I FEEL ambivalent about the arrival of Seacom. On the one hand, there is excitement surrounding the first east-coast undersea bandwidth cable landing in South Africa.
On the other, it will be some time before the full benefits will be realised and the companies which should be saving South Africa from our ridiculously priced bandwidth have been handed an excuse to milk the SA market for a little while longer.
And that's because, at time of Seacom going live, only one company in South Africa can capitalise on the new international bandwidth.
Everyone else is tied up in Telkom contracts that stretch over the next 12 to 18 months at least, from what I can tell.
The incumbent network operator saw Seacom coming and used its grip on the market to secure contracts with major clients to tie them down well beyond Seacom being switched on.
Even Neotel, which says it's at the forefront of connectivity in South Africa, has a lot of work to do on its local network before it can produce the economies of scale that will benefit the South African consumer. You only need to run latency tests on Neotel's network to realise it is woefully far away from running a competitive national network.
But let's not downplay Seacom - it was an ambitious project that achieved its goals ahead of the other five international cable projects scheduled to land in South Africa.
Seacom CEO Brian Herlihy and his team deserve full recognition for not only successfully completing the mammoth project that Seacom was, but for doing so on time and ahead of the competition.
Telkom has market by short and curlies
Credit is also due for doing it in a way that offers the African countries in question full benefit of an open availability model, where the bandwidth the project provides is available to all who can afford it.
The reason South Africans will have to wait to reap the benefits from Seacom has nothing to do with the cable project itself, and everything to do with the incumbent operator's grip on the market and other network providers' inabilities to scale up to demand.
Telkom still has the market by the short and curlies, while everyone else is some way away from fully rolling out national networks, even if Neotel (Tata Africa) is closer to the goal than most.
And in the middle of the South African bandwidth saga is the independent communications authority of South Africa (Icasa) which, instead of getting on with things and introducing the policy changes that our telecommunications market so desperately needs, is beating around the bush.
It is also pandering to leftist loonies, hampering progress by interfering in international telecoms deals and having its top brass plead ignorance when taken to task on the matter.
What Icasa should be doing is focusing on local loop unbundling, spectrum allocation and the implementation of policy that can make a real difference to our market.
One can only hope that the new department of communications, under the leadership of minister Siphiwe Nyanda, will bring about the kind of service delivery the Zuma regime has promised as well as the required pressure to bear on the market.
Before South Africa catches up with the rest of the world in terms of bandwidth availability, several things needs to happen. Telkom's grip on the market must be broken, possibly through unbundling of the local loop, which will allow other telecoms operators to access Telkom infrastructure.
Consumer apathy also to blame
The other operators building out national networks - including Neotel, Vodacom and MTN - must complete their network upgrades and expansions to completely escape interconnect contracts.
Companies in a position to drastically reduce prices must do so. And this is something the market is loath to do, barring the smaller players who have no choice but to compete on price to gain entry.
As it stands, only Neotel is in any position to reduce prices - and it doesn't have to, because no one else can.
And, finally, the South African consumer is to blame for expressing some of the worst apathy in the world. We are ripped off for a number of things in South Africa - branded clothing, electronics, cars - and, yes, bandwidth. But instead of rising up against ridiculous prices, South Africans sit back and take it.
SAT3, which was the only cable connecting SA to the rest of the world until Seacom arrived, is currently underutilised. The cable is not fully lit up - meaning it is not yet delivering its full capacity. Surely if SA had a bandwidth shortage the first step would have been to fully capitalise on existing infrastructure?
But no, it was never necessary. And if we had the ability to bring down prices in the past, and didn't, what makes anyone think we will do so now?
Realistically, South Africans cannot expect cheaper broadband in the next year. It will be another year or two before we are anywhere near prices experienced in the developed world.
We will see minor reductions in the short term, but don't hold your breath for world-class bandwidth - because there is too much money to be made from milking an apathetic South African public for a little while longer. The bandwidth price drop is inevitable, but it ain't here yet.
- Fin24.com