Steve Esselaar

Mobile cellular telephone: Fixed-line substitution in Sub-Saharan Africa

Mobile cellular telephones have been the success story of communications globally. In the developed world, mobile telephony is traditionally seen as being complementary to fixed-line telephony, primarily because of its pervasiveness but also because the fixed-line network provides access to other technologies such as broadband. This article finds that, in nine African countries, in contrast to the developed world, mobile telephony is a substitute for fixed-line telephony - across all income groups and not just low income households as previously thought. The article argues in addition that pre-paid payment options (not just for mobile phones) are key to increasing use by low income households because irregular incomes do not support regular financial commitments in terms of contracts.

Case notes: South Africa's policy incoherence: An update on the Knysna Wi-Fi project

In the past, the main obstacle against building network infrastructure was the cost. Technological advances, however, have meant that building a functional, low-cost network is possible. Knysna is the first municipality in South Africa to achieve this. The problem is not the infrastructure but the connection to the larger networks of the mobile and fixed-line operators. The incumbents’ incentives are to prevent interconnection (or at least to delay it) on the basis of maintaining their dominance. In the telecommunications sector in South Africa, the only way to overcome this problem is via regulation. Yet regulation has to balance two sometimes competing interests – investment in infrastructure and competition. The Knysna Uni-Fi project has operated outside of any enabling regulation for competition and investment and this has negatively impacted upon its commercial success. Any regulatory intervention imposed upon the market has to balance the interests of competition and investment. In the South African market, given the huge dominance by the incumbents, that balance must change to favour new entrants. Until this takes place Knysna is not a replicable model for South Africa.

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.