Government’s recipe for telecoms failure
Last week’s national policy colloquium, organised by the department of communications, drew a degree of cynicism from the telecoms industry. The view among many industry players is that it’s the same old rhetoric with no action. Will this time be different? The industry can be forgiven for suffering from “colloquium fatigue”. Politicians
How ANC is squandering SA’s digital future
The release last week of Research ICT Africa’s report on mobile phone pricing in Africa has provoked a little controversy. The facts are quite damning. SA has some of the highest mobile costs on the continent. This is odd given the country’s comparative wealth and infrastructural advantages. By rights, SA ought to have the cheapest phone
Yet more sub-sea cables coming SA’s way
Just when telecommunications industry players and analysts thought SA couldn’t possibly get any more undersea broadband infrastructure, news is emerging of a raft of new cable systems that will serve both SA and the region. On Monday, Brazil, Russia, India, China and SA — the so-called Brics countries — announced plans for a new high-capacity
Another day, another cable system
Five years ago, SA had one cable, Sat-3, running down Africa’s west coast and connecting it to the global Internet. Today the continent is surrounded by high-capacity cables, with plenty more, even bigger systems to come. There are now so many cables and such a great deal of capacity that Steve Song, author of the popular
Steve Song: connectivity crusader and cartographer
When he isn’t talking at technology conferences and seminars, or travelling to them, 49-year-old Steve Song lives and works in Durbanville near Cape Town. He’s perhaps best known for his map of the various submarine cables that have landed in Africa in recent years, and for his passionate advocacy of the use of television white-spaces
New sub-sea cables to drive down broadband prices
Consumers can look forward to even cheaper broadband prices, with many new undersea cables set to come online within the next 18 months. It is unclear how much of a decrease is likely, but talk in the industry is of a 10% to 20% drop in local prices
Icasa sparks debate over ‘spectrum parks’
In its framework for the licensing of high demand spectrum, published last week, the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) says it intends to reserve a portion of the 2,6GHz band for a “managed spectrum park”. The idea, it seems, is to make spectrum
Spectrum trading in SA: a pipe dream?
The National Planning Commission’s National Development Plan, released last week, makes several proposals for growing the information and communications technology industry, one of the most interesting of which is that the country should allow companies to
Enough dithering already
More than 17 years after SA’s first democratic elections, politicians are still indecisive over how to extend connectivity into rural areas and bridge the so-called “digital divide”. Government continues to concoct ideologically confused plans. Instead, it should just get
Song sings on spectrum and the value of white spaces
“White spaces.” These chunks of radio frequency spectrum allocated to broadcasters but not used could hold the solution to SA’s electronic communications challenges. Steve Song, founder of Village Telco — a social enterprise that uses open-source
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