Johannesburg - All indications are that South Africa will deliver on its information and communications technology (ICT) commitments to Fifa and host a successful World Cup in 2010, says Gartner principal analyst Will Hahn.
The big question is whether it will fully grasp the opportunities presented to it by the event to the benefit of South African citizens.
Speaking at the Gartner Telecoms Africa 2008, Hahn said one of the commitments the country had to make was that it would deliver high-definition broadcasts (HDTV) of all the 2010 matches for screening around the world.
It was ironic then, that it didn't seem the country would be ready to deliver HDTV to its own citizens. And this was not due to a lack of willingness by the broadcasters.
An industry player shared his concerns.
Steven Sidley, the chief operating officer of Altech, whose subsidiary UEC makes set-top boxes and will participate in manufacturing low-cost decoders for the conversion of analogue to digital TV, made a comment during question time that the regulatory authorities had not yet approved the specifications for the set-top boxes, what the subsidies would be or the distribution channels.
Watch out for over-regulation
He said there would only be a tiny proportion of set-top boxes out in the market by 2010.
Hahn said his message to the 'powers that be' was that they should do as much as quickly as they could.
He warned that over-regulation could prevent the country from taking advantage of the opportunities available to it.
Hahn said the challenges and opportunities for South Africa in hosting the World Cup spectacle were "immense", but the benefits and impact were also great. This had never been attempted in a country like South Africa before, he said.
South Africa had to make a number of guarantees to Fifa, among them that all broadcast would be HDTV-capable and that there would be two 40 gigabits/second (Gbps) fibre links between the venues. Government had guaranteed there would be 99.9% network availability with no single point of failure for the event, Hahn said.
He said the games just kept getting bigger. At the previous World Cup in Germany in 2006, there had been a massive increase in the number of viewer hours, channels and viewers from the African continent.
The service providers, like T-Systems, had taken advantage of this with World Cup ringtones, phones and converged offers that even included a voucher to place an online bet.
Hahn used the metaphor of an obscure - but existing - sport called chess boxing, in which opponents box for a round and then play chess the next, to illustrate the extent to which unimaginable converged offerings will be put together and will appeal to an audience.
Avaya, which provided data networks for the Germany World Cup, saw 21 terabits/second (Tbps) of data passing through its network during the 2006 event. Hahn said the scope of the event had stressed even a large and sophisticated telecommunications network like that of Germany, which was both a warning and an opportunity for South Africa as it forced modernisation of networks.
But whereas in Germany the providers took all their sophisticated infrastructure and equipment away afterwards, a key element for South Africa was that the infrastructure would remain in place. Although some elements might be moved around to different parts of the network, it would, importantly, still be here beyond 2010 to the benefit of the country.
Hahn said online usage could explode, while mobile data take-up should also be significant.
- Fin24.com