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Telecoms in South Africa: Apres moi, le deluge

Published
by
Steve Song
on 29 August 2008
in Telecom Policy
. 0 Comments

In a landmark decision today, the High Court of South Africa ruled that everyone in possession of a Value Added Network Service (VANS) license was entitled to “self-provide”.  What this means is that every Internet Service Provider (ISP) in South Africa is entitled to compete with the likes of Telkom, Vodacom, MTN, and Neotel.  In one fell swoop, the market has gone from 4 players to conceivably over 600 players.

At the root of this change has been the dispute around how existing VANS licenses should be converted in the context of the “new” Electronic Communications Act of 2005.  The Minister of Communications has argued that only some VANS licenses should be converted to full “infrastructure” licenses which would allow companies with VANS licenses to build out their own infrastructure.   In essence, this was an attempt by the Minister to perpetuate the “managed liberalisation” process that began almost 14 years ago.

That attempt appears to have backfired on the Department of Communications and their Minister.  The Minister could have issued a general invitation for companies to apply for an infrastructure license (i-ECNS license) and considered each application on its own merits.  Instead, by attempting to influence the license conversion process which is the purview of the regulator (ICASA), they provoked a court challenge from one of the companies in the conversion process (Altech).

The court decision, handed down this morning, utterly rejected the validity of the Minister’s attempt to influence ICASA’s handling of the conversion process and completed validated the Altech’s contention that VANS should be able to self-provision.

Since, the Act states that all licenses must be converted on terms no less favourable than their existing terms, this means that ICASA is bound to grant infrastructure licenses to all 600 VANS licensees.  Great news for telecoms competition in South Africa!

Unfortunately this is just a battle won but not the war.  There are many other issues to be addressed.  For a start, the fees associated with the telecom infrastructure licenses.  Given that only a short time ago Neotel paid R100 million Rand for their license, I can see some drama brewing on what sort of annual fees should be charged to the newly converted licensees.  The ideal scenario in my opinion would be to have fees tied to revenue and only have the fees kick in after a certain threshold of revenue had been reached.  This would contribute to lowering the bar to market entry.

Another and perhaps more significant issue to be addressed is the allocation of spectrum.  There are lots of lessons learned from around the world.  Why can’t spectrum be auctioned in South Africa in a transparent and open manner.  Lack of transparency must surely be one of the biggest barriers to investment.

However, one battle at a time.  You can see the general expressions of joy from the South African community.    Arthur Goldstuck’s Oh Frabjous Day is worth reading as is the general outpouring of joy by likes of Dominic Cull and Ant Brooks (and a few hundred others) on the mybroadband.co.za discussion list.

Ellipsis have posted a copy of the judgement.  Can’t wait to see how the DoC and the Minister react.

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Open Everything in Government

Published
by
Steve Song
on 26 August 2008
in All Things Open
. 2 Comments

I attended the Open Everything (Cape Town) event on Friday.  Apart from being a masterfully facilitated workshop and an excellent opportunity to talk to other “openly” minded folk, it also featured a great interview with Aslam Jaffee, CIO of the Department of Science and Technology in the Government of South Africa and the current chairperson of the GITOC Open Source and Open Standards working group of the Government IT Officers Council (GITOC).  Matthew Buckland and I interviewed Aslam on his experience of establishing an Open Source, Open Standards, Open Content policy for the South African government.  Mark Surman has blogged about it and has posted a podcast of the interview that you can listen to.

Does Open Source Need To Be Government Policy?

I was somewhat skeptical of the idea of enshrining Open Source as a mandated policy in government.  It seemed a bit like mandating the eating of spinach.  You know it’s good for you but there is a natural resistance to implement something you’ve been ‘ordered’ to implement especially if it means a change from the status quo.  It also seemed to me that good policy follows practice and not so much the other way round.

Having said that I was impressed by Aslam’s presentation and it may be that in the case of South Africa at least, that having an Open Source/Standards/Content policy is a good thing.  The policy states that the government will use Open Source unless there is a compelling reason not to.  This obviously provides a lot of leeway as it is conceivable to write a software specification to suit almost any particular piece of software.  However, it does ensure that at the very least a dialogue needs to take place in each case as to the merits of Open Source.  This alone is a very positive step.

It is interesting that Open Source, Open Standards, and Open Content have been bundled together in the policy.  I am in two minds as to the wisdom of having all of those issues in a single policy document.  On the one hand, I can see how, given the opportunity, one might want to pack as much openness into a policy as possible.  On the other, they are each complex issues in their own right and deserve treatment on their own merits.  In particular, I think Open Standards deserves to be the absolute, non-negotiable backbone of procurement policy whereas I think the dialogue-driven tone they have struck with Open Source is probably about right.  Open Content is a different kettle of fish again and appears to be directly at odds, at least in spirit, with the Intellectual Property legislation currently being tabled in parliament.

Flavours of Openness

What does Open Source in government really mean?  Aslam mentioned at least three broad categories.  Open at the server, open at the desktop, and open at the application level.   He pointed out that the South African government has been using Open Source software for its mail and web servers for many years.  Further, there is work underway by a couple of departments (the CSIR and the Department of Science and Technology) to roll-out Ubuntu on user desktops.  However, in the area of large scale corporate applications not much has happened yet.

While I think there are compelling reasons to deploy Open Source desktops and mail and web servers, I think the real opportunity for Open Source in Government lies at the application level.  Governments around the world face similar challenges at the national, provincial, and local levels.  As the trend towards e-services grows within government, one cannot help but wonder how much duplication is taking place around the world in the development of applications to deliver services, whether government-to-citizen, government-to-business, or government to government.

The Frontier for Open Source in Government

Many initiatives claim to be Open Source but fail in significant ways.  The Brazilian government’s Department of Health is a great example of this.  They have developed a comprehensive health information management system which is theoretically Open Source but only available through governments i.e. the Brazilian government may privately offer the software to the South African government.  This strategy may give the Brazilian government a comforting sense of control but it substantially reduces the chances that any other government will ever implement this software.  Perhaps this is not a tragedy from a Brazilian perspective but think of all the lost opportunities for Ministries of Health around the world.  What this strategy misses out on are the many health information system developers around the world who could potentially contribute to this project.

Consider by comparison, an initiative such as OpenMRS.  OpenMRS is a community-developed, open-source, enterprise electronic medical record system framework.  Thanks to its modular design and a robust, open API, OpenMRS lends itself to flexible extension into a variety of more specific applications.  Government support for flexible core applications like OpenMRS could transform the way that applications are developed to support government services.

A powerful step any government could take would be to get behind independent, transparent, community-driven Open Source initiatives like OpenMRS to support the development of common, open applications for effectively delivery of government services.

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Top Five Ted Talks

Published
by
Steve Song
on 19 August 2008
in What I'm Reading and World View
. 1 Comment

At the Shuttleworth Foundation we have a now reasonably well-established tradition of gathering together every Tuesday at lunch to watch a Ted Talk.  I borrowed this idea from Vera Franz of the Open Society Institute and with only a few damp squibs we have seen some great presentations and had some great discussions as a result.

In no particular order, here are my 5 favourites to date:

Ken Robinson

If you want to hear someone speak with passion about bringing creativity to the fore in schools, this is the talk for your.  My favourite part of this is an anecdote he relates about a girl being treated for not being able to pay attention in school.  The punch line (sorry) “Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn’t sick; she’s a dancer. Take her to a dance school.” will stick with me forever.

Jan Chipchase

Jan Chipchase has a very cool job.  He works for Nokia and travels the world observing how people use mobile and other kinds of technology.  His discoveries and insights help inspire the development of the next generations of phones and services at Nokia.  As a result, he knows a lot about how people do and don’t use technology. Big take home message for me in this was the extent to which he/Nokia expect innovation to come from the street.

Ben Zander

I first read The Art of Possibility six or seven years ago.  It has been a source practical insight in both my personal and professional life.  Ben Zander is an inspiration.

Paul Collier

Pragmatic thoughts on how to close the widening gap between The Bottom Billion and the rest of the world.   Watch the video, read the book.

Hans Rosling

Doctor, researcher, and global data visualiser.  Hans Rosling is a legend in many communities.  This is a great video about the power of representing data effectively; of making lasagna and not spaghetti.

Ted Shorts

Honourable mentions for two Ted short presentations both of which have a tinkering theme.  Gever Tulley talks about his Tinkering School in Five Dangerous Things for Kids and Johnny Lee demoing his Wii Remote Hacks.

People I’d Like to See on TED

John-Seely Brown.  Former head of research at Xerox Parc, author of The Social Life of Information, and now general visionary on learning, education, and innovation, Johnn Seely-Brown is someone to listen to.

Dave Snowden.  If complexity theory, narrative, sensemaking and Web2.0 are terms that make your ears prick up, Dave Snowden is someone worth listening to.

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Open Hardware for Development

Published
by
Steve Song
on 14 August 2008
in All Things Open and Village Telco
. 2 Comments

In my last post I wrote a bit about what kinds of information and communication technologies are needed by the poor.  I have also written about the importance of tinkering and tinkerable technologies as a catalyst for innovation.

My previous experience has led me to believe that tinkerable technologies like Linksys WRT routers running open firmware like OpenWRT can play an important role in spurring the development and deployment of appropriate connectivity solutions in developing countries.

The Linksys WRT54G and its successors are remarkable in that they surprisingly rugged and difficult to “brick“.  They can run on anything from 5 to 20 volts and have a surprising amount of processing power for a simple access point.  People have adapted these routers to become, among other things, small PBXes, firewalls, and traffic shaping tools.  With a little bit of effort these devices can be tuned to draw less power making them more suitable for use with solar power energy sources.

So for the last few years I have been quite taken with the idea of finding and re-purposing commodity information and communication technologies developed for wealthy, consumer markets and adapting them as appropriate communication infrastructure.  Now, however, my point of view has changed somewhat, partly as a result of meeting David Rowe and in particular in conversations with him and others at the Village Telco workshop. David pointed out that wonderful as the Linksys routers are, we put up with numerous constraints e.g. limited memory space, limited interfaces, higher than desired power consumption, lack of surge protection on some interfaces, non-ruggedised housings, etc. where perhaps we don’t have to.

This took a little mental digestion on my part and, at the time, I was reluctant to give up the beloved Linksys.  However as things turned out the workshop led us to look at other technologies such as the Ubiquiti Nanostation and even to the point of coming up with plans to design our own hardware, the Mesh Potato.

Until I met David, I would have said that designing and putting customised hardware into production was a beautiful idea but not very practical.  Indeed, at first glance the OLPC appears to be a direct cautionary tale about the dangers of trying to do just that.  However, David has already done it successfully on a small scale.  He has designed and put into production an embedded Asterisk IP PBX.  One of the things that is most interesting about his project is that, as a result of publishing the hardware design and schematics under an open license on the Internet, manufacturers in Shenzen found David, not the other way round!

I think we are at the confluence of a number of trends:

  • the trend towards standardisation in manufacture and chip design;
  • the increasing integration of functions into single chips;
  • the move toward placing more and more hardware functionality in the ’soft’ firmware of devices;  and,
  • the increasing commoditisation of design tools.

In addition, because Open Source firmware is becoming increasingly common and the community of developers is growing, this means that a lone developer such as David Rowe can develop a fully functional hardware PBX whereas in 1978 it would have taken 20 or more engineers.

I believe this means that it is conceivable for appropriate, useful communication hardware for poor communities to be designed and put into production on a small but sustainable scale by small groups of experts but not necessarily experts employed by Nokia, Intel, etc.  I think this opens the potential for innovation of new technologies for markets not currently served by large corporations.  Ideally, these innovations would then be picked up and improved upon by large corporations, a bit like what has happened with the OLPC.

With one significant difference.  The OLPC chose to patent the new technology it developed and use the revenue gained from licensing those patents to fund further development.  There is a case to be made for this strategy.  However, it does not appear to have helped them make friends with the likes of Intel, Microsoft, and others.  One cannot help but wonder whether a focus on core innovations needed in a developing country context and an Open Hardware approach might not have helped them partner more successfully.

It is interesting to note that Pixel Qi, the company spun off by former OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen, are also basing their success on standardisation of manufacture.  This from their products page:

“Pixel Qi is a fabless ASIC company that specializes in screens.  The screen is just a big ASIC chip - we work closely with the large LCD factories.  The trick - we use their standard processes and materials and can produce new screens with radical new performance in about a year.  We are not a demo in a year,  but rather we can get all the way to high volume mass production in a year.”

Pixel Qi are licensing OLPC’s patents.  I wonder how many “Pixel Qi”s might exist if designs for that technology were published under an open license, open to contribution from universities and companies around the world interested in developing technology for the poor?  I’d sure like to find out.  Stand by for news of the Mesh Potato.

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Information and Communication Technologies for the Poor

Published
by
Steve Song
on 7 August 2008
in All Things Open and Village Telco
. 2 Comments
Nokia 1100 - Wikipedia

Nokia 1100 - Courtesy Wikipedia

An ongoing conversation with a large foundation has inspired me to think more directly about what specific technologies stand the best chance of benefiting the poor.  Early on in the conversation, I made the point that “connectedness” alone actually counts for a lot.  Most people involved in information technologies over the last 10-15 years, whether in the developed or developing world, have at one time or another learned the hard lesson that “build it and they will come” is more the exception than the rule.  Yet mobile phones have proven a pretty reliable exception with the result that Africa, one of the poorest regions in the world,  is the fastest growing mobile market in the world.  A testament to the importance of being connected and to the power of simple voice communication.  So, I am prepared to say that simply driving down the cost of access and increasing ubiquity of access to voice communication is a worthwhile goal in development.  Mobile phones improve lives and livelihoods.  We know this.

We also know that in Africa access to voice telephony is overpriced and scarcest where people are poorest.  What can be done to drive down the cost of access?  Nokia and other handset manufacturers have made a point of trying to develop phones that are developing country friendly.  The Nokia 1100 handset was designed for developing countries.  After selling over 200 million units, it has become the best selling handset in the world.  As Ken Banks of Kiwanja.net points out in a recent PC World article, “they’re sturdy with a sealed keypad, have good battery life, the user interface is easy, and they’re cheap (originally selling for around $40 new, for example, but now available for easily half of that in second-hand markets)”.  Hard to beat.  Unfortunately that is just one link in the chain.

Cheap phones do not equal cheap access.

The real cost of access lies in the usage charges.  Granted, this is mitigated somewhat by the caller-pays system which is standard in the developing world and which often allows communications costs to be subsidized by those who can most afford the communication charges.  Yet this is not the solution.  The solution lies in increasing competition in the provision of access.  Improving policy and regulatory frameworks to allow more competition is essential to driving down the cost of access.  Equally important is driving down the cost of network infrastructure so that the cost of market entry opens up to more entrepreneurs.  This is more or less what the Village Telco is aimed at.  Solutions that support vendor lock-in and perpetuate the supply-chain of incumbent mobile networks are not going to solve the problem.

Voice is no longer enough

As Ken points out in his article, the Nokia 1100 and phones like them designed for the developing world have “no GPRS, no browser, no Java, no camera, no color screen — the very technologies that form the linchpin of our plans to promote the mobile phone as the tool to help close the digital divide.”   He goes on to make a plea to divert “international development funding toward providing a subsidized, fully Internet-ready handset for developing markets.”  I think this is a brilliant idea except for the word “subsidy”.  When donors provide subsidies to the private sector, somehow this doesn’t always turn into real benefits for the poor.  Underserviced area licenses are a great example of subsidy failure.

I can think of at two other ways of achieving this that I think stand a better chance of succeeding:

  1. Announce an X-prize or something similar for cheap, rugged, Internet-ready handsets.  Give the market a direct incentive to build something to serve the poor.
  2. Open up the design of such a device.  Sponsor an Open Hardware project to design cheap phones that support GSM, GPRS, and WiFi.  Design bounties could be offered in this case as well.  Initiatives like OpenMoko already have a headstart in this area.

Don’t Try to Figure Out What People Will Do With It

Jan Chipchase - Ted Talk

Jan Chipchase - Ted Talk

Some people will find this idea hard to digest and it does verge on the “build it and they will come” mantra but we know that people will come for voice and text services.  Let’s start by driving down the networks costs and then by adding building-block functionality for other services in order to allow innovation to happen.  As Nokia resarcher Jan Chipchase says in his excellent Ted Talk:

“However, we design this stuff, carefully design this stuff, the street will take it and will figure out ways to innovate.  As long as it meets base needs, the ability to transcend space and time for example.   It will innovate in ways we cannot anticipate in ways that despite our resources, they can do it better than us.  That’s my feeling.”

The more hackable a technology is, the more opportunity there is to tinker with it, to shape it to meet the needs of the user, the more innovation we are going to see in ICTs and development and the greater impact these technologies will have.

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