The availability of affordable broadband telecommunications infrastructure in a developing nation like South Africa is essential to achieving the ASGISA initiative of lowering the cost to do business in our country. Broadband Infraco was created in this context under the Broadband Infraco Act No. 33 of 2007, specifically with the mandate to expand the availability, access to and affordability of national and international telecommunications connectivity services and, to ensure that the bandwidth requirements for specific development projects of national interest are met. This presentation will review the broadband network deployed by Infraco to date, including the commissioning and operations of the network to provide national long-distance connectivity for the launch of Neotel services in the market, as well as expansion of the network to meet the requirements of the new SITA Network. It will briefly touch on the planning and project engineering, which is also well advanced on the needs for the MeerKat and international connectivity networks. Looking ahead, the presentation will touch on planned expansions to provide for the increased footprint and the capacity required by Neotel, SITA, TENET and the additional projects being developed under the leadership of the Department of Science and Technology.

India’s telecom sector has grown exponentially in the last 5 years. Teledensity has shot up to almost 30% from 4% at the turn of the century; local and long distance tariffs are amongst the lowest in the world. There has also been significant investment, both domestic and foreign, in expanding international & domestic backbones and wireless infrastructure. In this session, Srinivasa Addepalli will review the achievements made possible by a progressive telecom policy that has encouraged entry of new operators in all segments of the industry. He will touch on the regulatory environment that, while occasionally mired in controversy, has remained independent and pro-competition. India, however, still has a long way to go before it can become globally benchmarked in terms of emerging broadband and Internet services. As such, this session will also share the lessons to be learnt in managing an environment of convergence and next-generation technologies and services. The presentation will cover some examples of Indian telecom companies that have managed to not only make a mark in the growing Indian market, but also leveraged their capabilities to make an impact in the global telecom scene.

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This talk will discuss how Africa can achieve considerable e-Readiness in order to bridge her intra and inter-continental digital divide. The different measures of e-Readiness will be discussed with their limitations and ‘fit’ into Africa’s context highlighted. These measures such as those developed by World Bank, World Economic Forum and so forth are too distant from the realities on ground in Africa for any workable policy development. Recent research on Africa’s e-Readiness measurement from African researchers and practitioners will be presented in response to these limitations.
Also, different challenges to Africa’s e-Readiness attainment will be presented and discussed under the “5P” framework of People, Poverty, Process, Product and Policy. Various factors under these classifications challenging Africa’s e-Readiness will be elaborated upon and solutions to overcome them will also be presented.
These challenges are dealing with the issues of economic growth, telecommunications & energy infrastructure, computer technology and population needs are discussed under these broad classes. These issues will also be presented as recommendations for policy and practice at the continental, national and local governmental and non-governmental levels in Africa.

This presentation synthesises the results and findings from the various national projects in the LOG-IN Africa Network into a roadmap for e-Local governance. The synthesis is based on a framework of four questions derived from strategic management literature. The first question involves establishing where the countries are with respect to e-Local governance. This involved an assessment of the existing e-Governance policy and strategy situation at the national and local government levels. The second question is where the countries need to go with e-Local governance in terms of the vision, or the desired end-state in the longer term. The next question concerned how to get to the desired end state. In this presentation, this has been addressed through focusing on the e-Governance strategic direction and strategies nations have to develop, methodology for business process re-engineering and methodology for e-Local governance implementation. The final question is how countries will know whether they are achieving their e-Governance vision, strategies and associated results. This question is addressed through outlining monitoring and evaluation, involvement of policy makers and role and participation of citizens. The presentation ends by summarizing elements of the proposed roadmap and making some recommendations.

There’s no question about the cost of ICT. It’s a real cost and a rising cost to government. According to ForgeAhead, the South African government is expected to spend about R45 billion on ICT in 2008, reflecting more than 10% growth from R35 billion in 2007.
The reality, however, is that with the extraordinary evolution of IT in the last decade, the IT infrastructure of government has grown into a complicated collection of silos, each handling critical but discrete functions, often without the ability to work together.
The inadequate use of best practice processes across much of IT and the inability to gain a common view of IT make the management challenge even greater. And so does the introduction of promising new technologies — such as VoIP, open source, server virtualisation or mobile devices. At the same time, the pressures to improve public service delivery and simplify access to basic service for the SA citizen continue to mount. For government, leveraging IT to transform service delivery has been a vision for some time, but perhaps it is more of a goal than reality.
So is government really deriving any business value from ICT? Given that, from a governance perspective, there appears to be lack of ownership or accountability and traceability for realising promised benefits, a situation that is further compounded by the lack of clearly defined and integrated technology policies.

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