Out on the town
And it is the Cape tourism mecca of Knysna that is leading its larger urban rivals in the race to provide wireless telecoms and Internet facilities to residents and visitors. Municipal officials are ambitious.
Knysna’s director of finance, Grant Easton, even speaks of residents watching the 2010 soccer World Cup over their cellphones using the town’s network. Knysna is creating a Wi-Fi network that provides free Internet access to residents. The service will not be free for long but Knysna plans to charge only after the first 45 minutes’ usage.
SA’s larger cities are starting to catch up. Cape Town is planning to offer a free telephony service for local calls before the end of 2008. The mother city is already providing free Internet access through its libraries. The telephony service will initially run between Cape Town’s libraries and clinics but Douglas Gelderbloem, the city’s infrastructure manager, wants to connect residents directly to each other.
eThekwini (Durban) is thinking about offering a similar service to its residents and is testing an Internet based voice service.
Tshwane (Pretoria) has an entrepreneur in one of its townships, Soshanguve, using its network to offer an Internet service.
There are even talks between Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni (East Rand) to form a “Gauteng-wide” integrated network, says Herklaas du Plessis, Johannesburg’s deputy director of IT.
Municipalities insist, however, that their activities in the telecom arena are not meant to challenge telecom operators. “This is not about IT, it’s about local economic development,” says Easton. He explains that Knysna’s limited resources forced it to embrace technology and cut the costs of telecom services. Easton says Knysna’s network also creates a platform for entrepreneurs to run Internet-based businesses.
“It’s irresponsible for cities not to invest in providing some kind of broadband service for their residents,” says Denis Smit, MD of technology analysts BMI-TechKnowledge. Smit points to a PricewaterhouseCoopers study of EU countries which showed that for every E1 invested in broadband, there was a return of E 1,70 in urban and E 1,30 in rural areas.
Despite the evidence of economic benefits, SA municipalities have not exactly rushed to provide broadband services.Telkom’s insistence that the act allows local governments to operate networks only on "one piece of private land" has led municipalities to be cautious about setting up their own infrastructure.
The exception is Knysna, which decided to provide its own network anyway. Easton points out that Knysna has the backing of telecom regulator Icasa and the parliamentary committee on communications. Despite a few murmurs from Telkom, it took no action. Knysna’s boldness has since been vindicated, with Johannesburg getting Icasa to rule that a municipal area is “one piece” of land.
Municipalities already enjoy substantial savings on their phone bills as they have since set up their own internal telephone networks. Cape Town says it expects to save about R40m/year once its network is installed, while savings in eThekwini and Johannesburg enabled these cities to recoup the costs of building their own networks within four months.
Telkom has softened its stance. At a recent conference on digital cities, which it sponsored, it indicated it would work with municipalities. “We could eventually partner Telkom,” Du Plessis says.
Smit say the biggest obstacle for these municipal networks is a “lack of political will”. So far, it has been municipal officials rather than politicians who have driven the process. Du Plessis says this is changing as mayors and councillors are backing the development of local networks. “The political buy-in is there,” he says.
The urban initiatives will complement the increasing number of commercial hotspots offered by individual businesses such as hotels, conference centres and even restaurants.
Inet-Bridge
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