CIO opinion
Realistically, when will Africa
experience the true benefits of
Smart Cities?
South Africa is a bit of a conundrum
because, in theory we should be miles ahead.
We should be using electronic payments
and broadly able to connect. This is the only
place I go to where I turn off my mobile
data as I switch on my phone as the plane
lands because it’s so expensive. But if you
go to Lagos where are only a few hundred
access points around the city, it’s running
very well. Facebook Express is putting the
subsidy in where, even though it’s not
free, it brings everybody into a connected
world. It does require public and private
partnerships and if it was made a priority by
government, it would happen. But if you look
at somewhere like Kenya, micropayments
are abundant, whereas here we’re still in a
situation where that hasn’t happened.
The challenge is that it’s been developed to
a degree; they’ve got fibre and connectivity,
but they haven’t got wireless. There are
also multiple operators here which in theory
should be a benefit but in practice means it’s
quite difficult to enforce something. But we
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are seeing change. There will be a significant
rollout in the near future, certainly in the first
half of next year around Cape Town which
will be quite transformational, and I think
that will lead the way. of a fibre network; a radio backbone network,
which is Wi-Fi and the other networks are
connecting in. That’s proving very effective
and I think that’s a trend we will continue
to see.
With the population numbers set
to increase in Africa, what role can
technology play? What role do national governments
need to play to accelerate and
coordinate the development of
Smart Cities?
You only have to look at countries like
Nigeria to see that it’s abundantly clear that
you won’t be able to have things without
technology. People need to understand their
own health with simple devices. They don’t
need to be expensive but have to be pervasive
and we need to make sure not wasting our
resources and are proactive with metering
and loss prevention. These countries are vast,
so it’s not really practical to have cables and
connect to things. The technology of choice
is inevitably going to be a radio network of
some kind. Each device uses different radios
so it’s not as if you can use the same IP to
every device because they all have different
characteristics and requirements.
You’re not going to build dozens of radio
networks, so what you have is the equivalent
The only thing that governments can really
do is to look carefully at spectrum allocation
because what we’ve done in recent years is
giving big chunks of spectrums to the highest
bidder which of course has been extremely
helpful to the financial situation of the
country. The challenge with that though is
that it’s clear from studies done in the US, that
we will run out of spectrums if we continue
with that model. Therefore, if I continue to
give huge chunks of spectrum to the highest
bidder and I’m limiting it to some very
wealthy operators, then we are constraining
the growth of all these different devices. So
the government has a very important role to
decide how to go about that. As you go from
3G to 4G, that needs to be talked about now
before they put forward the 4G licence. n
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