Politics

Talking to South Africa's Regulators

One WISP CEO and consultant writes about a unique oppotunity to shape wireless Internet industry regulation on another continent.

by Marlon Schafer Consultant and CEO, Odessa Office [December 13, 2004]

As promised last week (see A Trip to Southern Africa), I'm doing my level best to chronicle my trip to South Africa on behalf or TRASA, an association of telecom regulators from 13 southern African nations based in Botswana. They've realized that they've over regulated the telecom industry in their countries and are determined to create a competitive environment rather than hold onto the current monopolistic environment.

I was up bright and early on Monday morning for the TRASA meeting (it was 5 pm my time when I got up). Thank goodness I'd thought to bring sleeping pills so I did get a pretty good nights sleep (so far this has proven to be a very good idea).

At slightly after 9:00 am local time the meeting got started. This meeting was mainly going to cover proposed wireless regulatory issues. It centered around a 30,000 word document, TRASA Guidelines on Wireless Technologies and Regulation. Its goal was to provide a platform for all 13 southern Africa nations (or as many as are willing to do so) to implement the same or very nearly the same regulatory environment.

The current regulatory environment is keeping costs up and expansion and innovation down. I'm paying $10 per hour for Internet access that is wireless (via my Orinoco Wi-Fi card) but runs at slow dialup speeds.

There were several speakers but myself, Uzoma C. Onyeije, Senior Legal Advisor, Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, and Mike Leach, who is Policy Advisor, Department of Trade and Industry in the UK, were the main ones to talk either from stage or during general discussions.

The first speakers from TRASA talked about how wireless would help reduce or eliminate a lot of the problems that they have in country. Things like no local calling within country, high equipment and construction costs for traditional infrastructure and a lack of diversity in services and/or service providers in the market.

They talked about how expensive satellite access is in the region. I brought up the idea that most traffic normally stays in country and that better/more local infrastructure would likely not mean as much additional incoming bandwidth as one may think.

This was then that I was given a lesson in how things work here in southern Africa. There are only ten interconnect points in the whole southern Africa region. All traffic has to run through them and the cost to connect to them is very high. Because the costs are so high (a domain could be $1000 US dollars per year) it's not unusual to see servers containing local-oriented content sitting in the UK or US.