Research ICT Africa (RIA!) has published their 2006 South Africa Telecommunications Sector Performance Review. The tone of the fourth edition is worrying. The authors urge for measures that prevent South Africa from further lagging behind its natural competitors in terms of access to services, cost of usage and competitiveness.

The telecommunications sector in South Africa is not doing well. This is the clear message that speaks from the 2006 South Africa Telecommunications Sector Performance Review 2006 by RIA!. Once South Africa had the leading and trendsetting telecommunications sector on the Africa continent, now this position is slowly being challenged by other countries. Morocco already has more fixed broadband connectivity than South Africa and the Tunisia mobile market is now the fastest growing in Africa, besides the island states.
The fourth edition of the South African ICT and Telecommunications Sector Performance Review (SPR) seeks to measure and assess some of these market developments against national policy objectives such as access to services, cost of usage and competitiveness. It is not a conventional market analysis. These tend to be concerned with overall growth or growth of different market segments and the profitability of companies. This study is concerned with such data only as indicators of delivery on national objectives. So, for example, while the overall ICT sector in South Africa has continued to grow significantly in the last year, this review considers how this relates to improvement in penetration rates and costs of telecommunications to consumers and users and as a major business input, and to the introduction of new services for effective participation in the global economy.
The review is divided into eight chapters which take the reader from global policy and regulatory trends, through a detailed analysis of the sector in South Africa, to conclusions and recommendations to improve the sector performance.
The telecommunications sector is dominated by rapid technological and economical changes. Convergence of technologies has a revolutionising impact on the costs, scale and scope of service provision. Internet Protocol (IP) based technologies are able to offer new, innovating and low-cost services to the customers. This happens at a global level, and also affects the South African ICT and telecommunication sector. However, as observed by the authors of the SPR, the South African 'managed liberalisation' process has created a market that has only been opened up incrementally, with few opportunities to see the benefits of lower prices, service and billing innovation, and choice of services associated with open markets in other parts of the world.
The impact of this market structure on the development of the South African telecommunications sector is assessed in terms of penetration and pricing. While fixed-line growth is negligible, the growth of data services, particularly through the introduction of ADSL (Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line), has been significant, despite the high costs associated with these services. Although these costs have come down in recent periods, they continue to be far above other lower to middle income countries and even developing countries such as Morocco. The mobile market grows astronomically, with subscriber numbers over 30 million. At the same time, interconnection and facilities leasing continue to be significant bottlenecks in the introduction of a fair competitive market and major contributors to the high input costs of telecommunications in business. On top of that, the exclusivity Telkom has over the SAT-3 landing station is making international bandwidth cost considerably more than its real cost. Although positive developments are taking place in the last year, serious regulatory action needs to be taken to improve the penetration and costs of telecommunication services in South Africa.
The report provides a wealth of information for who wants to understand the South African telecommunications sector. The sources of the information are well documented and presented with a large number of illustrative tables and figures. Market structure, access to ICT and pricing of different services and providers are covered in detail. However, the lack of a proper definition of the ICT and Telecommunications sectors can easily create confusion. Software and hardware industry, although important driving forces for innovation in the telecommunication sector, are not covered in the report.
In spite of the fact that the conclusions and recommendations in the last chapter mostly address the challenges for the sector in South Africa, they also provide important lessons for policy makers and regulators in other African countries. Many governments are in the process of implementing new policies and regulatory frameworks. In doing so they should learn from the events in South Africa and avoid similar pitfalls.

The development of the East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy) has gradually transformed into a powerplay of an increasing number of stakeholders. The Association of Progressive Communications (APC) has published an analysis of the stakeholders, their power and interest positions and sheds renewed clarity in the complex EASSy discussion.

The establishment of the East African Submarine Cable System, popularly known as EASSy, is important for the further socio-economic development of the eastern part of Africa. The project started approximately four years ago.
EASSy is the proposed US$300 million1, 9,900km fibre optic submarine cable that will connect the east coast of Africa to the world's network of international high capacity submarine cables. Mtunzini (located just north of Durban) in South Africa will host one end of EASSy, and Port Sudan in Sudan the other end. In between, EASSy will have landing points in seven other countries.
This project would greatly increase the accessibility of the connected countries to high speed, high bandwidth connectivity, as well as enable the development of new products and services that would otherwise have not been possible due to bandwidth restrictions. Through the development of back-haul transmission networks, EASSy will be able to improve the connectivity between African countries and reduce the cost of communication within and between them and expand the possibility of intra-Africa trade.
In spite of the high urgency of EASSy, the progress of the project has been slow in coming. In the paper A Stakeholder Analysis of the of the East African Submarine Cable System the APC Policy researcher for the African region, Abiodun Jagun, analises the reasons behind this slow progress. According to the paper the key to the delays is the uncertainty around the ownership and management of the cable, which in turn influence the terms and conditions that will govern access to its capacity by non-members (i.e. entities that do not hold shares in the cable). The ownership of EASSy was initially conceived under a Closed Consortium Ownership, similar to the SAT3/WASC submarine fibre optic cable. Disappointing performance of SAT3/WASC in terms of improved and low-cost broadband internet access has prompted interest groups to urge for the adoption an Open Access model for EASSy.
With the start of the discussion on the modalities of the Open Access model and its operational hybrid variants, the complexity has grown. The new players and the new stakes have created an impasse. Through an analysis of the stakeholders the paper tries to create clarity in understanding and navigating the current state of play and developing scenarios of the future of the project
The author has decided to apply Power-Interest matrices as a tool for analysis to better understand the position of 15 identified stakeholders in the decision making process. The paper first analises individual stakeholders and continues to look at the coalitions that were formed in the course of the Open Access discussion. This last aspect is interesting since it clearly shows that some groups were able to improve their position in the process and and increase their influence in the decision making. In the last of the three matrices the role of NEPAD in the EASSy project is examined. The analysis shows two competing groups; one the NEPAD Protocol coalition, and the other the Submarine Fibre Consortium. It identifies that the powerful position initially held by the Consortium has been diluted, and that the impasse has created high levels of uncertainty about the viability of the EASSy project.
Although the analysis provides interesting insights on the levels of power and interest of the stakeholders, the reader remains in the dark about the data and methodology used to justify the classifications. The identification and grouping of the stakeholder could have been documented better. But also the way in which they were plotted in the Power-Interest matrices definitely needs to be explained in more detail. This would give other researchers an easier possibility to validate and extend on this research.
In spite of these methodological shortcomings of the paper, it provides an important analysis for everyone who wants to understand the process of the development of EASSy. It also shows that times are changing. As Mike Jensen already noted in his APC issue paper on Open Access Models, a growing number of people are painfully aware that the mistakes made with the SAT3/WASC cable should be avoided at all costs if improved access to low-cost internet connectivity is to be realised for Africa.

This review was writen for the World Dialogue on Regulation