South Africa: Telecoms ‘Gold Rush’ Leaves Nothing for Masses - ICASA

This press release was widely distributed online and appeared on Allafrica.com amongst others, from where I reproduce it, with full credits intact. This of course ties in with my previous posts regarding the fragile socio-political dynamics of the South African internet/web 2.0/technology sector and the many challenges faced by all who hope to make a meaningful contribution in this space.

Telecoms ‘Gold Rush’ Leaves Nothing for Masses - ICASA
Business Day (Johannesburg)
NEWS
24 July 2008
Posted to the web 24 July 2008

By Lesley Stones
Johannesburg

THE telecommunications sector is becoming a new gold rush where large white-owned companies pocket the wealth and leave nothing for the masses, says the chairman of the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa).

The lowest rungs of society would be alienated if the regulator did not actively demand a greater role for black people in the industry, said chairman Paris Mashile. That is why Icasa would insist new licences for scarce spectrum went to companies that were 51% black-owned.

Speaking during a conference staged by Internet Solutions this week, Mashile defended Icasa’s decision to make empowerment a more important criterion than skills or cash to build a telecoms network,

Demanding 51% black ownership “isn’t outside the law” and the aim was to empower black people to start their own businesses rather than just take a stake in a successful white operator. White firms that sold equity to black people without relinquishing control were merely performing “empowerment gimmicks”, he said.

The high black profile is a condition for six new licences to use a high-speed wireless technology called WiMax, and each licence will allocate 20MHz of spectrum. That decision has also angered the industry, with many voice and data carriers saying 30MHz is needed to build a cost-effective network.

Telkom’s chief technical officer Thami Msimango said giving licences to one-man shows would not benefit the country. “People who can afford to roll out infrastructure should be given that spectrum,” he said.

Vodacom CEO Alan Knott-Craig said true empowerment would be achieved by giving everyone access to affordable telephony and internet services, not by favouring operators owned by the previously disadvantaged. Vodacom could extend its network for two-thirds of the current cost if it had more spectrum, and it would pass the savings on to consumers by cutting the cost of calls, he said.

Mashile said there were ways of using 20MHz of spectrum efficiently, and operators just wanted as much as they could get simply to deprive other companies of that resource.

The unwelcome licensing criteria were set out after Icasa distilled a wide range of comments from the industry. It has repeatedly said the conditions are final, but has called for another round of comments.

Mashile said he would be happy to see companies build their own network infrastructure, as long as they were aware of the risks. ” We will open up for whoever wants to burn his money in this market - it’s up to them to take on the big guys and live with the consequences.”

Copyright © 2008 Business Day. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com)

Tags: access, africa, BEE, black economic empowerment, competition, culture, empowerment, ICT, infrastructure, internet, politics, resources, south africa, telecommunications

Morphic resonance, (mistaken) IP infringement and how to build a web app in four days…!

TechCrunch has a story up about the ins-and-outs of building a web application in three four days with little to no money. These days with open source tools and web-two-point-owe type open APIs and frameworks, it is easy for a dedicated team of developers, designers and PR/marketing people to bring out something that may just be the next hit of the social media world. Guy Kawasaki knows all about this with Truemors and Alltop. The flipside of that coin, however, is that there will be a proliferation of so many social networking/web-two-point-owe type of tools and sites to choose from, it will be hard to distinguish which ones are worth engaging with or signing up for and which ones will just be contributing to social networking fatigue

Already there is a movement in the direction of lifestream aggregators like Friendfeed and planet type services that pull all your scattered web services and networks you belong to into one central space. That is of course the main raison d’etre for this very blog of mine where I can pull everything together under one roof and my own namespace. Of course the process takes time and effort and it becomes yet another modality to manage and nurture and maintain if you wanna establish a credible and/or professional web presence.

Speaking of lifestream and web aggregator services, the South African blogosphere temporarily experienced a little uproar when Justin Hartman, one of the co-founders of Afrigator.com, blogged about a new RSS aggregator service called regator.com that received some press and buzz over at TechCrunch , Mashable and ReadWriteWeb. Justin and the co-founders and many of the SA bloggerati felt there was a possible case of IP infringement since the logo, name and colorscheme is basically identical to the Afrigator.com properties’ own brand assets. A flurry of comments on Justin’s blog was followed by one of the co-founders of Regator.com posting a comment and basically playing very nice and dispelling any fears and suspicions of foul play or malicious intent. It is a play on aggregator, since it is an aggregation RSS service, alligator seemed a natural and fun mascot, alligators are green, and the top level dot com domain name was available, hence regator.com. It all seems to be a major coincidence and case of morphic resonance and Justin has decided to check out the beta version of regator.com just to set his own mind at ease.

Afrigator.com of course is also an example of how a web app can be put together with enough skill, dedication and ingenuity from the right people combined in a good, efficient team. It is a South African made aggregation service where people submit the best blogs from within South Africa and the rest of Africa and the ones with the most buzz around it (algorithm, algorithm) kind of floats to the top a la digg or techmeme. ReadWriteWeb did an excellent round-up and hat tip to local South African web dev skills last November and this very story also featured in yesterdays uproar about the regator copyright infringement case.

Update, July 05, 2008, 07:30 UTC +2: Scott Lockhart, co-founder of regator.com commented on my blog post about the misunderstanding about them infringeing coincidentally using the same mascot, colorscheme and similar sounding domain name as local aggregator service Afrigator.com I appreciate the effort Scott has gone through to do damage control and set minds at ease and convince evceryone involved of their bona fides and that they really were not aware of Afrigator before yesterday. He also pointed me to Justin’s update and that Justin went over and got access to their entire operation to see that intentions were good. Stii, one of the Afrigator.com co-founders, also did a very diplomatic post and put a nice positive twist on the whole saga.

Tags: africa, afrigator, branding, business, copyright infringement, intellectual property, lifestream aggregator, marketing, readwriteweb, regator, social networking fatique, South African bloggerati, strategy, techcrunch, webdevelopment