Beri
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It's simple: Telkom keeps the costs up
With announcements on new undersea cable and plans to rejuvenate telecoms policy, South Africans can be forgiven for wondering when landline broadband costs will come down.
Although the ICT industry is complex, the solution is simple. Everywhere else fixed-line internet is a cheap and abundant enabler of the information economy. But in South Africa broadband costs are among the world's highest.
High prices are caused by a problem with the last mile, the local loop. This is the piece of copper from an exchange to a home or work premises, which Telkom controls exclusively.
Simply put, the problem with the cost of internet access is Telkom. The national telecoms utility is a mess - less of a mess since Pinky Moholi took over as group CEO, but still a mess.
Telkom cannot make money from its own network. It cannot make money letting its own lines before it adds the other services, like phone calls or internet access. T he access deficit appears to be the reason why Telkom is stalling local-loop unbundling that would give other service providers direct access to its customers.
But while Telkom fiddles, other technologies are eclipsing copper, which has reached its speed limits.
Fibre to the home (FTTH) is used extensively around the world to provide the much faster speeds needed for the next generation of much more data-intensive internet services, especially video.
Larger internet service providers, like Internet Solutions and MWeb, and the cellular operators and privately owned fibre supplier Dark Fibre Africa, have advanced fibre networks. Smaller operations like Atec, which wired up suburbs like Cape Town's Clifton, can provide FTTH. Why can Telkom not? Why has Telkom's major shareholder, the government, let this national asset stagnate? As it did with telecoms supplier Sentech?
Perhaps the government does not understand the telecoms industry? It is impossible to say because of the opaque muddle of telecoms policy, the revolving-door policy on communications ministers and nearly two decades of abusing citizens' wallets.
This week, Communications Minister Dina Pule held a hastily arranged policy colloquium in Midrand. She called for a long-overdue revision of ICT policy to "help the country benefit from sustainable ICT development" for the next two decades.
But as new Cell C CEO Alan Knott-Craig pointed out: "In the early 1970s, South Africa was rated number five in the world or certainly in the top 10. We were certainly number one in Africa. We are now 73rd in the world and going backwards. And we are no longer number one in Africa." Knott-Craig, the former Vodacom chief, said broadband costs have to be halved.
The only innovation in cost and broadband provision is by the cellular operators, who must effectively build a new network every year to keep pace with increased consumer demand.
But they are running out of spectrum - the highly contested radio frequencies used for fast wireless broadband using 4G, or long-term evolution. This remains unused by Sentech, which will never have the money needed and has proved itself incompetent at anything more than disseminating TV and radio signals.
Pule promised a policy on spectrum by as early as next month and appealed for patience as "whatever process we undertake must benefit all South Africans".
Yeah right. The only beneficiaries are Telkom and Sentech, the bottlenecks in fixed-line broadband.
http://www.businesslive.co.za/south...2/04/21/it-s-simple-telkom-keeps-the-costs-up
With announcements on new undersea cable and plans to rejuvenate telecoms policy, South Africans can be forgiven for wondering when landline broadband costs will come down.
Although the ICT industry is complex, the solution is simple. Everywhere else fixed-line internet is a cheap and abundant enabler of the information economy. But in South Africa broadband costs are among the world's highest.
High prices are caused by a problem with the last mile, the local loop. This is the piece of copper from an exchange to a home or work premises, which Telkom controls exclusively.
Simply put, the problem with the cost of internet access is Telkom. The national telecoms utility is a mess - less of a mess since Pinky Moholi took over as group CEO, but still a mess.
Telkom cannot make money from its own network. It cannot make money letting its own lines before it adds the other services, like phone calls or internet access. T he access deficit appears to be the reason why Telkom is stalling local-loop unbundling that would give other service providers direct access to its customers.
But while Telkom fiddles, other technologies are eclipsing copper, which has reached its speed limits.
Fibre to the home (FTTH) is used extensively around the world to provide the much faster speeds needed for the next generation of much more data-intensive internet services, especially video.
Larger internet service providers, like Internet Solutions and MWeb, and the cellular operators and privately owned fibre supplier Dark Fibre Africa, have advanced fibre networks. Smaller operations like Atec, which wired up suburbs like Cape Town's Clifton, can provide FTTH. Why can Telkom not? Why has Telkom's major shareholder, the government, let this national asset stagnate? As it did with telecoms supplier Sentech?
Perhaps the government does not understand the telecoms industry? It is impossible to say because of the opaque muddle of telecoms policy, the revolving-door policy on communications ministers and nearly two decades of abusing citizens' wallets.
This week, Communications Minister Dina Pule held a hastily arranged policy colloquium in Midrand. She called for a long-overdue revision of ICT policy to "help the country benefit from sustainable ICT development" for the next two decades.
But as new Cell C CEO Alan Knott-Craig pointed out: "In the early 1970s, South Africa was rated number five in the world or certainly in the top 10. We were certainly number one in Africa. We are now 73rd in the world and going backwards. And we are no longer number one in Africa." Knott-Craig, the former Vodacom chief, said broadband costs have to be halved.
The only innovation in cost and broadband provision is by the cellular operators, who must effectively build a new network every year to keep pace with increased consumer demand.
But they are running out of spectrum - the highly contested radio frequencies used for fast wireless broadband using 4G, or long-term evolution. This remains unused by Sentech, which will never have the money needed and has proved itself incompetent at anything more than disseminating TV and radio signals.
Pule promised a policy on spectrum by as early as next month and appealed for patience as "whatever process we undertake must benefit all South Africans".
Yeah right. The only beneficiaries are Telkom and Sentech, the bottlenecks in fixed-line broadband.
http://www.businesslive.co.za/south...2/04/21/it-s-simple-telkom-keeps-the-costs-up
