Digital cities -- the connectivity resurrection

10.10.2005
Von Nicolas Callegari

While South Africa"s telecommunications monopoly is attempting to widen the digital divide with high pricing, addressing the divide goes further than introducing competition and potentially lowering prices.

International trends show that local governments and municipalities can play a very important and strategic part in closing the digital divide, by making provision for digital services to be delivered to their citizens through municipal broadband networks.

Whether this is through commercial broadband offerings, or the use of the networks to facilitate municipal services (such as remote video surveillance or traffic light maintenance), huge opportunities lie in wait for municipalities that take the plunge.

According to Greg Richardson, founder and managing partner at Civitium, a US-based consultancy specializing in municipal network roll-outs, there have been a number of successful roll-outs in both major cities in the US and rural cities.

"Typical applications," he says, "include public safety applications, for example, sending a mugshot to a policeman"s handheld etc."

"In Houston, Texas," he says, "municipal networks are used to access city-wide parking meters, a major revenue generator for the city. In some places, citizens have been given broadband access for US$14.95 a month."

Locally, legislation is the main prohibiting factor in the commercial roll-out of these types of networks, but, according to BMI-T director, Denis Smit, this will soon change.

"The Electronic Communications Bill (ECB) - formerly the Convergence Bill - makes provision for new classes of licence, so government is conscious of their prevalence in the future."

The telecoms industry could very well see the birth of municipal networks as the resurrection of under-serviced area licences (USALs), which, while a good idea at the time, did not meet up with expectations on execution. Let"s face it, nobody is in a rush to service the poor people of SA.

According to Smit, using municipal networks in partnership with USALs will provide much-needed connectivity to even the most remote areas.

But the question remains, if municipalities are struggling to provide even the most basic services to their citizens in remote areas, how will they be able to provide reliable broadband services?

This is obviously something that is not going to happen overnight, says Smit. But a number of municipalities in SA are already leading the way, including Cape Town, Knysna and (closer to home) Tshwane.

Charles Kuun, manager for the global digital hub at the City of Tshwane municipality, says that the city already has a well established network.

"Our aim in Tshwane," says Kuun, "is to have a blanket of connectivity over the city. We already have a well-webbed fiber backbone and well-placed high sites, which are interconnected by the fiber."

He says that connectivity is high on government"s agenda, and that it goes further than basic data connectivity with its alternative service provisioning initiative. "We want to give each and every citizen an e-mail address and possibly even voice connectivity," he adds.

Tshwane has also been piloting connectivity to the city"s Smart Learning Network, which connects learning institutions, such as universities, schools and libraries, allowing them to share information resources quickly and cost effectively. Of the some 600 digital cities worldwide, the majority manage their network infrastructures in public, private partnerships (PPPs). "Municipalities do not want to be operators," says Kuun.

But the momentum behind municipal networks labels it clearly as the next disruptive trend in the global IT industry. The need for connectivity has also been shifted, especially from an affordability point of view.

Political momentum has shifted dramatically, from protecting Telkom and establishing the mobile networks, to lowering costs. And maintaining high costs could be seen as political suicide.

To emphasize the importance and momentum behind municipal networks, BMI-T will be holding the Digital Cities Forum on 3 and 4 November, to bring together authorities on the subject from overseas, as well as influential government figures and solution providers.