Long-awaited legislation to allow schools cheaper access to the Internet has been approved – more than four years after the Department of Education and the Department of Communications introduced the idea in a policy document.
A bungle involving the departments and telephony parastatal Telkom has delayed the introduction of an e-rate, a discounted rate for Internet services. This has deprived a generation of poor young South Africans of the benefits of the Internet, ranging from using e-mail to learning how to access and organise the information available on the Web.
The departments presented the e-rate as far back as November 2001 in a document entitled Strategy for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Education.
In subsequent documents – for example the Department of Education’s plan to tackle the crisis in maths, science and technology – it also identified ICT as critical in “bridging the digital divide” and talked about introducing an e-rate to schools that cannot afford steep monthly costs associated with operating an Internet facility.
But President Thabo Mbeki only signed the law to make the e-rate a reality last month.
According to Section 73 of the Electronic Communications Act: “Internet services, provided to all public schools..and all public further education and training institutions, must be provided at a minimum discounted rate of 50% of the total charge levied by the licensee providing Internet services to such institutions.”
Richard Mantu, spokesperson for the Department of Communications, said: “All that is left now is that stakeholders [Telkom and Internet service providers] to start implementing the e-rate.”
In the absence of the Electronic Communications Act, schools had to pay a premium as Telkom continued charging Internet service providers the normal rates. In turn, they had no option but to “pass this on to the end-users” (schools), as a discount did not make business sense.
E-School Network (ESN), an outfit representing 1 800 farm and church schools, was formed in 2004 to tackle the issue of affordable Internet access. It has been lobbying the government to clear all obstacles to ensure the full implementation of the e-rate.
“We are certainly pleased that finally this has been signed into law. What it means is that previously disadvantaged schools would now have an access to Internet facility. We just hope the implementation does not take long to happen. It must take place soon,”said Jenny King, director of ESN.
King said the delay in implementing the e-rate means a number of schools in disadvantaged communities were lagging behind their well-resourced urban counterparts in ICT programmes.
“f we don’t get these schools to be connected to the Internet they will be hugely disadvantaged. We should be levelling the playing field so that rural schools could also benefit from these technological innovations,” said King.
She said her organisation believed that the technical infrastructure should be developed so that it would be easy to install the latest broadband Internet facilities, which are faster, saved time and costs and are available seven days a week.
King said costs for broadband were fixed to enable schools to budget adequately and with e-rate, savings could be substantial.
“At the moment most schools use a dial-up connection, which is expensive to maintain, slow to connect and also takes time to download,” said King. Because of the way this (dial-up) is configured, costs vary and this makes it difficult for schools to budget properly.
Attempts by the Teacher to find out who was to blame for the delay in the implementation of the e-rate, yielded conflicting views from the key players.
The Department of Education said it would be inappropriate to comment as the project involved other parties such as the Department of Communications and Telkom.
Ashwin Syme, media liaison officer for the Deputy Minister of Education, said the issue of implementation was discussed but it was felt “because this is a joint process between the eduction department, Telkom and other stakeholders, it would not be appropriate for the department to comment before the whole process is finalised”.
In reply, Telkom said it had “provided an e-rate to schools for which we have received official documentation that qualifies schools to receive the e-rate in terms of the Telecommunication Act as amended”.
The parastatal blamed the delay in the implementation of the e-rate on the education department. It said what caused delays in providing the e-rate to schools “is the accreditation of those schools by the department that would qualify those schools for e-rate in terms of the Telecommunications Act as amended”.