Country coverage
A weekend trip to Magoebaskloof near Haenertsburg in Limpopo got me thinking about the good work that MTN and Vodacom have done in extending connectivity — telephony and Internet access — into SA’s rural areas.
In 1997, Telkom was given a five-year monopoly by government to get telephone lines to parts of the country that previously had no communications coverage. The apartheid government had provided telephone service mainly to formerly white areas in the towns and cities and had largely neglected to extend lines into townships and the country’s poorer, more outlying areas.
Government’s objective was noble: give Telkom a short period of exclusivity during which time it is mandated to address the inequalities of the past by quickly offering millions of new lines to black communities.
Telkom’s foreign shareholders at the time, SBC (now AT&T) of the US and Telekom Malaysia, were given the unenviable task of setting up 2,8m new lines in five years and ensuring that Telkom’s network was fully digitalised. They did this, but, unfortunately, used their monopoly to ram through big price increases.
Telkom went through the necessary process of rebalancing its local and international tariffs — local calls were being subsidised by expensive international calls — but the shareholders also exploited the company’s monopoly by charging sky-high prices for local and international bandwidth. And local call prices more than doubled.
The result was that many of the new lines provided by Telkom were cut off. Poorer consumers — the very people Telkom was meant to be helping — found they couldn’t afford the company’s high tariffs.
At the same time, though, MTN and Vodacom, which had been operating commercially for only three years, were quietly putting up cellular base stations throughout the cities and towns and, importantly, in outlying areas. In 1997, the two operators had barely 1m subscribers between them; today, it is estimated that more than three in every four South Africans — men, women and children — own a cellphone. There are about seven times as many cellphones in use in SA as there are fixed lines.
Government did not realise it at the time, but it was not going to be Telkom that provided the sort of ubiquitous communications coverage that it wanted, but rather two companies that it lorded over much less: MTN and Vodacom.
During my visit to Magoebaskloof, I had to do some work, which involved being online to do research on the Web and sending and receiving e-mail. Sitting in a picturesque setting in the forests outside Haenertsburg, I dialled up to the Internet using GPRS — 3G hasn’t reached that part of the world (yet) — and was online, connected to the world.
Because MTN and Vodacom have slashed their data access prices in recent years — the cost per megabyte to access the Internet from a cellphone is less than 1% of what it was a few years ago — I didn’t think twice about downloading e-mails with large attachments.
That got me thinking: though many people in SA’s rural communities use cellphones, they tend to be rudimentary handsets capable of little more than making and receiving voice calls. They are not suited for browsing the Web. Smartphones with Web browsers and e-mail software are expensive. Given the power of the Web as an information, education and business tool, that’s a great pity.
I expect that handset manufacturers such as Nokia and Motorola are working hard to develop more affordable handsets with large screens that can function as Internet terminals. Once available cheaply and in the hands of the poor, the mobile Web will probably uplift rural communities in ways we can’t even imagine today.
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