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 \u2014 telephony and Internet access \u2014 into SA\u2019s rural areas.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s poorer, more outlying areas.<\/p>\n
Government\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Telkom\u2019s 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\u2019s network was fully digitalised. They did this, but, unfortunately, used their monopoly to ram through big price increases.<\/p>\n
Telkom went through the necessary process of rebalancing its local and international tariffs \u2014 local calls were being subsidised by expensive international calls \u2014 but the shareholders also exploited the company\u2019s monopoly by charging sky-high prices for local and international bandwidth. And local call prices more than doubled.<\/p>\n
The result was that many of the new lines provided by Telkom were cut off. Poorer consumers \u2014 the very people Telkom was meant to be helping \u2014 found they couldn\u2019t afford the company\u2019s high tariffs.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 men, women and children \u2014 own a cellphone. There are about seven times as many cellphones in use in SA as there are fixed lines.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 3G hasn\u2019t reached that part of the world (yet) \u2014 and was online, connected to the world.<\/p>\n
Because MTN<\/a> and Vodacom<\/a> have slashed their data access prices in recent years \u2014 the cost per megabyte to access the Internet from a cellphone is less than 1% of what it was a few years ago \u2014 I didn\u2019t think twice about downloading e-mails with large attachments.<\/p>\n That got me thinking: though many people in SA\u2019s 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\u2019s a great pity.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t even imagine today.<\/p>\n