Broadband must be Africa’s aim


By Guy Berger
Highway Africa News Agency

African governments and regulators need to create an environment conducive
to the growth of telecoms and very especially of broadband infrastructure in
order to build the Information Society.

This was the message to the Africa Telecom 2004 conference by Karl Socikwa,
CEO of South Africa’s parastatal Transtel. The company is part of a
consortium being licensed to operate South Africa’s second national
operator.

A broadband action plan was needed for the continent, and each country
needed one as well, he said.


Broadband meant, “a connection to each customer with enough bandwidth, and
it becomes possible to support a range of multiple, simultaneous combined
voice and data services.”

He quoted South Africa’s Convergence Bill as defining broadband as “a high
capacity link between end user and … suppliers, capable of supporting full
motion, interactive video applications”.

Socikwa complained that just as the WSIS final documents failed to include
reference to convergence, so South Africa’s Convergence Bill only mentioned
broadband once. He also noted that at present the highest broadband
connection a person could get in South Africa was 512 kilobytes, “a far cry
from the multi-megabits per second available elsewhere”.

Arguing that the information society could not exist without telecoms and
advanced telecoms services, the Transtel CEO said that the time to develop
broadband policies was now.

“Just as the growth of mobile is closing the gap between developing and
developed countries in basic telephony, so the lack of broadband access is
widening a new digital divide.”

Broadband was what made convergence a reality, said Socikwa. In turn,
convergence referred to the way that any content – whether voices or data –
could be represented in digital form and conveyed on any digital
infrastructure

Socikwa predicted that “broadband penetration will become the measure of
access to a wide range of services and information.” Tradition low-bandwidth
services such as the “plain old telephone” would become obsolete, and
multiple services the norm.

His current concern was that “it is regulation, and not simply technology,
that makes for convergence …”

South Africa’s draft convergence law would make for a competitive market
that would “blur the lines between all facilities players, fixed and mobile,
voice and data.”

Socikwa cautioned, however, that if this undermined the conditions of
existing licences, or changed the environment overnight, it could discourage
investment in the sector.

The speaker, whose own company will have a fixed line license that will
combine wired and wireless technologies, was sceptical about mobile
telephony providing adequate broadband access. “Despite all the hype about
3G mobile, true broadband access is, and will remain, a fixed network
phenomenon.”

Broadband was the primary driver of the growth in fixed line telecoms
networks, Socikwa said. The most successful broadband operators around the
world had taken a mass-market approach, making the service available and
affordable to a large percentage of their users.

The Transtel CEO stated that the growth of mobile services was no surprise
because “governments have typically allowed competition in mobile services
whiles clinging to control of monopoly fixed-line incumbents.”

He also noted that “incumbent operators are often the fiercest critics of
disruptive technologies and will often choose not to deploy appropriate
technologies for fear of eroding their existing revenue and infrastructure
base.

“In Africa, we cannot afford the luxury of this approach. Innovation must be
rewarded, rather than punished, and competition must not revolve around
protection of the incumbent, but of the interests of the user.”

Socikwa cited a prediction by a company called Ovum that there would be
1.8million broadband subscribers in South Africa by 2009. “Not only does
this number need to be greater, or the date earlier, but it needs to be
matched across the continent, if Africa is to have any hope of bridging this
new digital divide.”

Governments should consider subsidised access to broadband. There should
also be incentives to operators since “the long-term national benefits far
outweigh the short term infrastructure costs operators will have to bear.”

He pointed out that “the need for Internet and other data services requires
a level of sophistication only found in literate, or at least
computer-literate societies. Bridging this divide takes more than investment
in telecommunications, but also in education and other infrastructures.”

According to Socikwa, voice over internet protocol (VOIP) was not a miracle
technology for Africa, but “simply another tool that operators have that
allows them to build cost-effective multi-service networks.”

He praised Egypt for a very aggressive promotion of internet.


Highway Africa reports from Cairo are made possible with support from the
Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. Editorial decisions are solely
the responsibility of Highway Africa.

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