Thinking small is key to bridging the gap

CARLOS Rey-Moreno, a senior researcher at the University of Cape Town, is involved in a fascinating project to extend affordable connectivity — voice and data — to the remote and desperately poor Eastern Cape community of Mankosi, between Coffee Bay and Port St Johns.

With Rey-Moreno’s help, Mankosi — which has 3 500 residents living in 12 villages — is experimenting with ways of making communication in deep rural areas more affordable and as a result more accessible.

The average personal income in the community is just R388 a month. Yet Rey-Moreno says people there spend 22% of their income on communication, sometimes even forgoing food so that they can make a phone call. Fully 87% of the population accesses mobile services at least once a week, with each community member making an average of 17 minutes’worth of calls a week. Few use data services, because of the cost, with only 8% connecting to the internet in the past month.

Rey-Moreno’s focus is on finding ways for communities such as Mankosi — and there are thousands like it across South Africa — to “selfprovide” more affordable telecoms services using wireless “mesh networks” that connect people, allowing them to pool resources and reduce costs.

There’s no doubt that the mobile operators, although they’ve done well to extend coverage to most of the population, have failed to make these services truly affordable to those living in rural areas.

Rey-Moreno’s project introduces a more sustainable model for building locally owned voice and data infrastructure that is shared by the community. The idea is that rural communities create their own telecoms operators to service their needs.

People in Mankosi have been taught how to deploy a mesh network and can now make calls and have access to the internet at a fraction of the cost they were paying previously. Initial set-up costs were covered by UCT, but the community is now taking the business model forward.

A 13-node mesh network is connected to the internet via a 3G gateway. Revenue the community collects is used to maintain and upgrade services. Future plans include providing internet access to schools and other “anchor tenants”, and offering internet access and voice-over-IP calls to Wi-Fi-enabled phones.

But Rey-Moreno has a bone to pick with the mobile operators, which he accuses of not coming to the party with lower costs for “backhaul”, used to connect the community with the rest of the world. “If prices could be reduced, it would encourage much greater uptake in a community desperate for greater access.”

He says people in rural areas are spending an “outrageous amount of their income to communicate very little”. Yet the mobile operators’ infrastructure is hardly being used because people can’t afford it.

Direct government intervention — an idea too often touted in South Africa — won’t solve the problem. As William Stucke, a former councillor at communications regulator Icasa, said this week, the government “should not assume they can do it better than businesspeople can. There’s evidence everywhere that they can’t.”

The idea is that rural communities create their own telecoms operators

Which is why the government’s decision to “designate” Telkom as the lead agency for rolling out telecoms services in rural areas makes no sense. A large, lumbering incumbent with a high cost base and known historically for its sky-high prices is never going to solve South Africa’s rural connectivity challenges.

Instead of protecting Telkom and the big mobile operators, which haven’t done what’s needed to get rural South Africa online, the government should open up radio frequency spectrum to smaller regional and local players and communities that are prepared to accept much lower profit margins.

There are hundreds of small wireless players itching to provide services, and to do so at prices far lower than anything offered by the big incumbents. This is where South Africa ought to be fostering innovation. This is how we’ll bridge the digital divide.

McLeod edits TechCentral.co.za. Find him on Twitter @mcleodd