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At This Rate
Universal free Net access in Asia is right around the corner
By ERIC ELLIS
December 7, 1999
Web posted at 7 a.m. Hong Kong time, 6 p.m. EDT
A few years from now, maybe even as early as within a year, you'll probably feel about metered Internet access the way people do now about telex machines and rotary dial telephones. You'll be amazed you ever paid to use it.
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I'm talking about free Internet access. Germans have it en masse, following Britain and Italy's lead. More and more Australians are getting it. Some Americans get it but at $20 per month unlimited access its virtually free anyway.
So why doesn't Asia have it?
The good news is that it is dribbling into the region. An ISP in Calcutta, Caltiger.com, has inaugurated a free service based on that city and surrounding West Bengal. In China, the Legend computer group has done a deal with China Telecom to offer a year's free access--if you buy one of its computers--and carriers in Korea and Thailand are giving away accounts.
The Thai and the Korean services are essentially marketing programs to ratchet up a user base. In Thailand at least, the idea is you get a year free, get hooked and then you'll happily pay.
The most serious of the free service providers has just been launched in Singapore, in keeping with the wired island approach the tiny republic wants to cultivate.
StarHub claims there are no catches with its service. It gives you a disk, you install it, register and then you have free dial-up service for life. Admittedly it's slow and modem-based, and if you've been using Singapore Telecom's Magix ADSL service you'll be reluctant to scale back to a dial-up--but the point is that it's free.
Typically, it's backed by Singapore Inc. in the form of government-backed Singapore Technologies, whose president Madame Ho Ching, is married to Singapore's Deputy PM Lee Hsien Loong. StarHub has tied up with Yahoo! which provides content for the main page.
The company sees itself as almost an online newspaper or magazine. It doesn't get cash from online charges so it charges for online ads in the same way that newspaper and magazine advertising subsidizes cover prices.
So far the launch has been a success. StarHub has signed up 38,000 in just two days and is looking for 200,000 inside a year. That would spook the island's existing ISPs, who have some of the highest Internet charges in the world. It's no coincidence that Asia's first NASDAQ Net stock was the Singapore ISP Pacific Internet.
Of course, nothing is totally free, and Singaporeans who keep their computers permanently logged on to StarHub will have a serious telephone bill. The terrestrial line monopoly Singapore Telecom has metered local calls.
But Singapore might be onto a trend here. For the Net to truly click in Asia, it has to get out to the masses--to villagers in India, China or Indonesia for whom technology is still a television set. They won't be able to afford the type of charges wealthy Singaporeans can, but they are the ones who will give the Asian Net a significant critical mass for it to truly take off.
If corporate Asia needs further evidence, check out the recent stock valuations of Germany's Freenet and Britain's Freeserve. Those companies each count their communities in the millions and their market worth in the billions.
Write to TIME at mail@web.timeasia.com
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