By Francisco Perez
Laid atop their desks before me were four computers at a newly opened Community e-Center, a kind of governmental Internet café that is meant to provide low-cost Internet services to the general public. Several men looked on at the scene – the personnel who kept the place running, the regional director to whom they answered, and I, the head of the Telecommunications Office under which we were all employed. It didn’t seem to bother anyone but me, however, that there were no customers at all in the Community e-Center, no visitors to partake of the digital feast that the personnel had laid out.
The year was 2006. Only a few months had passed since my appointment as the head of Telof. Although plans to provide Community e-Centers had been approved in 2003, project implementation started
only in 2005.
As I stood wondering if the lack of customers was due to people being at school or at work, one of the employees mentioned that there was a privately-owned Internet café just across the street.
So we went to the Internet café. I asked the clerk at the counter how much the café charged per hour of
computer use. She gave me a figure that was five pesos more expensive than the one our Community e-Center charged.
Walking around, I counted more than 20 computers. There were five or six customers playing video games. None of our Community e-Centers have games installed in their computers, which gives privately-owned Internet cafés an advantage in drawing customers. Somewhere at the back of the room, however, I saw a young woman composing an email. Wasn’t she aware, I thought to myself, that the Community e-Center across the street offers Internet services at a cheaper rate?
I also began to wonder how much of the software in the Internet café was licensed and legally used.
Despite the availability of our low-cost Internet services, we were only tapping a fraction of our potential market. On the other hand, it really wasn’t appropriate for us to compete with the private sector. In fact, a few lessons can be learned from the situation I described above, as well as other similar experiences that we have had:
Community e-Centers should not compete with privately-owned Internet cafés. The whole purpose of setting up a Community e-Center is to provide Internet services where none are available. Governmental competition with the private sector is unfair because privately-owned companies need to earn a profit whereas the government does not. Ultimately, whatever services the government provides will be paid or subsidized with taxes, however unprofitable those services may be. Although the Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT) established the no competition policy early after its inception, the Telecommunications Office had already undertaken its own Community e-Center project a year before the CICT was created.
There must be sufficient promotion and advertising for the target market to be aware of the availability of the government’s Internet services. Simply posting a sign announcing the presence of a Community e-Center is not enough, especially if most people do not know what a Community e-Center is. Even among those who know it to be a kind of Internet café, the lack of other customers may discourage them from giving these services a try. Hence, there should be extra efforts made to promote these services and invite customers to avail of them.
Internet services must cater to the needs and desires of the market. To some extent, the government can anticipate those needs by targeting specific web sites for the kind of jobs that the locals engage in. For example, members of fishing communities may be provided links that can enhance their catch without jeopardizing the ecosystem. Not all needs may be anticipated, however, so we in government must be ready to adapt to actual or potential Internet use as they come to our awareness. We have found that a lot of customers go to chat sites or engage in social networking. Regardless of individual circumstances, the desire to connect with others will always be paramount.
Having four computers in any kind of Internet café, whether government-operated or privately owned, is far from enough to generate economies of scale. That is one reason why most Internet cafés have more than ten computers. Another reason is to avoid losing sales from potential customers who cannot find a vacant computer. Although we can establish more Community e-Centers by distributing computers over a wider area instead of concentrating more of them at fewer locations, doing so will generate smaller profits and may result in lost sales.
I am sure that there is still much that we can learn from our experiences with Community e-Centers. These are challenges that we gladly face because our customers stand to gain from the improvement of our operations.
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