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Cape Town - Citizen journalism has taken off in Tshwane as free Wi-Fi access becomes a reality for a new generation of South Africans.
Through the City of Tshwane's free Wi-Fi network, mainly younger film makers are developing video content that is shared on the Wi-Fi TV video-on-demand service.
"We believe Wi-Fi TV is engaging, educating and empowering the citizens of the City of Tshwane. We hope that this will contribute in bridging the digital divide and making the lives of people better and providing entertainment to communities," said Alan Knott-Craig Jnr, CEO of Project Isizwe which has been tasked with developing the network.
The provision of Wi-Fi has seen a spike in the demand for rich media content like video on the network.
According to figures provided by Project Isizwe, Wi-Fi TV hit a record 306 000 unique views in January 2015.
4G spectrum
"It seems hard to believe that not too long ago, the general public in the City of Tshwane had no real access to free Wi-Fi. Today they are setting records with high-quality videos that are streamed via Wi-Fi TV to be viewed by everyone," Knott-Craig said.
Mobile broadband in SA has been hamstrung by a lack of political will to make spectrum in the key 800MHz frequency band available.
Despite a number of delays going back to policy in 2008, policy makers have set March 2015 as a deadline for direction on policy.
"We expect to have a White Paper on Integrated ICT Policy by the end of this financial year, in March 2015. The Department, working with the regulator, Icasa, will seek to resolve spectrum shortage for network capacity in the short to media term," said Minister of Telecommunications and Postal Services, Dr Siyabonga Cwele.
SA faces a spectrum crunch if the rollout of high speed mobile broadband spectrum continues to be delayed. (Duncan Alfreds, Fin24)
Cwele was speaking at the Southern Africa Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference (Satnac) in Port Elizabeth late in 2014.
But that promise echoed one made by Yunus Carrim in his capacity as the former minister of communications. He promised that SA would have definitive policy on 4G spectrum by March 2014.
According to the former department of communications' presentation to the Portfolio Committee on Communications, in 2013, 33.3% of the South African population had internet access.
Cost crunch
However, the department (now renamed the Department of Telecommunications and Postal Services) submitted ambitious targets of 50% access at 5mbps by 2016, 90% by 2020, and 100% at 10mbps by 2030.
According to data from Ericsson's Mobile Data Traffic Growth report for 2013 to 2019, the region's data appetite is huge and expected to grow at 65% to 2019 and beyond.
Put into perspective, mobile data in the region was at 37 000 terabytes (TB) per month in 2013, and that will jump to 76 000TB by the end of 2014, on its way to a mammoth 764 000TB by the end of 2019.
But the government has admitted that it cannot alone shoulder the cost of building next-generation broadband networks.
"Funding requirements for the effective roll-out of broadband are beyond the capacity of either the government or the private sector alone," says the South Africa Connect: Creating Opportunities, Ensuring Inclusion South Africa's Broadband Policy.
While high speed mobile broadband faces political dithering, Wi-Fi has emerged as the de facto technology for high speed internet access.
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