Education on the backburner for IT spending in Western Europe

/me don't thinks the Government REALLY knows just how crucial ICT is to the success of our economy. Sure, now and then some politician will stand on the podium and preach about how ICT can help accelerate the growth of our economy. But when it comes to them actually taking ACTION to make this happen, nothing happens. This has been the case from the DoE's initial plans to bring ICT to most schools to the DoC's promise to do something constructive about the high telecoms costs in this country. Of course, the greatest blame should be attributed to the DoC in the form of Poison Ivy. It's as if the Government is intentionally trying to halt any ICT progress in this country!

Now why would they want to educate the masses ......
Suits Gov just fine the way it is now

<Q>The situation looks equally bleak in South Africa with the much talked about e-rate for educational institutions still not in place.

The e-rate was set in place to provide educational institutions with cheaper rates for Internet access in order to promote the use of ICT’s in schools.

The Department of Education reported at the last Telecommunications Colloquium held in October this year that so far schools were unable to access this service from Telkom.

It is uncertain what the hold up is but it has already been a year and still the benefits are not trickling down to South Africa’s learners</Q>

Lets see - a school that has no internet access can now get internet access at 50% discount. WOW. That's such an awesome invitation for a school to implement it.

Now - who is going to pay for it ?

Gee - I wonder why take-up is so slow - DUH.

So our ADSL is more or less 1000% to 2000% overpriced compared to other countries, schools can (in theory) get 50% off, meaning they can get it at an <sarcasm>"only"</sarcasm> 500% to 1000% overpriced rate - still enough to give Telkom a fat profit. But Telkom is so greedy that (even though they'll make upwards of R16 billion profit this year *) they just ignore the law and charge schools full price anyway, and there is zero enforcement of the policy - no consequences at all. It can only be that government is in Telkom's pockets --- perhaps they even told Telkom at the time "don't worry, we're just saying we're going to do this to score political points, we won't enforce it".

Also, schools won't even bother to try take Telkom up on this offer because they know that Telkom won't give them the discount. So schools actually have both zero incentive and zero discount on this. If it were actually enforced, more schools might actually sign up.

Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri represents everything that is wrong with this country.

(* to put it in perspective, this amount is enough to install four brand new SAT-3 cables (per year), so stoke, Telkom can certainly afford these discounts without even making a tiny dent in their profits)