Innovative Spectrum Approaches for Internet Openness in South Africa

AutorSenka Hadzic - Pablo Aguera - Alison Gillwald
Ocupação do AutorResearch Fellow at the CyberBRICS Project and a Senior Fellow at Research ICT Africa, where she was a Ford/Media Democracy Fund Tech Exchange fellow from 2018-2019 working on alternative spectrum policies to enable small scale operators and community networks - Passionate about studying the intersections between technology, justice and...
Páginas89-94
89The Value of Internet Openness in Times of Crisis
South Africa’s failure to release high demand spectrum for over a decade
has been cited by operators and analysts not only as a factorcontributing
to the high cost of mobile data1in the country, as operators deploy 4G ser-
vices in suboptimal bands, but also as a massive opportunity cost to the country
over the last decade, which runs into billions of Rands by various estimations.
The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted existing inequalities in the country, includ-
ing the digital divide: only about half of all South Africans are online as most
simply cannot afford smart devices. Wireless access remains the dominant way
of accessing the Internet, withless than 2%2of the population using fixed broad-
band services. The Research ICT AfricaAfter Access3survey also tells us that
many of those who are online cannot afford data at current price levels —
thecheapest mobile prepaid 1 GB basket4in the last quarter of 2019 was US$6.81.
The After Access survey data from 2017 shows the difference in ownership of
smartphones between urban and rural area residents: 54% of urban dwellers
own a smartphone, compared to 33% of rural population. Most people cannot
afford data for basic communications and information access, let alone home-
schooling or remote work which arguably require more data capacity.
Soon after the COVID-19 pandemic was declared a national emergency, the Min-
istry of Communications and Digital Technologies announced that ICASA, the
EIGHT
Senka Hadzic
Pablo Aguera
Alison Gillwald
Innovative Spectrum Approaches for
Internet Openness in South Africa
26/10valueOfINet.qxp_Layout 1 03/11/20 5:54 PM Page 89

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