SA’s broadband future
This technology should theoretically be able to connect everybody within a 50km radius – in other words the whole of Johannesburg and half of Pretoria – with a single base station.
Telkom said earlier this week that it had successfully trialled WiMAX with Intel, and this would in future complement its deployment of copper-based broadband ADSL.
Barrett said apart from Telkom having completed its trial, the State IT Agency (SITA) had also selected WiMAX to deploy broadband to rural areas.
Although Barrett acknowledged South Africa’s low penetration levels of PCs and internet connectivity, he said the county had made some “good progress” on the technology front – citing the more than 50% penetration of mobile phones as one example.
But, he warned: “Competition in the digital area is not about standing still”. Barrett believes a connected society cannot be achieved without the three pillars – citizens, government and business – working together to achieve it. He’s confident the country can see progress if this happens, qualifying that WiMAX can be a relatively inexpensive technology to implement if there’s competition.
Head of Intel’s sub-Saharan Africa operations Jacques van Schalkwyk said it was working with “multiple enablers” in South Africa on this score. Everybody was waiting for the spectrum to be allocated, which would enable this competitive environment we talk about, he said.
Barrett said SA compared fairly well on the various measures like the World Economic Forum’s ‘Network Readiness’ index and The Economist’s ‘e-Readiness’ index, coming in the top third in the former and mid-way in the latter. Things were “relatively positive and moving in the right direction”, but there was still lots of room for improvement, he said.
The 66-year old Barrett, who’s been with Intel since 1974 and became CEO in 1993, and chairman in May this year, was in South Africa for the first time since the late 1990’s.
Barrett said he travelled to 30 countries a year and had come to South Africa this time not for any special event, but rather to “see what’s happening here”, as a fast growing region and the hub of sub-Saharan Africa. He did, however, also donate a supercomputer worth more than $1m to the Merake Institute for medical research on HIV / AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis while at a presentation in Sandton on Thursday late afternoon.
Barrett was surprisingly well-versed on the dynamics of the South African environment, but shied away from political questions like black economic empowerment and refused to be drawn into any overly critical commentary on the country’s widely acknowledged slow pace of deregulation.
Instead he said merely it was important for any growing economy to have access to affordable connectivity.
Barrett said technology was the increasingly backbone of everything, and economies were driven by knowledge-based industries. He emphasised the importance of education and of spending money on research and development. “If you do this well, you get growth, if you don’t, you get stagnation or fall behind the rest of the world,” he said.
He also urged the South African government to take the lead in rolling out services electronically, and to design policies to support to development of new technologies.
Asked for his views on whether the technology market was again becoming over-heated, he said the IT bubble had occurred specifically because of unrealistic stock price valuations.
The only share currently trading on bubble valuations was Google, but that was an isolated scenario based on people’s views of its growth potential. As far as the PC market was concerned, he said this was growing at about 10% to 15% a year. Barrett said much of this growth was being driven out of developing countries, which had low PC penetration. “I don’t see any of the dynamics of the 1990’s”.
Source: http://www.moneyweb.co.za
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