The Western Cape government is forging ahead with its broadband initiative, which aims to span the province with a high-speed network over the next 10 years, and has called on industry to provide ideas around what it should be doing in the content creation space.
Marc Cloete, portfolio manager of the broadband initiative at the Western Cape government, says, in order to maximise the economic benefits of the under way infrastructure component of the project, the strategy requires concurrent focus on broadband readiness (skills) and usage.
"One of the interventions to address these latter issues relates to online content creation, curation and distribution, so we are trying to engage the content industry to gather their views about what government can do or should be doing in this space," says Cloete.
To this end, the government recently published a request for information (RFI), which can be completed online, with the closing date for responses being 15 October.
Cloete says, while companies involved in the skills, education, animation, gaming and music areas will be particularly relevant in responding to the RFI, anyone is free to offer their views. "There are undoubtedly some creative ideas and models that could be applicable in the online content space and the Western Cape government is eager to engage with these to help shape the optimal enabling environment."
Broadband partnership
In June, the Western Cape government went public with details around the public-private partnership between provincial government, second network operator Neotel and the State IT Agency (SITA) that will facilitate its broadband rollout plans.
The plan for phase one is to provide broadband to over 2 000 government sites across the province, initially with 10Mbps speeds per site and later an upgrade to 100Mbps, 1Gbps and some at 10Gbps - over a period of about three years.
Neotel CEO Sunil Joshi said in June the Western Cape government's first ask was for connectivity, and quickly. He said wireless connectivity across the province would be the first priority, followed by fibre in parallel.
The initial rollout phase includes 384 WiFi hotspots across the province. According to Western Cape premier Helen Zille, these will cover "almost every ward" in the province and government will subsidise "limited free" access for citizens.
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