Carrim’s big tent challenge

THIS Thursday, new Communications Minister Yunus Carrim will make his first public address to the South African tech community at Google’s Big Tent event in Midrand.

Barely two months into the job, and with only nine months before a new cabinet is appointed after the next elections, he faces the political contradiction that much is expected of him, but little delivery can be possible.

The inaction of a succession of his predecessors is blamed for the fact that South Africa has fallen to 80th in the world in average internet speeds.

Licensing of high-speed access technologies has fallen through the cracks of policy confusion between the Department of Communications (DoC) and the regulator, Icasa.

MWEB first piloted the relatively low-cost WiMAX technology in 2007, but to this day

Much expected of him, but little delivery can be possible

has not been able to obtain a licence for it. Its pilot infrastructure had to be dismantled.

MTN and Vodacom first showed in 2011 they could roll out Long-Term Evolution (LTE) in the spectrum frequency bands best suited for it. Their pilots, too, had to be shut down. Subsequently, they had to allocate less efficient 3G spectrum — a process known as refarming — to provide LTE access for new devices.

There are many reasons for this inaction from the regulator, but at its heart lies a lack of policy direction from the DoC. Lack of direction, in turn, means that the hi-tech landscape in South Africa is one of make-do, rather than can-do.

Carrim has many other priorities beyond decent broadband. The SABC remains divorced from a community of creators on which it depended for quality local content; digital migration from analogue TV broadcasting is now two years behind its original target; the Post Office needs new relevance as the letter is killed off by e-mail; Sentech’s role remains muddled.

It would need more than his master’s degree in sociology even to understand these challenges, let alone address them.

But at Thursday’s big-tent event he will share the podium with Vint Cerf, whose formal title is Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, but who is more commonly referred to as one of the “fathers of the internet”.

He helped write that TCP/IP protocols that make communication via internet possible. Today he’s working on the interplanetary internet, a project to enable communication from planet to planet — presumably by humans and spacecraft originating on earth.

He and computer scientist Bob Kahn are credited with making the internet as we know it possible, and bringing order to the complexity of different types of machines and software connecting with each other.

Cerf’s work stands in sharp contrast to the mess that Carrim has inherited. In South Africa, the “possible” became the “improbable”. Licensing of communications technologies became the domain of political patronage. As a result, a hi-tech community that has been starved of good news has all but given up hope in government advancing its cause.

In the mid-1990s, South Africa’s community of can-do internet pioneers took the country to 14th place in the world in number of computers connected to the internet, using Cerf’s protocols. Today, the country falls ever further back as it makes do with ageing communications technologies.

Everyone in the big tent will have their ears glued to what Cerf will tell them is possible in the coming years. But what Carrim says about the next nine months will be even more important to South Africa.

Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-inchief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee