a private telecommunications network (ptn) license would be needed in that situation
As a business that can't afford to have Telkom simply cut your lines, I would not advise you to cut through roads and advertise it with a board besides the pavement that says:
"Openly defying Icasa's interpretation of Act.96/Convergence bill". My angle is the cooperative community model where everybody will share the virtually unlimited local loop bandwidth of a fiber connection. The media discussion concerning telecoms liberalization are from the angle of a commercial venture who must have a viable business model and thus needs legal clarity. So just one very good reason for needing a PTN would be to resell bandwidth to business in such a way that Telkom can't take retribution against them, not because the police will hunt down the person who laid the fiber across the road.
From a civil legal viewpoint, I don't forsee local councils providing anybody with written permission to cut through roads, since Telkom's legal department will contact them. But since it is their roads, if they don't activly forbid us then
we could do what we want.
Here is a practical way to get this going.
Look at the picture on my blog to follow the description below. Instead of cutting through the road span a single twisted pair copper wire across the road perpendicular to the road from rooftop to rooftop. A
www.zyxel.com VDSL Dslam, provides 50meg downstream/30meg upsream at a distance of 1.5km. Eight VDSL modems connect's to a single port.
An 8-port Dlsam costs $1000. A VDSL modem is around $150. 30meg is enough for 20 M-peg4 streams. Gradually the suspended wire will be replaced piecewise with fiber/copper underground and under the tar road. Temporary Utp/fiber will be used etc. All along this backbone Wi-fi parabolics stream their data/video etc to it. This is
a hybrid solution, combining wi-fi and fixed wire copper/gigabyte/dslam/fiber.
The option of communities simply building their own telephone exchanges are not even considered in the media. Sure it is a grey legal area, but once these networks become entreched, how would one 'ban' them? We must usher in change,we must change the law. South-Africa is not Russia, there is a lot we can do to upset the applecart without getting zapped.
And dominic no I have not deleted anything, I edited my post but in such a way that your quote of me is accurate. I just numbered the stuff to make my points clearer.
