SA needs more ICT R&D

South Africa hopes to be awarded the opportunity to develop the square kilometre array (SKA), a billion-dollar telescope that will enable researchers to access real-time data from anywhere in the world, says science and technology minister Mosibudi Mangena.

Mangena delivered a keynote address at the Southern African Telecommunications Networks and Applications Conference (Satnac) 2005 at a resort in the Drakensberg on Monday.

Mangena says in addition to playing a role in the building of the telescope, the local ICT industry would also have the opportunity to develop new inventions and innovations that will assist in decreasing the cost of connectivity. The SKA project would also present opportunities to develop a new range of wireless bandwidth applications, he says.

Mangena also reiterated government`s commitment to research and development. According to the 2003 statistics, ICT research represents only 10.5% of research and development expenditure in SA.

"We seriously need to increase our expenditure on overall R&D if we are to improve our competitiveness," he said.

A key contributor to ICT research is the Telkom centres of excellence. Formed as an alliance between the Department of Trade and Industry, ICT companies and institutions of higher learning, the centres of excellence aim to drive R&D in the ICT arena.

The centres provide ICT partners with the opportunity to fund post-graduate study and research to test technology solutions and adopt those that work. There are 16 centres of excellence undertaking various aspects of ICT research.

Included in the Satnac programme were technical sessions presented by postgraduate students for the centres of excellence. Presented in four streams, presentations included speech recognition, network engineering, telecom protocols, network planning and mobile telecom.

Telkom COO Thami Msimango emphasised the importance of the knowledge sharing process as it serves as a platform for input from other centres and industry.

One of the projects focuses on how to alleviate SMS security vulnerability by securing messages without altering the physical GSM architecture. The research is based on the use of a one-time pad to secure an SMS message for transport between a mobile devise and the serving GSM network over any medium.

Another project presents ideas on how to extend the reach of Bluetooth by introducing the concept of Bluetooth hotspots. The research looks into the feasibility of creating Bluetooth hotspots through an alternative network infrastructure such as the Internet Protocol.

The conference ends today.

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