SA in jeopardy - again

The Department of Communications' attempts to derail Seacom's undersea cable is yet another prime example of how little it understands about, erm, communications, and why SA needs communications as urgently as it does. SA, to put it as bluntly as I can and still remain printable, is in dire, desperate and critical need of affordable bandwidth.

The Seacom cable, which can give Tenet bandwidth for local research and academic institutions at 500 times less than it is paying Telkom, is furthest along on the road to reality. The government's proposed cables, and the Nepad and Eassy cables, are all on paper at the moment, and will hopefully become real soon. In the interim, we need the Seacom cable, and we need it now.

The ISPs and VANs need an alternative supplier. The call centre and BPO market, which the government has high hopes for, needs the cable. SA is still losing business because our telecommunications costs are too high, and because there is no redundancy as far as our international links go. Local businesses need affordable communications. In today's global economy if you are not online you are nowhere.

Yet government still persists in controlling the market, and in believing this control is best for the country. Let me dredge my crystal ball out and look back to a past where sanity prevailed, and our telecommunications environment was fully deregulated as we all hoped it would be.

Government still persists in controlling the [telecommunications] market, and in believing this control is best for the country.

Samantha Perry, features editor, ITWeb

Today, we would have free local phone calls. Today, we would have all the undersea cables we need. We would not be paying more for broadband than Mauritius does. We would not be sitting jealously glaring at friends in the UK who get more bandwidth than we've ever dreamed of for the equivalent of the R300-odd we pay for capped ADSL services.

We would have businesses that could communicate, innovate and compete at high-speed, growing locally and internationally, training staff, empowering communities, and decreasing the unemployment rate. We wouldn't have all our graduates walking out the door to countries where life isn't as cheap, and jobs not as scarce. We may even be congratulating Telkom on turning itself around and becoming a responsible wholesale infrastructure provider a la BT.

We would certainly have seen Neotel launch a host of services, and then seen its competitors launch. The initial 15% price drops introduced by Neotel would have been replaced by 40% price decreases as the third, fourth and fifth operators joined the party. And we would, today, be sitting with a thriving telecoms sector, where competition to capture market-share and customer loyalty sees companies innovating on the product and services front as fast as possible.

Instead, we sit, waiting. Still.

I would hate for someone to total up the rand value of what the economy has lost as a result of the unliberalised telecommunications sector. I suspect the size of the figure would give more than a few of us a short, sharp and extremely unpleasant view of what Telkom and the government have really cost their country and their people. I can only hope that sanity will prevail soon, and control of the telecommunications market will be handed over to the market, as it should be.