Commentators have often called for Dr Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri to go, meaning that she should exit her position as Minister of Communications. It hasn’t happened. Instead, she’s got going in a different way.
Her Department of Communications is now trotting along at a respectable pace that can only be good news for the internet and associated media growth in South Africa.
This is despite its disputes with Post Office personnel, and its website still having too many dead links. It is also despite delays in the promised broadcasting digital migration policy that was due to be gazetted three weeks back.
The department blames part of the delay on the public-sector strike at the government printers, and some observers think the relevant gazette will be out any day. There shouldn’t be surprises, though, because a draft was already widely debated and several key decisions already made.
Some of these are evident in the minister’s recent eight policy decisions and eight policy directives — for which final public comment is due next week. As the 16 points are not contentious, it’s highly likely they’ll then be implemented.
Among the more significant steps are:
- From November 1, terminating Telkom’s monopoly on undersea international connectivity — by getting the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) to declare this an essential facility and to start setting its pricing.
- Directing Icasa to let comms operators set up their own infrastructure (instead of having to use Telkom, as is mainly the case right now).
- Ending Telkom’s monopoly on the ”local loop” between customers and their local exchange by letting competitors use the company’s wires to provide cheaper voice and internet services to homes and businesses. Although Telkom will still own the cable, this facility will now have to be unbundled into a separate body with its own cost-centre. And via this entity, the infrastructure will have to be leased on a parallel basis, or sold wholesale, to Telkom rivals — at Icasa-approved rates.
Some of Matsepe-Casaburri’s recent policy decisions also affect especially the lower ranks of the market. An example is post offices becoming multipurpose information centres served with wireless broadband through state-owned Sentech.
Combined with her other measures, the effect will be, as she has expressed it, that citizens who today are ”nobody@nowhere” will be able to be ”somebody@somewhere”.
And while the final policy document on digital migration is stuck in some pipeline, the minister has taken a strategy document on the topic through the Cabinet. It is now agreed that in November 2008 will start a three-year period for TV broadcasting to switch to digital distribution.
The significance will be multiple: better-quality images, freeing up frequencies for more channels, and the rise of incidental services such as e-commerce and electronic programme guides via digitally enabled TV sets.
The change will also provide for a mediascape of 16 national terrestrial channels looking something like this:
- five for the South African Broadcasting Corporation (and a probable scrapping of the licence fee);
- two for e.tv;
- three for M-Net (two subscription, one being a ”public access channel”);
- three ”regional language channels” accessible nationally — probably privately owned; and
- three public channels for ”developmental purposes” such as health, education, sport, business development and youth.
Meanwhile, the digital migration requires Icasa to move forward a frequency plan that will reapportion which airwaves are to be used for digital broadcast and which for wireless broadband and cellular telephony.
In turn, this probably means that although the licensing of new subscription-TV services by Icasa is continuing apace, any new operator that wants to use spectrum will probably have to wait until 2009 before actually broadcasting.
Anticipate an outcry by newcomers and consumers alike, but it doesn’t make sense for the newly licensed players to start transmission only to switch frequency a year later.
Meanwhile, the minister has also ruled in her recent policy decisions that broadcasting to cellphones will use a common standard, DVB-H. Another good thing is her ruling that the players in this sector, such as MTN and Vodacom, will have to run a single and open-access national network for TV on handheld devices.
Also significantly symbolically, the minister has persuaded the Cabinet to approve a vision for ”the establishment of South Africa as an advanced information society in which information and information and communication technology tools are key drivers of economic and societal development”.
Between her department’s policy and actual implementation are still myriad practical hurdles to be overcome. But, for now at least, Matsepe-Casaburri has stilled the fiercest of her critics, and South Africans can finally focus on communications lift-off.