From Telecentres, Community Networks to Sustainable Smart Villages and Smart Islands: Case Studies

An ISOC LIVE Summary

Authors: ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau (BDT) and the Internet Society

Prepared through the ITU Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific. The study was supported by the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications, Sport and the Arts of Australia. ITU, Geneva, 2026. ISBN 978-92-61-39401-1.

Overview

This report examines how earlier community connectivity initiatives—telecentres and community networks—can inform the design of sustainable Smart Villages and Smart Islands programmes. Rather than treating connectivity as an end in itself, the authors argue that successful digital transformation depends on combining broadband infrastructure with affordability, digital skills, relevant services, and long-term community ownership. The study analyses ten case studies across seven countries in Asia and the Pacific—India, Indonesia, Kiribati, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, and Vanuatu—to identify practical lessons for governments, development agencies, civil society, and local communities.

In his foreword, Cosmas Luckyson Zavazava, Director of the Telecommunication Development Bureau, frames the initiative as a shift toward an integrated whole-of-government, whole-of-society approach. Sally Wentworth, President and CEO of the Internet Society and the Internet Society Foundation, notes that the ten case studies show the Internet advancing all 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and that those most affected by the digital divide are often already marginalized—women, Indigenous peoples, and the forcibly displaced.

Why Smart Villages and Smart Islands?

The report opens by observing that approximately 2.2 billion people remain offline, according to ITU’s Facts and Figures 2025. Outside the Africa region, most of these people live in Asia and the Pacific. Growth in mobile broadband has been substantial: active mobile broadband subscriptions in the region rose from 61.3 to 101 per 100 inhabitants between 2017 and 2025. Yet many economies remain below 50 per 100 inhabitants, and fixed-broadband access is more uneven still—a regional average of 21.4 per 100 inhabitants in 2025 that is skewed upward by Australia, China, and the Republic of Korea, while many economies sit below five. Gender and rural-urban divides persist alongside the coverage gap.

The Smart Villages and Smart Islands initiative is presented as a holistic response built around four pillars:

• Expanding broadband connectivity.

• Improving affordability.

• Building digital skills.

• Increasing access to useful digital services.

The authors stress that infrastructure alone cannot bridge the digital divide. Sustainable connectivity requires coordinated action across government, the private sector, civil society, and local communities, supported by citizen-centred digital services in areas such as health, education, agriculture, finance, and government.

Learning from Telecentres

The report traces telecentres to their origins in Sweden in the mid-1980s, where they provided rural and isolated areas with telecommunications services and information technology facilities. They grew across the Global North before their prominence shifted to the Global South, though their purpose remained the same: public access to ICT tools and services for rural and isolated communities. Governments frequently established these centres to extend access to ICTs into underserved regions.

The authors acknowledge that many telecentres successfully supported education, healthcare, government services, and local development. However, sustainability often proved difficult. Common problems include:

• Dependence on external funding.

• Weak community engagement.

• Limited relevance of available services.

• Poor business management.

• Lack of trained personnel.

• Insufficient financial planning.

• Equipment theft and maintenance challenges.

These experiences demonstrate that simply installing infrastructure is insufficient without strong local participation and long-term operational planning.

Learning from Community Networks

Community networks first emerged in the late 1990s as a more participatory alternative in which local residents help build, operate, and govern telecommunications infrastructure, building on a longer history of community cooperation around communication and media infrastructure.

The report describes community networks as particularly valuable because they:

• Foster local ownership.

• Encourage community participation.

• Improve affordability.

• Generate local economic activity.

• Increase inclusion, including opportunities for women and Indigenous communities.

At the same time, community networks face their own challenges. Regulatory environments frequently limit access to licensed spectrum, increase deployment costs, and restrict technology choices. Difficult licensing processes, high import duties on equipment, expensive backhaul connectivity, and limited funding often constrain long-term sustainability.

Developing a Sustainability Framework

Drawing on previous research, the authors develop a six-dimensional framework for evaluating connectivity initiatives. The framework merges the six dimensions found in the telecentre literature with the five distinguished by the Internet Society for community networks—collapsing social and cultural sustainability into a single dimension, and separating internal organizational governance from the external policy environment.

Financial sustainability

The initiative should generate sufficient long-term income through combinations of government support, grants, subscriptions, partnerships, or locally generated revenue.

Socio-cultural sustainability

Projects should strengthen community participation, social cohesion, inclusion, and shared ownership while ensuring benefits reach marginalized populations.

Organizational sustainability

Governance structures should empower local participants, support effective management, encourage multistakeholder partnerships, and build local capacity.

Operational sustainability

Infrastructure should remain reliable, resilient, maintainable, and capable of delivering services that communities actually need.

Policy sustainability

Government policy should enable rather than restrict community initiatives through supportive regulation, licensing, and institutional cooperation.

Environmental sustainability

Projects should minimise environmental impacts while remaining appropriate for local ecosystems and operating conditions.

The authors acknowledge a data limitation: the environmental and policy dimensions proved difficult to develop for several cases, and they recommend further research in those areas.

The Ten Case Studies

The report examines ten initiatives across seven countries.

Community networks include:

• TakNet (Thailand)

• Wireless for Communities (India)

• Ungu Community-based LTE Network (Indonesia)

• Common Room Community Network Initiative (Indonesia)

Telecentre-based initiatives include:

• Telecentre Programme for Orang Asli (Malaysia)

• Gram Marg (India)

• Computer Laboratory and Internet Community Centre (Vanuatu)

• Kinect (Papua New Guinea)

• Community Telecentres (Kiribati)

• Community Telecentres (Vanuatu)

The selection intentionally covers a wide variety of geographic, cultural, and policy environments to illustrate how different approaches perform under different conditions.

The Kinect case in Papua New Guinea supplies the report’s starkest finding. Of roughly 90 sites established during the initial funding period, approximately 88 went dormant once that funding ended; only two remain active and generating enough revenue to sustain themselves. Both survivors—the island village of M’buke and a site anchored by a local high school—are distinguished by active community involvement in operating the service and selling vouchers.

Common Findings Across the Case Studies

Across all ten examples, three broad characteristics consistently distinguish more sustainable initiatives.

Reliable infrastructure

Projects perform best when connectivity remains dependable despite difficult terrain and weather. Appropriate technology choices, resilience, and ease of maintenance are all critical.

Sustainable financial and organizational models

Successful initiatives look beyond initial deployment funding. Flexible financial models, multiple partners, community participation, and long-term planning help projects survive after startup funding ends.

Meaningful Internet connectivity

The strongest initiatives focus on services that local people actually need rather than simply providing Internet access. Examples include e-health, e-education, agriculture, fisheries, government services, and local economic development.

Community involvement in operation and maintenance strengthens local ownership, while training programmes ensure residents can fully benefit from new connectivity. The report also emphasises deliberate efforts to include women, people with disabilities, Indigenous communities, and other traditionally underserved groups.

Recommendations

The report concludes with five recommendations for governments and organizations implementing future Smart Villages and Smart Islands initiatives:

• Deploy technology that is reliable, affordable, and appropriate for local conditions.

• Build multistakeholder partnerships involving governments, the private sector, civil society, academia, and local communities.

• Ensure meaningful community participation throughout planning, implementation, operation, and maintenance.

• Adapt organizational models and technologies to each community’s geographic, cultural, political, and economic context.

• Improve impact measurement and share lessons learned to support replication and continuous improvement across future connectivity initiatives.

Overall, the report argues that sustainable connectivity depends less on deploying technology than on building locally owned, community-centred ecosystems in which infrastructure, digital skills, affordability, governance, and relevant services reinforce one another. It presents Smart Villages and Smart Islands as an evolution of earlier telecentre and community network models, combining their strengths while addressing the sustainability challenges that have limited many previous initiatives.

RESOURCES

• From Telecentres, Community Networks to Sustainable Smart Villages and Smart Islands: Case Studies — the full ITU/Internet Society report (PDF, 2026)

• New ITU Report Finds Community Networks Are Key to Reaching the Unconnected — the Internet Society’s announcement as co-publisher (Jul 2026)

• ITU Smart Villages and Smart Islands — the initiative the report’s recommendations are addressed to

• ITU Facts and Figures 2025 — source of the 2.2 billion offline figure and the regional subscription data

• Building Smart Villages: A Blueprint as Piloted in Niger — the digital principles the report’s socio-cultural recommendations draw on

• Telecommunications Reclaimed: A Hands-on Guide to Networking Communities — the five-dimension framework merged into the report’s six

• Community Network Readiness Assessment Handbook — one of two sources for the report’s case-study guiding questions

• Financing Mechanisms for Locally Owned Internet Infrastructure — Forster, Matranga and Nagendra’s four-phase model, reproduced as Figure 3

• Barefoot Wireless Engineers — the train-the-trainers approach behind the Wireless for Communities case study

• Connecting the Unconnected: Kasepuhan Ciptagelar — Common Room’s own account of the Indonesian community network

• Community LTE in Papua — ISIF Asia’s technical report on the Ungu CoLTE deployment

• Building Last-Metre Community Networks in Thailand — the GISWatch chapter underpinning the TakNet case study

• Addressing Sustainability in Rural Connectivity: Gram Marg — Belur’s GISWatch chapter on the Public-Private-People-Panchayat model

• Net2Home — intERLab — the AIT lab and social enterprise behind TakNet

• Digital Empowerment Foundation — operator of Wireless for Communities

• Common Room Networks Foundation — partner to the Kasepuhan Ciptagelar indigenous community

• Association for Progressive Communications — funder of the Common Room network via its Community Networks Learning Grant

• TRBR Universal Access Policy reports — Vanuatu’s regulator, source for the CLICC evaluation