Grinning through my road rage
IT HAPPENS every time I go overseas and experience real broadband. My Internet and e-mail use is near instantaneous. It’s truly remarkable. I find myself grinning as if the Springboks just beat the All Blacks in New Zealand for the first time in a decade all over again.
I once made a fool of myself at a conference in Barcelona by gaping at how fast large picture files downloaded. The Italian journalist sitting next to me in the media centre looked at me as if I’d only just discovered electricity.
I was recently asked why South Africans don’t invent things like the social network site Facebook. Why don’t we have Google-like entrepreneurs in the country? Because we don’t have the same experience of being online as bandwidth-rich countries do.
We don’t see the Internet as a utility, like electricity, as the developed world does.
We’re in the Stone Age while the rest of the world is in at least 1974. We are truly backward. We’re in the becalmed tropics.
But Telkom’s profit margins have been doing just fine — until recently, that is, when reality started catching up with the profit- mongers in Pretoria.
A few years ago I tried to explain broadband to a neophyte using a car analogy. Dial-up is a big slow bus. Broadband is a Ferrari. I take that back. Broadband in the developed world is like Michael Schumacher driving a Ferrari. We are getting left further and further behind.
But Google opened up in South Africa, people might argue. Yeah, after they went to Eastern Europe first. What does that say about our market?
Which is why I don’t complain too much about the infernal roadworks while Neotel, Telkom, Vodacom and MTN constantly dig up the streets in Joburg. Still, it drives me as nuts as all the other road raged drivers — who hardly need stimulation to pop their repressed emotions. But I’m smiling.
Those orange tubes they are laying will soon carry super-fast Internet access. They will make our online lives faster, more exciting and, yes, YouTube videos load faster.
Broadband prices are artificially high because of one entity only. Telkom. It owns the significant share in the only undersea cable that delivers Internet access to South Africa, and therefore sets the price. Telkom sells said Internet wholesale to the other Internet service providers and sets the price.
But Telkom is just exploiting a loophole kindly created for it by legislation. That could be changed by Icasa, but the back office politics unwind any attempt by the communications regulator to enhance the online experience of us poor, miserable, broadband- deprived citizens.
Solving these problems is so mind-numbingly simple that even someone at the department of communications could understand it. Either they don’t or, worse, they do but don’t do anything about it.
President Thabo Mbeki, who has more than his share of short sightedness, certainly understands it. Every year in his state of the nation address, he specifically mentions the cost of telecoms.
Which other president specifically tells his communications minister in front of the whole country to do something about telecoms — and is then ignored?
Mbeki lambasts his own Telkom in the Financial Times, too.
So dig up the roads I say. Lay the tar three times in the street outside our Rosebank offices if you must. Make me wait in traffic for a few more months. Make us suffer these broadband growing pains, as every country has when the broadband rush has begun.
Soon I will be able to ditch my Telkom line and get real broadband, cheaply and problem-free, from a real telecoms company. One that cares about its customers. That doesn’t artificially castrate our Internet experience because of its state-sanctioned profit margins. Keep digging.
Shapshak is editor of Stuff magazine
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