Internet connectivity has an important impact on innovation and the development of societies and economics of any country, therefore, the accessibility to the information highway has become an important part of utility requirements, such as water, electricity, and sewage system.
With decreasing bandwidth prices and availability of cheap technology as well as the need to boost the use of e-services to improve productivity and decrease the cost, Internet can no longer be seen as charged service but rather a tool to deliver various services that generate higher economic benefits to the country, promote faster adaptability to internet, and facilitate better growth online knowledge base economy.
The free citywide internet model implemented in USA and Europe has shown a success in terms of boosting the city economy, increasing productivity, improving security, and creating higher knowledge society. Furthermore, it allowed the born of various innovative business models. This success also motivated a number of commercial business to adapt the model and generate higher economic return to their business.
The approach of citywide free internet also encouraged some countries to implement a countrywide free internet access such as the case of Estonia which accomplished e-leadership strategy through provisioning free internet access to its citizens. Furthermore free citywide internet offered many potential benefits for the citizens- from increased productivity to lower cost to greater citizen satisfaction- while being practical and cost effective. It also improved the performance of government services and opened up new business strategies that added high economic values and returns to the country. The study yielded that free wireless internet can:
· Attract many foreign business investments, which results on improving country economy.
· Be a driving engine to mushroom various business models, and create tremendous job opportunity.
· Improve the country security and traffic management, resulting on creating safer living environment.
· Create challenging competition environment, resulting on better service provisioning, reduced prices of connectivity, higher demand for high speed connectivity, and encourage the telecom operators to be more innovative by creating a pool of value added services.
· Encourage tourisms, resulting on generating add-on returns on the country economy.
· Generate various types of revenue streams due to convenience of use by the citizens.
The policy implications of free wireless internet models was only created by the telecom operators, who thought the free model maybe a cutting through for their services, however, after the realization of the economic return that such service provides in comparisons to paid models, which has fixed revenue; many telecom operators started to offer free wireless internet service creating an innovative business models that further promoted the various paid packages and generated higher revenue stream. This new business models made the policy makers support and play more encouraging role to further promote the development of other internet based services that generated outstanding economic benefits for the country.
The objective of this study is to investigate and understand the technology factors, economic benefits, and policy implications of free internet model, in order to come up with a recommendation plan for QATAR, to implement countrywide free internet access, in order to assess the country to diversify from dependency of oil and gas returns, to additional achieve alternative economic earnings, by facilitating knowledge base economy through country wide free internet access.
