Brigitte Daniel - 2011 USA Eisenhower Fellow

In addition to traveling to India and Sri Lanka, I had the fortunate opportunity to continue my explorations and visit the Island Country Singapore to examine and compare more digital divide models in South East Asia, where development was more mature and infrastructure in place and growing.  

Just to give a bit of background information about Singapore, Singapore is a Southeast Asian City-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula. Singapore is highly urbanized and with the technological world advancing at a rapid speed, the City-State has become one of the forerunners in the race towards innovation and advancement. Following in the footsteps of California and India, it has been dubbed as becoming the third Silicon Valley of the world.

Moreover, Singapore, thanks to its small size and a big public investment, could soon be the first country blanketed with a fiber optic infrastructure so fast that it would enable the contents of a DVD to be downloaded in only a few seconds. The new network is expected to give a strong boost to the growth of services like online video and Internet telephony. Pyramid Research, which analyzes the telecommunications business, expects the revenue of Singapore telecommunication operators to rise to $5.1 billion by 2014 from $3.8 billion in 2009.  The new network, stimulated by an investment of 1 billion Singapore dollars, or about $700 million, from the government, will help the country leap ahead in an international race to roll out faster broadband speeds, a competition in which several Asian countries are in leading positions.

So…you can imagine now why I was very curious and excited to travel to this Country. I knew there would be great examples to learn from and organizations to meet in order to bridge connection not only within SE Asia but across the seas.