How Telecommunication Industry Affects The Accesibility of Education During Pandemic COVID-19

Due to Pandemic COVID-19 that comes up from 2019 until now, social distancing is a must to prevent the spread of coronavirus. The world is not ready enough to respons the pandemic, regardless in both development and developed country, it has been quite similiar story. Education is one of the most affected aspect due to Pandemic Covid 19. Ministry of education said that around 646.200 schools closed due to this pandemic and 68 million students can’t access education directly in school. Furthermore, 2,4 % of education institutions still organize learning activities and 30 % of them organize due to accesibility to the internet in the rural area.

In fact, accesibility of education is the problem even before Pandemic COVID-19. The government are pushed by the society to improve the accesibility of education by improving the infrastructure of internet in the rural area. The question is how can we improve the accesibility of education in the side of telecommunication?

First, we have to analyze the current situation in the rural area. Papua for the example, their mountainous geographic conditions are making the development of infrastructure is harder. The accesibility of infrastructures including roads, electricity, etc are still lack if we compared to the Java Island. Some of Papua areas even does not have electricity. In the highlands, some villagers have to walk from one area to another area from usable path. Some solutions may provided such as electricity generation from micro hydropower installation or diesel generator.

From above explanations, some private companies face difficulty to develop a proper telecommunication infrastructure due to geographical conditions and lack of infrastructure have been built. Government is suggested to prioritize the infrastructure improvements to make the distributions flow are easier, including developing telecommunication in Papua. However, the accesibility of education can be improved by regulatory changes in our industry of telecommunication which can affect the cost and price of supplying infrastructure to some rural area like Papua for example. Developing infrastructures including optical fiber cable and towers for wireless transmission is should be considered. By developing optical fiber in the rural area, it streams more data at higher speeds, even up to Gbps, so that the bandwidth (bandwidth) becomes larger than ever. This is required since virtual meeting for organizing education need more bandwidth since video call conference is needed. Government need to partner with private company to provide internet including wifi area in certain area, continue to build infrastructure, and build social communities in order to solve the accesibility problems.