Tech4Africa Broadband Discussion

So Tech4Africa kicked off today and I must say that it has been a phenomenal experience so far. The programme is outstanding and I picked up a couple of golden nuggets during some of the sessions.

However, I had a good giggle during the #bandwidth session - a panel discussion about the state of play of broadband.

There were some really good points made by some of the panel members. Already South Africa has seen a drop in wholesale broadband prices of some 60% - although this is sadly not always translated into savings for the end user.

A very interesting observation from Stafford Masie was that it is inevitable that we'll have a Pan African open access network focusing on content somewhere down the line. He also believe that there needs to be a shift in mindset from an operator perspective and that they need to look at diversifying their revenues and focus more on content.

He also made the point that there needs to be a lot more cooperation. Between the different players locally, with international players and with government. As an industry we need to move away from the silo approach and where regulatory issues are standing in the way of progress, this needs to be addressed as an industry rather than by individual organisations. Wireless is a crucial technology in providing connectivity to under-serviced areas and there are a number of issues standing in the way of rolling this out effectively, including spectrum allocation. But in order for private sector to play any roll in speeding up regulatory bottlenecks, the industry needs to ensure that there is a cohesive body that communicates back to government.

Masie refers to the South African government as being a vending machine - you deposit your money and expect to get something back (a service). If it doesn't come, you shake the machine to try and speed up delivery of what you have paid for (toy-toy) until you get it.

He does however insist that we remain far too focused on the physical connection rather than on content and the ARPUs are just not there. What SA operators need is a clear vision and strategy around content as this is where they were truly start adding value to their customers. One pitfall here, however is the way in which SA last mile providers are engaging with international content owners. Masie describes this as being predatory - we are so focused on getting exclusivity that we lose sight of the importance of having it and strip all benefits away from the content owners - and then we wonder why we are not getting the content we want.

What made me giggle however, was a comment from a mobile operator. Having been involved in the industry for let's say 10 years, I recall the discussion among operators moving to data a while ago. For years we have been talking about data being the core focus, data being the financial driver and voice being the breathing space for networks. The biggest joke is then when one of the biggest local mobile operators admit that mobile data has exceeded voice already but that the mobile networks are built for voice and that is why we have data issues and high data costs.

Funny - if the discussion started years ago, why did we not start preparing our networks for it sooner? Just asking...