innovation in crises - 'making your own Internet' in Hong Kong

ON sunday more than 100,000 people in Hong Kong  downloaded a free app: firechat
which allows mobile phone users to message people nearby without mobile or wifi network connections. If there is no wifi or mobile signal, Firechat uses bluetooth to create a mesh network. “Usually, the more people there are in the same location, the less connectivity you get,” says Micha Benoliel, one of the app’s creators. “But with our system, it’s the opposite.” he told the Guardian on Tuesday.  This has proved very useful in the Hong Kong Occupy movement in a context where the Internet and mobile connectivity is highly managed.

This is an example of how need drives adoption that developers need to understand much more deeply. Is your app really addressing a (really big) problem?

Mark Zuckerberg's 'rough plan' for the next five billion

By Elaine Chan and Priscilla Chan [CC-BY-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

In a CNN interview last week Mark Zuckerberg said that “one of the biggest problems of my generation is to get everyone in the world to get Internet access.” He announced a new partnership, Internet.org that aims to bring Internet access to 'the next 5 billion'. And he has a plan, or as his white paper "Is Connectivity a Human Right?", now published on facebook puts it, 'a rough plan'.

The vision is big and inclusive - its about the rest of us in those parts of the world not usually referred to in Silicon Valley press releases -  something to be welcomed. Zuckerberg was ambiguous as to whether this was a philanthropic or a commercial initiative in the CNN interview - though he tended to focus it as largely the former.  Maybe it could be described as an example of enlightened self-interest: though Zuckerberg claimed that 'the next five billion' may not be a profitable market for Facebook for a long time to come, Facebook's growth in users is now almost entirely dependent on growth in emerging markets and that is being constrained by access. Not necessarily a bad thing if you believe that getting it done matters. If we depend on philanthropy to connect the disconnected, we may wait a very long time. But clarifying this point would be helpful.

There are three areas of activity in the plan that Zuckerberg proposes to bring low cost Internet to those so far not online: 1. Reduce data costs by improving the efficiency of transmitting data between network operators and users. 2. Reduce data costs by reducing applications' data requirements. 3. Develop or expand use of new business models for no or low cost data.

1. Improving efficiency of wireless data transmission

The plan suggests that it may be possible to improve transmission efficiencies by up to ten times in the next decade. Network operators across the world need such efficiencies as the demand for data increases. Facebook's optimism on the opportunities here is encouraging. Also helpful is their support in the white paper for making use of "White Spaces" (something Google also supports). These are unused parts of licensed spectrum - for example within frequencies used for television broadcasting - that are unused but which need some management at the users' end to avoid the potential to interfere with television signals. There is a pilot project going on in South Africa supported by Google at the moment.

2. Reducing applications' appetitites for data

Those Internet users in "bandwidth poor" countries are often using many of the same applications and services that those in bandwidth rich countries are using. The (bandwidth-rich) designers and providers of those apps have been designing them largely for the bandwidth rich - commonly users on unlimited data plans. This is not a new digital divide - I've read decades old online correspondence recently of an early Africa-focused list-serve in the pre-web Internet where "irresponsible" European partners were being chastised for overloading the system with data (measured in KBs) that had cost an African partner hundreds of dollars to download. Facebook has been a leader in developing low bandwidth versions of its apps that have worked well in Africa. Their 'Facebook for Every Phone' consumes much less data than its smartphone app and is widely used in Africa (the facebook page has nearly 300 million likes).

Zuckerberg says in the plan that: "The technology behind Facebook for Every Phone is generally applicable, and we’re looking at ways to make this available so other apps can be as data efficient as well." If "we're looking at" turns into "we will" then this could be an important commitment.

3. Zero-rating data and getting pre-paid users onto contracts

Facebook has done deals in Africa with mobile operators - MTN for example - to offer free data on facebook. The service is called Facebook zero. Google has offered something similar with Freezone.  In the white paper, Facebook says that this can work as a business model for operators: "We think this model exists. We’ve already seen results where attaching free data for Facebook — what we’ve historically called zero-rating — increases both phone sales profits and data plan profits." That's interesting information. But since the launch of Facebook Zero in 2010, it doesn't seem to have extended its reach. At this stage, from my own limited research, it is not available in more than a handful of countries.

4. Two Big Questions

Will Internet.org and Zuckerberg's plan help get many more of the 5 billion connected?
What kind of Internet will they be connected to?

Zuckerberg and his corporate partners (which include Samsung and Nokia) have significant capital - both economic and political.  Its a good thing that users/consumers in poor countries are now important enough to Facebook that they are willing to focus their own and others attention on getting 'the 5 billion' connected.  The rough plan highlights opportunities - both technological and commercial - that could have significant impacts. Note though that it omits any discussion about the role of governments or regulators - important actors with a role in reducing costs and increasing access.

The plan also gives an indication of  the contest to come over what kind of Internet we will be connecting to and so the business models discussion it raises is one which those who care about Internet access and use in Africa need to focus on. Facebook Zero doesn't enable poor people to connect to the Internet as a general purpose technology, it allows people to connect to Facebook. It also places the mobile operator in the position of selecting and differentiating the terms on which a user gets different content and services. There are other industry voices - Google springs to mind - that have not joined this coalition and that have also been actively and publicly engaged on these issues. Google also has its own zero cost access model - FreeZone - which they have made available in a handful of countries including South Africa. Free access is something to be welcomed. But this is not the open web.

Internet.org may represent a significant step in organising (some) powerful actors in the Internet industry to address Internet access for the majority of the planet. Indeed unless these actors do engage with this issue it may not be possible to achieve an Internet of 'everybody connected to everybody'. As Zuckerberg puts it:

"There is no guarantee that most people will ever have access to the internet. It isn’t going to
happen by itself. But I believe connectivity is a human right, and that if we work together we
can make it a reality."

But if connectivity is a human right then it must be an inclusive one. Not all of the bandwidth poor are economically poor though many are. The industry may be able to extend the market of users through some of the innovations that Zuckerberg proposes. But universal access will take more than industry alone.

There should be a robust debate about the 'rough plan'. And that debate must include not only the Internet industry but users, non-users, governments and regulators.  We should welcome the opportunity that Zuckerberg's initiative offers but we should request - or is that demand? - that that opportunity includes engagement with the people he is seeking to connect.

Dont hold your breath for the digital dividend

Last night I heard Duncan McLeod, editor of TechCentral responding to the news that the Minister of Communications, Dina Pule, has withdrawn her appeal to a court ruling for etv in a case related to digital migration. Digital Migration offers lots of potential opportunities: more free to air television channels, more broadcasters, and a 'digital dividend' of freed-up radio spectrum currently taken up by analogue television which could be used for other purposes (bandwidth that mobile operators are particularly keen to gain access to but more on that later). In the course of the interview, Duncan suggested that if no more mistakes were made in getting DTT rolled out, it could start this year and be completed by the end of next year. The Department of Communications has been equally optimistic in predicting the time it will take from launching digital television and beginning delivery of the set top boxes required to watch it and the time that enough of the population will have switched over to enable switching off the current analogue transmitters. So is one to  two years plausible? I think not.

This chart from the International Telecommunications Union gives an indication of why. Only two European countries have succeeded in completing the process in two years. The UK began digital broadcasting the '90s and only finally switched off the last analogue transmitter last year. The ITU says that those starting later have benefitted from learnings of those who came before them but still the average time taken is around five years.

I would argue that as the current framework stands, we are likely to be slower rather than faster than average. The main driver that will determine how long it takes is how quickly audiences shift - getting a set top box and watching digital rather than analogue transmissions. This in turn is likely to depend on what additional content will be on offer on the digital platform.  etv appears to be ready to start new services immediately - it could for example make its 24 hour news channel - currently only available to DSTV subscribers - available on DTT. SABC is another story. When they presented to ICASA some time ago they stated that they would need additional funding from government in order to roll out their plans for new channels - money that has not been forthcoming. Without sufficient new channels and content, take up of set top boxes is likely to be slow.

This is bad news - for television, for mobile and especially for wireless Internet use in South Africa. The frequencies that will become available could be used for next generation mobile services like LTE but they could also be used for unlicenced wireless (like Wifi) services which could greatly expand the opportunities for cheap or free internet services.

The New Wave - Who uses the Internet in South Africa

The New Wave

Who uses the Internet in South Africa, where they use it and what they use it for.

Mobile is not the (only) answer

We launched our South African Internet report this evening at Wits Art Museum in Braamfontein. @ambio - Steve Ambrose - of StrategyWorx tweeted "Amazingly comprehensive study with suprising results."

(c) 2012,  University of Witwatersrand.

We've gone from 15% of adults using the Internet (1 in 7) in 2008 to 34% in 2012 (1in 3). As the financial ads say, past performance is not an indication of future performance, but if this rate of growth was maintained, more than 50% would be online by 2014 and 66% by 2014.

What factors will slow this growth? Price is an important factor. But not the only one and possibly not even the most important one in maintaining growth.

Our research shows that many new users (those with 2 years or less online)  are on low incomes. A third of them are living on less than R432 per month, the poverty line used in the National Development Plan. Another third are living on less than R1,500 per month.

(c) 2012, University of Wiwatersrand.

 Many of these users are using expensive mobile data. But many of them are also using shared connections, some paid for and some free: Internet Cafes, Schools, Colleges and libraries. So increases in availability of shared facilities - especially free ones - may be just as important as reductions in data costs in explaining the increases in usage we have seen. This month, for example, Mpumalanga announced that they had almost completed their goal of making free Internet available at every one of their public libraries. Mobile and shared facilities have different limitations. One lesson I have drawn from our research though is that the increased availability of Internet capable mobile phones is not the only reason that usage has increased. Shared facilities are an important part of what has enabled many South African on low incomes to gain access to the Internet.

So to see whether growth rates are going to be maintained we may need to look at issues like whether other provinces are managing to their libraries as quickly as Mpumulanga's, at whether Western Cape's successes in connecting schools is being replicated elsewhere.

The report and info graphics were published this evening at  www.networksociety.co.za. Check them out. See http://www.networksociety.co.za/Media+Resources for credits and conditions for reproducing the report and infographics.

New Research on Internet use in South Africa - The New Wave

Over the last two years I have been working on researching Internet use in South Africa in a project I started called the South African Network Society project. Working with Alison Gillwald and Christopher Stork at Research ICT Africa in Cape Town, we developed a range of questions on Internet use that were incorporated into a major survey on communications and ICTs.

 The survey was nationally representative of South African adults (if you anything about surveys you will know that this is a big deal and requires randomly selecting areas, households and individuals across the country).

For some months I've been analysing the results - with the help of Dr Mark Orkin, the former head of Statistics South Africa and a brilliant social scientist. On Tuesday we launch the report at the Wits Art Museum in Braamfontein, Johannesburg. I hope it will make a contribution to understanding who now uses the Internet, where they use it and what they use it for.

Here are some of the questions we offer some answers on:

Is the Internet more popular than newspapers in South Africa?
Are most Internet users still english speaking whites?
Is the mobile Internet really the future for South Africa?
Is the Internet reaching rural areas?
Where do people connect and what do they do when they do?
How social is the South African Internet?
What are the most important factors stopping non-users getting online?


The research was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Open Society Foundation of South Africa.

I'll be posting some of the findings here next week after the launch. If you would like to attend the launch please contact Judi Mafika  journinfo AT wits DOT ac DOT za

Is Google the World's Biggest Media Company?

Google receives almost $5 of every $10 spent on online advertising worldwide. Its total income from advertising last year was over $29bn. To put this number in perspective, the total advertising revenues of all US newspapers combined last year was less than $22bn. And the major US television networks (excluding cable and local stations) earned  $21.7 billion in advertising.

Using Neilsen estimates,  the global advertising market may  be somewhere north of $400bn so internet advertising is still a relatively small part of the total market which is still dominated by television. But television is a local business, not a global one. The global networks like CNN, Discovery and MTV are small players in the global advertising market. CNN International's advertising  for example accounted for no more than 10% of CNN's income of some $500m in 2009. And Viacom, owner of MTV which they claim as the worlds biggest television network broadcasting in over 160 countries, earned less than $1,5bn in ad revenues in 2008.

Of course advertising is not the only source of revenue for media companies - though it is the only significant source of revenue for Google. News Corp owns 20th Century Fox which makes movies which people buy at the cinema and on DVD. Sony owns a studio too - Columbia - and a music company Sony BMG which sell CDs. But music sales are in decline and for many years the film industry has been largely dependent for its profits on television sales. And looked at globally, the television business is dependent on advertising.

What appears clear is that Google is, by a long way, the biggest advertising platform in the world. And the world, at the end of 2011, is one where getting people to pay directly for the cost of generating media is getting tougher and tougher. Google, of course does not make any content. But the major businesses never made their money by making content. They made their money by aggregating audiences. And Google is now the greatest audience aggregator in human history and the first truly global one.

south africa is not keeping up!

In discussing internet connectivity I've used the analogy of the development of the global train network in the 19th Century before. What the analogy helps to bring to the fore is how connectivity is important not only in absolute but in relative terms. Towns or countries that didn't get connected, started to be disadvantaged relative to those that did. In the case of trains, a major impact was on enabling trade (or not). In the case of the internet,  its enabling communication, social networks and transfers of knowledge, ideas and information.



So the issue of internet connectivity in South Africa is not (just) how far are we in getting people connected, and at what speed and price, but how connected are we in comparison to other countries. The graph above is based on World Bank data up to 2008. It shows the number of people connected per hundred people. In 1999, South Africa sat at 4.2 people per hundred, close to  the world median of 4.7 per hundred. But by 2008, though the density of connections had more than doubled, South Africa's comparative performance vs the world had fallen to little more than a third of the world's internet density, with a lower figure than many other countries in the continent, including Zimbabwe, and about the same as the West Bank and Gaza.

As concerning is the rate of growth. The steepness of the line running through 2008 shows the growth rate up to that time and South Africa's was slower than any of the other African countries shown in the chart. A recent study by World Wide Works indicates that this growth rate may have picked up recently, and the introduction of uncapped access also give some hope for an improvement but this is now off a low (comparative) base.

Why Keeping Up Matters
Ive written before on why connectivity matters to development. But the graph itself offers a great example of why this matters. It was generated using public data explorer from google labs. I read about this tool reading Hans Rosling on the TEDblog. Professor Rosling developed Gapminder, a beautiful way of representing data which he sold to Google a few years ago.

Here's some of the data above, based on world bank data again, presented using his software. I've added information on mobile density. Click on play!

His blog mentions an exciting development that he and others campaigned for - making all the World Bank's published development data available online for free. Last week the World Bank did just this!

But, you need a connection...

So now (based on 2008 data), eight out of ten Americans, more than one in four Tunisians, and about the same proportion of Mauritian's can get access to some of the best data available on economic and social development in Africa. But even taking the latest ITU data into account, less than one in eight South Africans can do the same.

The end of (mass) media

After last month's broadband forum in Johannesburg, I did an interview with Karen Van Schalkwyk of  Screenafrica, the leading publication for film and television producers in South Africa. 

1 You mentioned that broadband would be the end of content as we know it, could you elaborate on this and how do you think it will affect conventional media?

As content producers we have developed an industry based on a market -  and that market is the content distributors - film distributors and cinemas, television broadcasters, etc. The problem content producers face is that the business of content distribution is slowly collapsing under the pressure of the broadband  internet. Why? Well some of the (related) reasons are:

• costs of content distribution on the internet is virtually free, which means anyone who is connected can afford to do it, and also means that its difficult to make a profitable business out of it. 
  
• content distribution via the broadband internet  is transnational, so a lot of the business models around division of rights by territory are coming under great pressure
  
• digital content is like a renewable resource - you can copy it as many times as you like and its just as good as the first time! 
  
• most users of digital content also have the means to produce or reproduce that content - this a unique situation in the modern history of content distribution
  
• a scary thought for content distributors - peer to peer file sharing - 'audiences' sharing content amongst each other -  (almost all of which is 'media' - music and video) is estimated to account for something between 30% and 70% of all internet traffic depending on which studies you read. 
  

If we look at how this is affecting conventional content distribution channels, the music industry is in a structural decline with 7 consecutive years of falling income; free to air television, in markets where cheap broadband is widespread, is steadily loosing share of audience and share of advertising to the internet - the example I gave in my presentation was that Google UK now has a greater share of advertising than ITV1 historically the leading advertising earner in the UK. The CEO of Channel Four in the UK stated over a year ago that he couldn't see how Channel Four could survive the next decade on its existing business model. And remember that over 50% of the financing for feature films in fact comes from television. Pay TV, less reliant on advertising than free to air television is surviving a little better so far, but as broadband penetration and speeds increase they are going to be affected also. Even today, if you have the bandwidth, you can download most of the newest US television series online for free. Of course this is pirating but its exactly the same problem that the music industry has faced for years and is likely to have exactly the same economic effect on even pay tv as it has had in music.

2 What do you think will be the challenges for content producers and how would this affect their income and the way they do business – what should some of their new business strategies embrace?

The challenge for content producers is that the people who have paid them money to make television and film - the content distributors - are unlikely to have money to pay them soon! So content producers are going to need to start looking for new customers. Who will those customers be? Well probably the audience itself. One way of looking at the problem is that we no longer need intermediaries between content producers and those who want to watch, or listen to that content. That sounds attractive but there are three major challenges I can foresee. 

First, cash flow. In the old order business models, distributors often advance some or all of the costs of production  to the producer. The audience is unlikely to be willing to do this - they'll pay cash on delivery! So producers with access to cash flow finance are likely to be a much stronger position than those that do not. Second, many people are sceptical that online audiences will be willing to pay at all when there is so much content available for free. Hence the preponderance of advertising funded models online. I am sceptical that advertising funded models are likely to succeed in financing the kinds of content we have been making to date unless we can make that content for very much less money though, since each audience is likely to be smaller than the 'old' audiences (up until the 1980s in the Europe it was still possible for ONE channel to get audience shares of over 50%. Those days, it seems to me, are probably over for ever). I think there is some hope in micro-payments. On cell phones people pay quite a lot of money for so-called content (R5 for a ringtone). So wouldn't you pay R5 for a movie? itunes has proved this can work. The third challenge is more fundamental - whether 'audiences' as we understand them, will continue to exist. Content producers rely on audiences - that is (lots of ) people who are willing to sit still and watch something that was made by someone else. Some commentators describe these people as the 'former audience' because in fact the evidence is that they are less and less willing to behave in this way, maybe just because now they don't have to. If they can watch online they can participate. This isn't just that professional content producers now have to compete with amateur tom, dick and harriet. The broadband internet allows communication to be content rich (think facebook, youtube and flickr) and it appears that as this happens young people especially spend less of their time passively consuming content.

3 You mentioned that ITV has lost a staggering amount of ad revenue due to broadband  (also that Google does not pay for content) – how will this broadband development affect the broadcast industry and what should they change in terms of business strategy. i.e should they provide downloads of content to audience?

I don't have a suggestion of a business strategy for broadcasters except to accept that they are living through an era of massive (hopefully creative) destruction and that broadcasting as we know it is unlikely to come out the other side of it with much of a role as currently organised and in their current function. Many major broadcasters are investing heavily in various ways of making their content available on line. The BBC iPlayer project is one example. The problem isnt getting the content online. The problem is how are they going to earn a substantial enough income stream from it. The music industry has put its content on line (via itunes, nokia etc) but the ioncome they are receiving is not keeping up with the loss of income from CDs and the record industry estimates that 95% of music downloads are not paid for. One thought that might scare independent producers is that one way broadcasters could think of going is to move to focusing on producing content rather than distributing it. 

4 Why do you think SA has lagged behind in terms of broadband development and what are some of the solutions to speeding up this process and making sure we remain competitive?

Data from the International Telecommunications Union shows that South Africa  has fallen down the global league tables of internet connectivity. We were fist in Africa five years ago. We are now fourth. Common reasons given for this are:

• lack of competition - the long delays in creating the second network operator  have left telkom in a position where it can keep prices high to maintain their margins. The recent issuing of new licences following Altech's court challenge and the new cables that start landing in South Africa this year should make an impact on competition and prices.
  
• lack of government support - in spite of many government initiatives, some of which have worked and some of which haven't, we do not have significant focus on this area of infrastructure. Just look at public investment plans over the next few years in electricity generation and distribution, in railways and ports and compare it to the investment in building internet infrastructure. 

5 How do changes in the broadband world affect intellectual property/ rights and territories?

For content producers this is a very important question to consider. The key change that the broadband internet brings is that it makes the enforcement of rights either incredibly difficult or impossible. Histrocially content producers have been strong defenders of property rights (their main gripe has been they don't have or retain enough of them). But I think it is time to start reconsidering this position. Its not clear that the rights based system has really been beneficial to content producers and its not clear that it is a sustainable model for the future. So we need to start considering if there are alternatives and how these alternative could provide income and payment for content. The open source movement  in the software industry, creative commons and copyleft, these are all new ways of thinking about these issues. So far the film and television industry have not been leaders in this thinking.

6 You mentioned that this development moves us toward something more interesting – what are some of these issues that create a more interesting landscape?

Film and television producers at the beginning of the 21st century may be in a position not so different to scribes - the monks and others who wrote books by hand-  at the time of the spread of the printing press. We have some very impressive skills but some of those skills may become redundant over the next few years or decades.  

If I am right then the prospects for our professions are not looking too bright. But if you look at the change from the point of view of the audience the benefits are obvious. Printed books may not have been as beautiful as the hand written books they replaced. But they were just so much more useful, so much more accessible and, of course, so much cheaper. Printed books extended literacy, empowered the middle classes and made knowledge accessible to a much wider community. Broadband offers the 'former audience' something similar but also something even more powerful - the ability to connect, to converse, to organise, to find and to share information, ideas, and knowledge across the entire planet at very low cost. I do not think we have begun to see what this will bring. 

What none of us know is when and how this is going to happen. Maybe film and television producers have a few years or decades left. Changes on this scale in the past have often involved the old and the new existing in parallel for many years. But if I was just entering the professional world of content production I would want to be on the side of the future, not of the past.

Why South Africa needs Broadband

I attended the Broadband Forum in Johannesburg this week,  organised by Research ICT Africa, the Association for Progressive Communications and the Shuttleworth Foundation.  You can read a summary of my presentation on content and broadband the South Africa Connect blog. A number of interesting ideas came out of the presentations and discussions. 

1. Broadband and internet growth in South Africa has been slow

According to Arthur Glodstuck of World Wide Worx, there are 4,6m internet users in South Africa and just over 1,0m broadband users (thats less than 3% of the population). Looking at the ITU internet use development index though, its clear that whatever improvement there has been in South Africa over

 the last five years, it is much less than many other countries and many of those countries 

are much poorer than ours. The table combines information from the latest International Telecommunications Union ICT development sub-index for internet usage with per capita income figures from the CIA (!) 2008 World Factbook. Every country in the table was behind South Africa in internet usage index 5 years ago. Now only Zimbabwe is lower in the rankings.

2. We should look at broadband as a utility

We should treat internet access in the same way that water provision, and electricity are almost universally treated as utilities that should be available to every household. This doesn't mean that the service must be free. Nor does it mean that it must be government that should be the provider. Nor does it necessarily mean that internet access provision shares the 

same economic rules of 'natural monopoly' that water and electricity have (at least to date). It does mean though that the state needs to take responsibility for the framework that will enable such provision to be built. It seems to me there are three strong arguments for ensuring universal access: 

• we need to close, not increase, the digital divide within our society. If we do not we are likely to increase the economic and developmental gaps (already widening in South Africa) between haves and have nots, and weaken the social contract binding common interest in society. This argument is well rehearsed in terms of rights for the poor and is similar to arguments made for access to water, electricity and other utilities.
• If we do not provide universal access we will, over time, undermine the social network of the nation - in other words, while people will be connected, we will not be able to say that the nation is connected. If the internet is as important to 21st Century economic development as the railways and postal services were to the 19th Century, then those parts of the country left unconnected will end up disconnected from the country itself. This is not a new argument either. At the height of the development of national postal services, in the 19th century, many services were, in effect, nationalised and most nations created single price post from any point to any point in the country (even thought the costs obviously varied considerably by distance). This was a political act. We need a similar political commitment today. 
• broadband is undermining, and probably destroying, existing mass media business models, and those media channels have already achieved near universal access. Radio and television in South Africa are good examples of this. If broadband does not offer universal access it could actually leave many (poorer) people worse off than they are now in terms of access to important national and global information sources.

3. How broad is broadband?

In the course of preparing my input to the forum I came across a reference to a very interesting definition of broadband from the US Computer Science and Telecommunications Board: "local access link performance should not be the limiting factor in a user's capability for running today's applications". This addresses what to me is the most important issue: South Africa, just like any other nation, needs to think of connectivity in  relation to the rest of the world. That, after all is what the net is about. And how connected you need to be is a moving target. Every year new tools are emerging and those tools are based on assumptions of how much bandwidth its users have access to. If we want South African citizens, organisations and businesses to have access to the best of these tools we need to have the same amount of bandwidth as the other countries who are using such tools.

4. Who should make this happen? 

Especially in South Africa, there is great scepticism regarding the state's ability to provide services. This scepticism is based on very good evidence. But that doesn't answer the other undeniable truth, that this provision is a public good and that 

substantial externalities are likely to be at play. In other words, the market alone is unlikely to provide (at a universal level of access).  How did South Korea, for example, manage to occupy the position it does in the ITU indices? For the Forum I did a very rough calculation of comparative investment. The figures for the US, EU, Japan and South Korea are from the ITU database of telecommunications investment for 2003. The figure of Africa is extrapolated from data presented by the GSM Association at the 2007 Kigali Summit  of planned investment by their members in Africa. If anything these figures understate the problem. By 2003, Korea already had a very high level of broadband use but as these figures show, they were continuing to invest substantially in making this access more available and faster. In my presentation I said that, in order just to keep our current relative place vs these leading broadband nations, we would need to spend R40bn per year investing in infrastructure. The back of the envelope calculation I did to arrive at this figure was:

leading nations are spending between 82 and 149 Euros per head per year on infrastructure

if we spend 100 Euros per head per year we might keep our place relative to them (though certainly not catch up with them)

100 Euros per head is approximately equal to R40bn. 

I would love to get some economists to do a more thorough job of working out what level of investment is required. 

Then I looked at announced investments by telcos in South Africa. On an optimistic view, the figure I came to was less than R15bn per annum. So the question arises - who is going to fund the investment South Africa needs? The answer can only be: either the newly competitive market is going to lead to multiples of the current level of investment or the state needs to be involved.