With the ADSL hearings comming up soon and MyADSL looking for what people want them to present at the hearings it caused me to start thinking – what would bring affordable communications to South Africa – especially in the broadband arena?
With Skype recently announcing that calls from within the US and Canada were going to be free to landline and other numbers in those two countries. Now while that might be only be until the end of the year it proves that in the US costs are so low that a company can affrod a drop in revenue to offer one of it’s primes sources of revenue for free – no conditions.
So what would I do here at home? Well firstly a completely free market would be preferable … but naturally that isn’t exactly an option because we can’t just let anyone start laying cables all around the country – so now what?
Well I can’t exactly say that I know that laws in the US but it seems that there is alot more competiton there and in other countries, so. Basically what would be the most preferable (in my, very unqualified, opinion) is that any company who holds the correct – easily accesible – licence can then hire out their infrastructure to other companies. It is quite simply the ‘perfect’ senario – alot of little companies competing against each other.
So what to do about the Telkom, the tyrant – oppresor of our online and telecoms rights-in-chief. Simple – split it up – prehaps 9 little companies, one in each province, each owning Telkom’s infrastructure in that province – with a central company managing connections between them and all others which would be able to spring up under new ledgislation.
South Africa needs telecoms for growth – it is the biggest industry we are currently loosing out on. Not telecoms – but online businesses, how many web2.0 companies do we have? And of those how many of them host their services overseas?
I give our goverment 2 options – nationalise or split – as a national company Telkom could be forced to offer cheaper products … but more preferably split up, South Africans would have the world of opportunity.
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. So I re-installed the Videora iPod converter which has worked for other people I know and I am in the process of converting a 40 minute long piece of video – let's see what happens. Ok – it works! 
and that I am also working on another CMS, although this one is very specialised and will not be released (it is designed for a certain website which needs something particular – nothing else out there seems to be what we want and my main CMS is not what we need – yet). 
. Until next time.
