Neil Emerick, council member of the SA Free Market Foundation, describes the draft Convergence Bill that was released earlier this year as "a piece of horrendous legislation".
Speaking at today`s session of the Futurex conference in Cape Town, Emerick questioned the need for a Convergence Bill and said its model of attempting to license all types of communications activities is unnecessary.
"Licences are made by political discretion. They encourage the use of power and patronage and lead to corruption and so should be avoided."
Emerick said that in the Convergence Bill, licence definitions are "so wide and loosely worded" that they had lost all meaning.
However, Emerick praised communications minister Ivy Matseppe-Casaburri for the "big bang" liberalisation announcement earlier this month, saying this shows that managed de-liberalisation was a failure.
He showed the correlation between "big government" involvement in the ICT sector and teledensity per number of population.
"In the [fixed-line] industry, where we have a lot of government involvement [through its shareholding in Telkom], we only have a teledensity of about 40 telephones per 100 people. In the cellphone industry, where government involvement is a lot less, we have more than 14 million phones, or one for every four people."
The case for regulation
However, Angus Hay, Transtel`s chief technical officer, said some regulation is needed.
In his presentation, Hay said Africa`s governments and telecommunications regulators must create an environment conducive to growth in the sector, broadband and convergent telecommunications to support the information society.
Hay suggested that to increase broadband access in Africa, governments should start with telecommunications deregulation. They must also encourage competition, use good regulation and incentives, develop a national plan for broadband access, build telecommunications into broader infrastructure initiatives, and work regionally to encourage cross-border infrastructure operators.
"Just as the growth of mobile is closing the gap between developing and developed countries in basic telephony, so the lack of broadband access is widening the new digital divide."
Hay said the best incentive for operators remains stable, predictable regulation, which enables investors to develop long-term plans for infrastructure deployment.
Bridges.org executive director Teresa Peters told the conference that community telecentres had largely failed because people have to go out of their way to use them. However, there are some success stories.
"In Africa, the real opportunities rest in handheld devices, which allow people to store data and e-mail each other," she said.
The Futurex Cape 2004 conference ends today. It was organised by ITWeb in association with the CSSA, EIF, CITI and ITA.
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