Minister urges ICT, research investment

What are you smoking Mr Minister. Competition will drive innovation, and we have not seen that for the past few years. If companies start testing new telecoms technologies, it will come under fire from ICASA, govenrment and Telkom especially in the wireless fields.

South African companies need to invest more into technology and technological research in order to remain globally competitive, says science and technology minister Mosibudi Mangena.

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Disjointed statements like these are beginning to annoy me. How can they (GOVT) expect companies to invest in ICT and to remain globally competitive in such a restrictively high priced ICT environment? Who would do such a thing as "GIVE" the government(with it's 40% share in Telkom) or Telkom money like this? What an unrealistic expectation to say the least.

There is potential thousands of applications that can be developed in the ICT sector with cheap affordable broadband being the foundation for such developments. But alas we all know the pace (err be it non existent) of liberalization in this country.

It looks like these departments in govt hardly do any collaboration with other departments, or even the research, before they make statements like this.

R4tt3xx said:

If companies start testing new telecoms technologies, it will come under fire from ICASA, govenrment and Telkom especially in the wireless fields.

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That's true. ICASA has already published articles in the Western Cape newspapers warning wireless ISPs, I think, about not having licenses. There was a thread about this somewhere (ICASA warning people about ISM band...).

Then you have the guys in Soweto that are doing this illegally and they're getting praise from some dept/individual in govt. There's a thread about this also somewhere either on this site or one of the OPA sites.

Let's just look at that telescope system in the cape, that has to bloody mail cdroms around because it's too expensive!

Research requires intelligence, and communications. We don't have either in any great amount. We're not stimulating research. In fact, doing research in this country is an expensive venture.

Anther example that the government don't have a clue what they are talking about.