Alison Gillwald

Experimenting with institutional arrangements for communications policy and regulation: The case of telecommunications and broadcasting in South Africa

This paper examines the shifting institutional arrangements in South Africai?½s telecommunications and broadcasting sectors as it seeks to deal with national transformation at the same time as the relentless economic and technical changes to the sector being driven at a global level. These include the convergence of traditionally distinct forms of communication resulting from the digitalisation of technologies and the privatisation and liberalisation of traditional monopoly services. The author locates the changing institutional arrangements in this sector in the context of the struggle by government to transform decision-making and institutional arrangements. The tensions inherent in this process are not clear-cut, consistent or even clearly visible but impact in complex and cross-cutting ways on the policy framework and arising institutional arrangements.The paper then periodises institutional arrangements in the broadcasting and telecommunications sectors into four overlapping phases: the pre-transition phase up to 1993; the reform phase up to 1997; the implementation phase which begins in 1994 in broadcasting and 1997 in telecommunications and the review phase which begins with broadcasting in 1998 and in telecommunications in 2001. Although the institutional flux has often been attributed to forward looking policy it is argued that the perpetual reorganisation of the sector also reflects large scale institutional failure. It is argued however that this cannot be placed solely at the door of the various new regulatory institutions. Perhaps one of the most critical factors to undermine the various regulatory institutions has been the lack of resources. The lack of skilled human capital has allowed all three regulators to be out-regulated by the industry and the lack of financial capital has rendered them in effectual both in defending their actions and fulfilling their mandate. The dearth of these have taken their toll on the ability of the regulator to be credible and one can only conclude reflects the covert desire of the industry and state for them not to be entirely effectual. Finally, the paper argues that until there is an integrated and holistic national information and communication policy, driven from the Presidents Office, various policy proposals impacting on ICT development in the country emanating from different portfolios will continue to be contradictory, inconsistent and ultimately damaging to the vision of South Africa as a regional ICT hub and a major contributor to the African Renaissance.

Analysis Instead of Summation: Why Indices Are Not Enough for ICT Policy and Regulation

This paper demonstrates that analysing ICT indicators, based on benchmarking through the application of a dynamic diagnostic approach with context relevant indicators, provides a far more valid evidence-base for ICT policy and regulation than using the ranking of a country on one of the global ICT indices. Both approaches - composite indices and benchmarking - use the same data but differ in how the data is analysed. Both approaches have shortcomings. However, the benchmarking approach used in this paper is seen as the starting point for further analysis, showing clearly the linkages between individual indicators. Global ICT indices, as they are currently formulated, disguise these linkages by providing a composite measure, encouraging the perception that the index is the end result of the analysis, rather than the beginning. Ranking all countries, from poorest to the richest, leads to an automatically high correlation of an index to GDP per capita, making the latter the best predictor for the index score.

Developing Smart Free Public Wi-Fi in South Africa: Can Public Wi-Fi Help Redress Digital Inequality, and If So, How? Emerging Lessons from South Africa's Diverse Implementations

Free Public Wi-Fi (FPW) has been deployed in many countries for over a decade for a range of economic and municipal governance reasons. However a literature review found that although previous research on Free Public Wi-Fi (FPW) did exist, it pertained largely to projects initiated in the early 2000’s, the pre-smartphone era and related to wealthier countries, with minimal consideration of socially inclusive access. At that time Wi-Fi was early in its ‘hype cycle’ and no evaluations of current projects were done, meaning that there is no foundation of evaluative methodology on which to build. The recent increase in smartphone penetration into lower income groups has led to FPW gaining greater traction as a socially inclusive solution to broadband access. Many municipalities in South Africa (SA) have embarked on FPW projects. The main challenge, as with all infrastructure initiatives, is that projects require upfront and ongoing financial investment and management commitment in the face of stark alternative demands and therefore policy decisions must be well-informed to maximise return on investment and ensure project success. SA’ two major metros, Johannesburg and Cape Town, used different funding approaches to their FPW, providing a natural experiment from which there are significant learnings which, although context specific, will provide insights for the extension of FPW into smaller towns and less developed towns. It should also have wider application for other developing counties. There is no clear winner and loser arising from the experiment, with the different approaches and funding models producing various positive and negative outcomes across the two projects. The paper does however distill some factors for success relating to cost, funding, deployment, the user experience and project replicability and sustainability for policy makers in developing countries. Wi-Fi is never ‘free’ and a basic taxonomy is suggested based on who pays for the service (typically the end-customer, government, advertisers or owners of the site being covered) and what parties stand to gain. Only one of the projects studied aimed at full government sponsorship, a situation which the municipality is reviewing. This paper suggest what has worked abut each approach, although emphasising that different contexts call for different solutions. The well-funded, government sponsored FPW was able to evolve more quickly and have more people on line with better services than the mixed commercial and government funded model. However the first is highly dependent on political will and leadership, making its long terms sustainability and potentially its scalability more susceptible to risk than project that result from innovative public private interplays that are self-funding. The study found that projects are best imbedded in a wider broadband strategy (rather than standalone), including government fibre connectivity projects, content and applications. Government buildings are an ideal starting point, as connectivity, power and security are already budgeted for. Educational institutions should be prioritised, as they are numerous, well positioned within populations, provide broadband for learning, and target age groups most likely to adopt broadband. Libraries, health facilities, museums and public open spaces have also been targeted. Open access Wi-Fi networks have the advantage of allowing competition by internet service providers but require more costly equipment to facilitate than projects involving one exclusive service provider. The findings inform the concluding set of recommendations to policy makers and municipal decision makers.