Paul Jacobson

Heather feels that bloggers aren’t doing enough to draw a more diverse group of bloggers into the local blogosphere. She pointed to a post by David Sasaki where he talks about the lack of diversity in the South African social Web and voiced her opinion that we (being the apparently white boys’ club – sorry ladies and any other non-white demographic) are not doing enough to create/encourage/drive greater diversity.

Again the question: what have we done?

Have we actively sought to invite a diverse range of people to blogging events like the 27 dinner?

Have we done anything to bring new bloggers into the field with any training or mentorship?

Have we sought out the opinions of bloggers from people outside our own circle?

Have we commented on and supported the posts of new bloggers?

I say this because I accept some of the blame myself. This is a community. A community where we take collective responsibility for moving the industry forward because it’s important for all of us. Bloggers tend to be huge individualists, and I think that’s why we’ve focused on being better bloggers, getting better contacts, extending our own individual networks. But I think the time is ripe now to give some time and energy to the collective.

This isn’t the first time this argument has done the rounds and I’m not sure how I feel about it aside from a mildly queasy feeling. Part of me wants to leap onboard the guilt train and commit to bringing a non-white male blogger to work and teaching him/her to blog. That would be a quick reaction to an accusation of sorts that I am a member of some white elite blogger group and I haven’t quite taken my boots off the non-white male South African bloggers’ throats. The thing is, that just isn’t an accurate reflection of what has been going on from my perspective (however white male centric that view may be).

If you look at the tools that are available today for people to get online and blogging/otherwise expressing themselves, there is a very low barrier to entry once you get past having access to an Internet connected computer. Anyone can set up a blog on WordPress, Blogger or Vox (for example) at no cost and in a pretty short time period (it takes almost literally 5 minutes to set up a WordPress.com blog). From there it is up to that budding blogger to blog.

The big issue here is gaining access to an Internet connected computer and the fault lies at our government’s, ICASA’s and the telcos’ doors for various reasons. That is also another debate I am pretty passionate and frustrated about.

Getting back to me not doing enough as a blogger, I also have to ask why I should be required to specifically seek out blogs or content published by non-white male bloggers and undertake to bring those bloggers/creators on board. For one thing the South African blogosphere is hardly an invitation only club. If you have something interesting to say and people want to hear it, you’ll have an audience. In fact, if you have something to say and say it on your blog, you are part of the community already.

Maybe I am just being an apathetic white male blogger … well, that is also an over simplification of who I am. I am white (check), male (check) and a blogger (check). I am also Jewish, married, have a small child, a lawyer, passionate about open content licensing, excited for some strange reason about typography, love Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, get a little too obsessed with new mobile devices and social networks and I have a thing about sunflowers. Actually there is more to me but if you want to establish an elite clique then you really should look a little further than white and male because real people are a little more complex than a colour and a gender. Sure if you want to put me in a box then why don’t you pigeon hole me as a sci-fi lover who is married? Or maybe as a heterosexual male who owns a mobile phone? Actually, it would probably be more helpful to say I am Jewish (we control the world anyway) and I drive a car. Hmmm, when you think about it the “white male blogger” is a little arbitrary and self-serving. That is the problem with surveys conducted along limited lines with a view to putting us all in nice, tidy boxes. The results tend to conform to tired racial and gender based categories which work well for people who only see things along those lines. There just isn’t all that much attention paid to all the rest of our characteristics that make us living, breathing three dimensional people.

Anyway, back to the issue of not following enough black (or some other category) bloggers. The one big challenge for any budding blogger is that there is so much content out there, people have to focus on the stuff they really want to know about or they will drown in a sea of feeds. I subscribe to more than 200 feeds and that is after a recent cleanup. I don’t have time to subscribe to and follow everyone I come across so I focus on the people who talk about things that interest me. If one of those bloggers happens to live in Soweto then that is great. It really makes little difference to me whether the bloggers I follow are black, white, Asian, Canadian or like to smoke shrubbery in the morning before eggs and toast. If she is blogging about a topic I find interesting, I’m there like a bear. This portrayal of the South African blogosphere as an intentionally exclusive club reveals an overly pessimistic view of this apparent elite. Sure there may be a disproportionate number of white and male bloggers but that doesn’t mean the blogosphere was designed to be that way. It just means those white and male bloggers had more opportunities to start blogging early (I started in December 2004) and to become prominent through a combination of staying power, interesting content and occasionally a fine sense of humour.

One thing that continues to bug me is this notion that if we haven’t mentored a certain number of people from some demographic then we ought to feel guilty as bloggers. Some of us bloggers are driven to bring about that sort of social change through their blogs and that is admirable. I tend to highlight issues that catch my attention and occasionally advocate change in other areas. Some people just blog because they want to talk about their love lives. Others blog because their ego needs the attention. We all blog for our own reasons and we read other people’s blogs for other reasons. I refuse to feel guilty because the blogs I read don’t comprise 40% black South African bloggers living in some shack somewhere. On what basis is it acceptable to dictate what I can and can’t read or what my blogging should be directed at? Why do some people cling stubbornly to convenient demographics and refuse to see that issues are rarely so black and white?

Mike published a post yesterday titled “The Next Step for Social Media” which I think I have been waiting for on some level. It didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t know but it is one of those posts which reveals a change in attitudes that is somewhat overdue. The first two paragraphs of the post pretty much capture the essence of the message for me:

The honeymoon is over. Much of the hype and noise surrounding social media and its meteoric rise (especially in the USA) has abated. Perhaps owing to the global economic crisis, arguably due to the apparent lack of sustainable business models and possibly as a result of some semblance of reasonable thinking, we’re no longer reading about $1.6 billion investments in YouTube and $15 billion Facebook valuations.

At the same time social media or Web 2.0 or new media or whatever the heck you choose to call it certainly hasn’t disappeared either. On the one (marketing) hand we’re seeing significantly higher budget percentages being pushed at below-the-line, experiential and digital (for the purposes of this conversation including online and mobile) channels – a sure sign that business takes the effect that the social media evolution has had on their customers pretty seriously. Agencies are feeling this – a fact that keeps my company and me very busy.

A while ago I wrote a two part series of posts for the Times in a past life as a blogumist. The first post was titled “Social Media is Dead” and the objective of that post was to point out that the hype behind this New Big Thing “Social Media” had overextended its stay and it was time to see social media for what it is has become: part of the fabric of the Web itself and not some new widget. Instead the Web we came to know as a largely unresponsive mix of media types has evolved somewhat to become more social, interactive and meaningful.

Just like in the late 90s there has been a fair amount of hype surrounding social media and what it represents to the world. To a large extent I think the hype has eclipsed the reality (and a measure of practicality) and we have seen a number of the same types of services springing up in an effort to garner some of that VC funding that seemed to be flowing like water until the financial crisis/panic hit recently. In the space of a couple years we have seen social networks like Facebook explode and the rise of things called microblogging platforms like Jaiku, Twitter, Pownce, Identi.ca … (the list goes on). In some cases we have seen services pop up we couldn’t have anticipated previously and that has been great. Often it is the unexpected new thing that has more of an impact than the planned stuff.

With the amount of available VC funding diminishing it is even more important to start focussing on taking established and tested social media tools and putting them to work. Mike has a few good suggestions on how to do that in his post and I think it is fair to say that Mike has a good grasp of the state of the local market. From my perspective it is increasingly important to start paying attention to some of the more mundane and perhaps even unpleasant aspects of social media implementations too. Here I am referring to the legal issues that accompany this sort of work: things like content licensing, privacy, regulating user conduct on your Web spaces and so on.

These issues aren’t just being taken care of and when the warm fuzzy feelings associated with all this sharing and socialising wear off businesses may well find themselves staring down the barrel of a couple nasty lawsuits for copyright infringement or privacy violations. Not a happy thought at all but entirely something manageable. It makes a lot of sense to lay the groundwork for this stuff and incorporate it into your usual risk management policies and processes early on and avoid any unpleasant surprises later.

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legal, mike stopforth, new media, social media, legal issues, planning

I had a mildly alarming experience with Facebook Notes this afternoon. I published a note and specified friends who would be able to view the note using Facebook’s very welcome and pretty granular privacy settings. I published the note and a couple hours later I saw that a couple people had commented on the note who I hadn’t included in the distribution/access list.

The privacy settings on Facebook are very flexible. They allow users to choose whether to open a note up to everyone, friends of friends, just friends, specific friends (when you select those friends you even have an opportunity to create a new friend list on the fly) or to keep the note private. I took advantage of the option to restrict access to the note to specific friends mainly because I felt the content of the note should perhaps be limited to those of my friends who are closest to the news.

I certainly didn’t expect the note to be published publicly anyway to all my friends. While I didn’t exactly give away nuclear weapons secrets, this does serve as a reminder that not everything goes as well as it is intended to go on these platforms, especially platforms still being tested like the new Facebook platform.

In addition, don’t expect Facebook to take responsibility for any glitches in the system. Its privacy policy is pretty comprehensive and doesn’t leave much wiggle room. Ultimately it comes down to this one line:

You post User Content (as defined in the Facebook Terms of Use) on the Site at your own risk.

That being said, I am really glad to see the privacy options available to me when I publish content on Facebook. I also appreciate Facebook’s two core principles which are set out at the beginning of the privacy policy:

Facebook follows two core principles:

1. You should have control over your personal information.
Facebook helps you share information with your friends and people around you. You choose what information you put in your profile, including contact and personal information, pictures, interests and groups you join. And you control the users with whom you share that information through the privacy settings on the Privacy page.

2. You should have access to the information others want to share.
There is an increasing amount of information available out there, and you may want to know what relates to you, your friends, and people around you. We want to help you easily get that information.

These two principles address some of the criticisms levied against Facebook and mirrors some of the language in the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web which was published a year ago tomorrow (5 September) little while ago. They are welcome provisions in a privacy policy and ideals to strive for. They are also subject to the technical features of the platform they govern.

As with any platform on the Web which you store or publish your content on, you take a risk when you use the services. Outages occur (less frequently, thank goodness) and services can be hacked. Just bear these risks in mind and act accordingly.

Update: I just read a recent post Paul Walsh published about privacy on Facebook in the context of photos that is worth reading.

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bill of rights, facebook, privacy, control, privacy controls

Simon Dingle made an interesting comment when we were in Japan recently. He spoke about how in Japan there is a sense of tremendous national pride coupled with an almost unspoken distinction drawn between the Japanese and people who are simply not Japanese. This pride inspires the Japanese to be so good at what they do.

I was thinking about the stuff we put up with here and Simon’s point got me thinking about South African national pride, or rather, the apparent lack thereof. Despite the hope for a rainbow nation in the early years after the 1994 elections, we remain a deeply divided nation. We are divided across all the lines which we hoped to bridge: race, gender, cultural heritage, political alignment and religion. There has been talk in the past about what it actually means to be South African and what identifying as South African actually means beyond being a statement of citizenship.

I just don’t know that there is a coherent sense of South African identity. We don’t have the kind of national identity and national pride that drives us to do better and excel at what we do as South Africans. We are far more concerned with our own communities and, in many cases, even smaller groups of people we identify with. The distinction between South African and not South African is a question of which ID book you hold. Without a clear and strong sense of national pride we remain a hodgepodge collection of racial, cultural, political, religious and gender-based groups huddling under this umbrella term: “South African”. This boils down to a lack of respect for each other as human beings and fellow South Africans and we see that in our daily lives through the way people treat each other and how we don’t look at each other anymore.

Even our government doesn’t speak about a rainbow nation anymore. Have we lost our national pride altogether?

Image: Colour by coda licensed under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial ShareAlike 2.0 license

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south africa, national pride, pride, fractured society

Ramble on

A complete treatment of this topic would probably take up a number of hefty volumes so this chapter is not intended to cover all aspects of doing business in South Africa. There are many brilliant, knowledgeable and expert writers and professionals in South Africa who could speak far more authoritatively on the range of topics that fall under the general header of “SA Inc and the business of doing business in South Africa”.

Instead I am going to mention two topics which I am both passionate about, regard as two very hot topics in the near future and which are, themselves, are subjects of entire books and which SA Business should bear in mind when doing business in South Africa: privacy and content licensing. These topics are going to be of interest for those businesses which are interested in or involved in the growing social media space.

While content licensing and privacy are the topics that tend to attract the most attention when I chat to business people about them, freedom of expression and unlawful competition are two topics I won’t deal with in this chapter due to space considerations in the context of this blook as a whole but which are arguably equally important. Which topics are more relevant and therefore important to you may be a matter of perspective depending on what your focus may be at a given point in time.

Privacy

Privacy has always been an issue business has had to tackle although not terribly vigorously. Privacy issues in the workplace have often included personal communications and personal relationships in the workplace and have been dealt with through internal policies on issues ranging from the acceptable use of the organisation’s IT infrastructure to policies that deal with the prickly topic of sexual harassment.

The need to give substance to the right to privacy in the Bill of Rights and the increasing amount of personal information that is becoming available both online and offline in all spheres (and the growing need to safeguard that potentially sensitive information) have given rise to draft legislation presently doing the rounds in our legislature.

This is not a new process and in many ways the draft legislation mirrors developments abroad, including in the European Union. Without going into the legislation in much detail (yet another volume in itself), it defines personal information and through a series of voluntary and mandatory mechanisms it seeks to strike a balance between the need to safeguard personal information when processed by public (for example, government bodies) and private (for example, businesses) bodies, the need to protect and give substance to the right to privacy and the desire to facilitate the appropriate flow of personal information.

I use an extract from the draft legislation in a presentation I give on these topics and in which I highlight some of the examples of personal information. Although few people can actually read the extract in the slide because the font is so small, the highlights demonstrate the fairly broad scope of the definition and highlight the need to take a more active interest in how this draft legislation may impact on South African businesses.

An unfortunate consequence of a growing complexity of issues pertinent to business is that it is necessary to introduce a range of measures to reduce and manage the risks that accompany this growing complexity. One of these measures, at least in this context, is a clear privacy policy that informs both internal stakeholders and customers what personal information the company is collecting and how that personal information is being used. These uses are guided by the draft legislation and it is vital that this information be communicated to these people.

The draft legislation also envisages imposing a series of obligations on businesses to secure their stores of personal information and to retain that personal information subject to specified guidelines. Add a range of exemptions and prohibitions to the mix and businesses are facing a far more complex privacy landscape which needs to be navigated with considerable care.

Bottom line: things are about to become really interesting in this space.

Content licensing

For the most part Business SA either doesn’t think too much about copyright or views it as a shield to protect it from the horrors that ravage the intellectual property countryside that include plagiarists and unimaginative bloggers who are too loose with the “Copy” and “Paste” commands.

Copyright certainly has a valuable place in that intellectual property countryside. One of its most important functions is to protect original content and, in the process, it encourages content creators to develop more original content. The difficulty with copyright is that, as a bundle of exclusive rights, it does not always fit in well with the growing social media trend (if you can call it that) and with consumers’ desires and habits.

One question I often ask people is how many of them tend to download or copy interesting content they see on the Web without thinking too much about little things like who owns the copyright in that content and whether consuming that content in that way is consistent with the copyright owner’s intentions and rights. At the risk of oversimplifying the issues, people want to go online and freely share what they find with their friends, family and colleagues. This act of sharing often takes the form of copied text and images being distributed by email, printed out and passed around or even incorporated into blogs and other online social media platforms.

The problem with this tendency, of course, is that many of these uses are forms of copyright infringement and while there are a number of exceptions to general copyright infringement the exceptions themselves are sometimes not terribly clear or helpful.

There is an alternative to simply relying on the protections afforded by copyright and its exceptions to copyright infringement. If your goal, as a content creator, is to ensure that your content is made available to the biggest audience possible within certain parameters which may protect your business model, the integrity of your content or ensure that any sharing perpetuates your open access ambitions then you will be thinking about some form of license for your content. The immediate challenge is how to properly license your content and make sure that the considerations that need to be addressed are, in fact addressed.

One option is to go to an attorney have have a custom made license prepared. A license will grant its user certain rights in the content concerned which, in turn, will enable the user to make use of the content in a way that would ordinarily be prohibited. This has its advantages because you will have a license that does exactly what you want it to do (that is, permit certain uses and prohibit others). The disadvantages include the costs involved and the possible inability to understand the terms of the license unless you have degrees in Latin and advanced legalese.

The second option will be far more appealing to many content creators. Creative Commons licenses are ready made content licences that permit a range of uses of content depending on the license adopted (there are six core licenses). These licenses are customisable to a degree in that you can choose which elements to include in your license to supplement elements that are built into every Creative Commons license, such as the ability to share the content privately, the requirement that authors of the content concerned be attributed properly and the perpetual term of the licenses. The rights granted by a Creative Commons license may include the ability to create a derivative work of the content (something like a remix of a song, perhaps?), the right to exploit a work commercially or perhaps the requirement that adaptations of the content be distributed under a similar Creative Commons license.

One thing for SA Business to bear in mind, especially in the push to integrate social media into an online presence, is that Creative Commons licenses can be powerful tools which can be used to help spread content as widely as possible. This makes a lot of sense where a business has a blog or otherwise publishes its content on the Web with the intention that it reach as many people as possible. Additional protocols like the recently introduced CC+ protocol enable businesses to integrate their commercial licenses into a non-commercial Cretive Commons license. One benefit of this is to present a licensed version of the content that can be freely shared while preserving a commercial model. A good example of a service that uses a similar model is the popular tutorial service, Common Craft.

What I constantly find remarkable about these legal constructs is the very real impact they can have on creative expression. Although copyright was originally intended to protect and promote creative expression, it has become almost synonymous with protectionism and restrictions on content usage. It is unfortunate but it has paved the way for tools like Creative Commons licenses and similar free content licenses to free content creators to express themselves more freely secure in the knowledge that they have struck a balance between sharing and spreading their ideas and passions and, at the same time, ensuring that their content is used in a way that best achieves that expression. Just what form that expression takes and how it manifests will vary from one content creator to another, whether that content creator be an artist, a writer or Chief Executive blogging about his hopes and dreams for his company.

Levelling off

Without a doubt privacy and content licensing are critical issues that SA Business needs to pay careful attention to, especially as more and more local businesses provide services and publish content online. Two topics I wasn’t able to deal with in this chapter introduce further dimensions of complexity and perhaps greater challenges for many businesses: freedom of expression and unlawful competition. These seemingly unrelated topics come together in a very interesting and yet somewhat disturbing way for many businesses in the context of social media in particular and also merit very careful consideration.

One message I try to communicate whenever I speak about these topics is that as much as they may complicate an already confusing landscape, the risks they represent can (and should) be managed and, in the process, reduced. Doing so requires a little research and planning but the benefits of these foundational steps will soon become apparent in a variety of ways, all of which add to the tremendous promise and potential of doing business in South Africa.

Now read the rest of the blook chapters:

Introduction
1. The new South Africa – is it real?
2. Is SA rich or poor?
3. What the world thinks of South Africa and what our global opportunities are
4. The importance of each individual’s contribution collectively
5. SA Inc and the business of doing business in SA
6. The beauty and grandeur that surrounds us
7. The importance of technology in SA’s global emergence
8. Building brand South Africa
9. Making the most of SA’s creative talents and abilities
10. Innovate for a better South Africa
11. The role of the younger generation in SA, and what we need to do to support them
12. Connecting South Africa – Communities that transcend technology
13. We are African – the role of collaboration in South Africa’s growth

Chapter 5, SA Inc and the business of doing business in SA by Paul Jacobson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 South Africa License.
Based on a work at pauljacobson.org.

Technorati Tags:
content licensing, copyright, creative commons, south africa, blook, sa blook, opportunities, privacy, legislation, sa business

I have been involved in the local debate about whether to certify Microsoft’s Office Open XML document format as a South African and international standard. Although I represented a local non-profit called The African Commons Project, this post represents my own views and not necessarily the TACP’s. For those who don’t know what this whole thing is about, I’ll present a simplified version.

Microsoft has a new document standard which emerged in Office 2007. You may already be using it without knowing it (.docx, .xlsx etc). Anyway, Microsoft wanted that document format to be certified as an ISO standard which is a pretty important certification as far as standards go. To get there it had the document format certified by a smaller standards body called ECMA (which was done) and then, through ECMA, it was placed on a fast track process. The idea behind the fast track process in this case was to push the document format through as quickly as possible.

The whole process was controversial and attracted a fortune of interest from multinationals like IBM and Sun (both companies argued vigorously against certification). The document format specification was extremely long (over 6 000 pages) and was incomplete. There was a fortune of legacy code in the format which didn’t seem to make all that much sense to the more technical people. To me the debate came down to an open access/public benefit issue. Was certification of Office Open XML good for communities like our rural poor and the developing world as a whole? Of course my response was (and remains) “no”. I gave a presentation at one of the early meetings of the taskforce convened to debate the issue at South African National Standards which I’d like to share. There is a lot of talking behind the scenes but you’ll get the gist of my arguments.

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ISO announced the result of the international voting process a couple days ago and while there were hopes that Microsoft would be defeated, its application was successful. One of the contributing factors is almost certainly Microsoft’s somewhat questionable tactics in securing countries’ support for its format and where I was mildly indifferent to Microsoft before the debate, this experience has on polarised me against Microsoft on these sorts of issues.

There has been talk about how this process reflects what is right and “what needs to be done”. Mostly this talk is from people and organisations who seem to me to be closely aligned with Microsoft (at best) or firmly in Microsoft’s pocket (at worst). This has been an important issue for Microsoft because certification as an ISO standard is the key to big procurement contracts by governments around the world, to name one customer base. It has been a high stakes game in which Microsoft has fought hard to protect its interests.

The Oracle, writing on Lockergnome, makes an appropriate point in a brief discussion about a ZDNet article about the vote:

The article doesn’t have anything to say about the methods used to convince the voters, but in the first and second rounds allegations of payoffs and ‘deals’ were leveled at the Redmond giant. The resultant investigations proved nothing about outright bribery, but details of dealing were shown. Since the ’standard’ could not garner a simple majority before, yet amazingly achieves a 75% share of the votes this time, with few changes to the standard, it does make the thoughtful person wonder.

It does indeed.

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iso, microsoft, office open xml, ooxml, open access

I decided to head off to the First Tuesday event this month for a panel discussion about broadband in South Africa. I thought I would blog some of my thoughts about the event so here goes …

One of the panelists was Henk Kleynhans from Skyrove. Just as Henk got started one of the attendee’s phones rang with the theme from Magnum PI … what an intro. After going through the pros and cons of 3G and WiMAX (a load of hot air, according to Henk), he espoused the benefits of wifi as the wireless medium of choice. Henk briefly painted a picture of almost ubiquitous wifi connectivity and single signons. It all sounds great and I’d like to know how that will pan out. Metro wifi will certainly help matters but will street lamps become wifi access points?

Matthew from WebAfrica wasn’t as optimistic about wireless Internet access in South Africa although he does see ADSL as the speed connection of choice in South Africa. He pointed out that the mobile networks have faster uptake but sees Telkom remaining a dominant force in South Africa’s broadband landscape for the near future.

Much of the talk focussed on low adoption rates and the economics of developing further infrastructure to service under-serviced areas and what really bugs me is that many service providers seem to take the existing cost structure as a given and that pretty much means South Africa’s broadband userbase remains pitifully low. This is one of the reasons I like Skyrove so much. Users can make their broadband lines more readily available for less and provided you don’t have too many people using the connection at the same time and degrading the connection speed, you can add more bandwidth to accommodate increased usage of the line. If Telkom won’t make better broadband penetration possible, users can do it for themselves.

The one panelist from MWeb (don’t remember his name) made the point that Telkom sets the prices and in the absence of any meaningful regulation in the local telecoms space, service providers are forced to bite the bullet and deal with the pricing structures. He was far more positive about WiMAX as a preferred wireless choice for IP traffic. He described WiMAX as a simple and elegant solution that is pretty similar to wifi. WiMAX also makes a lot of sense in South Africa where we have terrain and distances not conducive to cabled Internet access. For the time being it is a matter of waiting for all the hype to die down a bit and let WiMAX achieve better recognition as a preferred data transmission platform.

At this point the discussion started to devolve into a bit of a pissing contest with the 3G/HSDPA advocate undermining the WiMAX guy. Matthew talked about the problems with wireless technologies compared to cabled technologies and even Henk got in on the debate with his further thoughts about wifi as a better “last yard” option. This all misses the point. Does it really make a big difference which acronym labels fast, affordable and meaningful broadband access to end users like you and me. As I wrote this my mobile phone was battling to find enough of a signal to upload a photo I took of the panel for this post. There simply wasn’t a signal for my phone even though I was sitting about 20 to 30 metres from a door leading outside. Who cares about speed, latency and development in 3G if the signal isn’t there in the first place.

The panel was asked about the core issue of Telkom’s pricing and the first response was to asked about Telkom’s capacity which is estimated to be around 20Gbits/s. Telkom has apparently said that Telkom only uses about 2.4Gbits/s for IP traffic which begs the question what the remaining 17Gbits/s of bandwidth? Is Telkom holding back to provide for the future? Another point made is that with all the talk about the last mile, there is a fair amount of congestion between South Africa and the rest of the world. Matthew pointed out that the big problem is the national backhaul where Telkom and Neotel control the pricing. This is where there is a substantial bottleneck too. He stated that it is no good landing an international cable on our shore and not being able to get that data up to Joburg …

The discussion shifted to Joburg’s plans for a metro-wifi network and opposing views on the sustainability of the model. At this point my butt cheeks went numb from the chair … not exactly an edge of my seat discussion.

My friend Craig Bregman challenged the panel’s VHS versus Betamax (or perhaps Blu-ray versus HD-DVD) arguments and they ultimately came down on the side of consumer choice and picking the most appropriate option. Henk made the point that where a mobile worker comes across wifi, that person will likely use wifi. He was connected via 3G at the time. I think this is a fair representation of what people do when they are roaming. Until my phone stopped talking to my MacBook I used a combination of wifi and 3G when I was out and about and ADSL when I am back at home base or somewhere I could connect a cable to my MacBook.

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hsdpa, first tuesday, broadband penetration, broadband, skyrove, mweb business, webafrica, wimax, 3g, adsl