The City of Cape Town has applied for a public telephone (PTN) licence that if awarded, will help the Mother City cut a large chunk from its annual R100 million telecommunications bill.
Nirvesh Sooful, City of Cape Town CIO, says the licence application was made to ICASA (the Independent Communications Authority of SA) about three months ago, before the August telecommunications liberalisation announcement made by communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri. He says no word has been heard from the regulator since.
"Our aim is to increase our options when negotiating with telecommunications providers and not to provide telephone services to the consumer," Sooful says.
He says the awarding of such a licence would put the municipality in a powerful bargaining position, but that it would probably not follow the example of Tshwane (Pretoria) of aiming to supply "consumer-type" telecommunications services.
The City of Cape Town pays Telkom about R74 million a year to supply voice and telecommunications services and a further R16 million is paid to other providers such as the cellular network operators.
Sooful says the telecommunications service providers treat local government and municipalities as they would any other client and do not make allowances for the fact that they have to provide basic public services and meet social obligations.
"We have about 100 primary healthcare clinics that have to use dial-up connections at the cost of R1.2 million per year. Ideally, we want them connected online all the time."
Sooful says that enhancing primary healthcare implies good and cheap ICT connectivity.
Apart from the clinics, the city also has 850 remote office sites that collect rates and taxes and offer other municipal services. Added to that are about 200 councillors and other municipal workers that have dial-up connections and a number of other specialised services, such as water treatment plants, that also have connectivity requirements.
The city also has plans to enable its public lending libraries to become payment points for other municipal services and this will need connectivity.
Sooful says the city is willing to look at various joint public/private sector partnerships. "However, if the private sector is unwilling to help us lower costs and so to meet our social obligations, then we may have to do it on our own."
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