re in a business that regularly works with the United Kingdom, Hong Kong and Germany, you can have a number in the UK, a Hong Kong number and a number in Germany. These numbers mean colleagues can call you at local rates.
Global businesses have taken notice of Truphone’s technology. Three of the five largest global banks are among the company’s customers.
If you’re working with some countries outside of the Truphone Zone, don’t fret. “Our business is very scalable,” says de Hesselle. “Much of what we’ve done in the past 24 months is invest in our network, systems and tools, so we can scale the Truphone Zone quickly.”
Although Truphone runs its own network, adding a new country does require integrating with local tier-one providers of radio towers while allowing Truphone’s network to serve as an umbrella. “We have the ability to do that very quickly. We’ve added three countries in the past six months,” says Dehesselle.
Up in the Air
For the true business traveler, the progress of global connectivity matters as much at 30,000 feet as it does on terra firma.
“Since the launch of our first connected aircraft, there have been more than 50 million Internet sessions on the Gogo network,” notes Ash ElDifrawi, chief commercial officer at Gogo, the in-flight Internet provider.
Still the airborne Internet experience has generally been not as satisfying as its earth-bound brethern. A study by DePaul University’s Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development found that 39.5 percent of airline passengers use mobile technology, compared to 59.4 percent of discount bus passengers and 52.2 percent of Amtrak passengers.
“The major performance limitation currently is the available bandwidth from satellites,” says Boeing spokesperson Elizabeth Holleman. “While advances in compression and use of spot beams in the systems improve the flow of data through the systems, the airplane connectivity environment will lag the performance and bandwidth associated with ground-based systems.”
Notwithstanding, the next year may bring some enlightenment to the dark corners of connectivity in flight with new technologies rolling out mid- to late-2015 from Boeing, AT&T and Gogo.
However even with improvements and impressive potential for the future, there’s an interesting issue with inflight connectivity: It will always be the bridesmaid and never the bride. While in a couple of years, connectivity in the air might match the connectivity we have on the ground today, it won’t match the progress in connectivity we’ll have on the ground two years hence.
Still, for business travelers the world over, being connected – regardless of the bandwidth – beats not being connected any day.
