Unless some strange reversal of integrity leads to President Jacob Zuma sacking underperforming ministers Siyabonga Cwele and Faith Muthambi, expect 2017 to be the same as 2016: filled with internecine squabbles between the two telecoms ministries with similar names, overlapping responsibilities and an inability to get even basic legislation passed.
Muthambi is better known for her defence of the indefensible by protecting the SABC’s delinquent, narcissistic Hlaudi Motsoeneng and for going against her own party’s resolutions on the much-needed, much-delayed set-top box initiative for the switch to digital terrestrial TV.
The international deadline to move from the old analogue to digital TV broadcasting was last June. Yes, 2015. Given the bungling of Muthambi, who has faced numerous court challenges on the matter, it’s not unrealistic to believe she’ll still be blundering and muttering about sunshine journalism while her portfolio continues to stagnate.
Out of touch
I’m quite sure both ministers voted for Zuma to stay at "that" national executive committee meeting in late November.
I was almost prepared to give her equally challenged counterpart, Cwele, the benefit of the doubt when we spoke together at a huge telecoms conference in Cape Town called AfricaCom. But he started his speech with "I’m just a villager. I don’t know much about technology". I turned around to see how many people were still in the auditorium — admittedly at 5pm after a full day of presentations — and spotted a man in the row behind me fast asleep.
That pretty much summed up Cwele’s input and his tenure so far: another snore-worthy ministerial speech, woefully out of touch and filled with unsubstantiated rhetoric.
Cwele’s major contribution in 2016 was to table a white paper that is so recidivistic and socialist in its approach that it makes Fidel Castro seem like a capitalist.
Having licensed the spectrum to mobile operators on which they have built tens of billions of rand worth of infrastructure, he now wants to nationalise that spectrum.
It’s like selling someone the land to build a hotel, then telling them they don’t own the land anymore. Not only is it unconstitutional, it is also dumb. Yes, minister, dumb.
Worse still are Cwele’s plans to have government control the frequency and manage it on some wholesale basis. Every other attempt by government to provide its citizens with connectivity, the lifeblood of the Internet age, has ended in disaster: from the mismanaged Telkom five-year exclusivity period, to the hundreds of millions of rand wasted by signal broadcaster Sentech’s failed MyWireless initiative, to the current Broadband Infraco, which is going nowhere despite the good intentions.
It’s kind of like having Zuma write legislation himself. Oh wait, he appointed them and split the dysfunctional department of
mis-communications into two squabbling subunits. A bit like cancer replicating, strangling the lifeblood out of the industries these ministries are meant to foster.
For years I’ve been telling the tech and telecoms industry, admittedly cynically, that they are speaking the wrong language. Government only understands mining licences and big tenders that a son of the president or cousin of the MEC can get a slice of. If the IT industry could find a way to explain wireless broadband in tenderpreneurese, we’d have world-class infrastructure and cheaper prices.
What might happen in 2017 — only a "might" given the mess that is government policy thinking — is that wireless data costs might drop.
Since mobile is how the majority of SA get online, you’d think either one of the bungling telecoms ministers might exert a little pressure to bring these down. No, parliament’s various telecoms committees were naive enough to buy the mobile operators’ weak-hearted attempt to get so-called over-the-top players like Facebook and Twitter as regulated as the networks themselves are. I lost a lot of respect for the heads of the networks that made that pathetic plea, especially after a good two decades of profiteering from sky-high voice calls.
Data campaign
It took the #DataMustFall movement to get this important topic before parliament again,
but let’s be clear: it wasn’t government itself, nor the
telecoms and communications ministers who were setting the agenda. It was a radio DJ. Well done, Tbo Touch.
Sadly, like this year and in previous ones, the most exciting thing that will be done in telecoms in 2017 will be by the private sector. There is eager expectation for what former RMB and FNB bankers Michael Jordaan and Paul Harris will do with that orphan of telecoms, WBS. Without the legacy of the other wireless operators, or the requirement to carry voice (now a subset of data), they can do some interesting things with the mobile broadband services they plan to offer.
The data speeds of networks have plateaued as much as the handsets themselves. An attempt by Samsung to steal a march on arch-rival Apple led to the Note 7 debacle — as profound a tipping point as BlackBerry’s three-day outage. It’s hard to see how Samsung will recover from the considerable brand damage.
Every flight that takes off warns people that a Samsung Note 7 is not allowed on the plane of fear of catching alight. Every flight I have taken since September has someone reading that out, while check-in counters have huge signs warning the same. The big problem for Samsung, which has had to recall other products, including 3m washing machines in the US after some exploded, is that nobody hears "Note 7" catches fire. They hear "Samsung".
All the dominant cellphone makers have had their rise and fall: Motorola, Nokia, BlackBerry. It’s not inconceivable that Samsung has had its crisis moment and is heading in the same direction.
2017 is going to be the year of the mobile manufacturers you’ve never heard of. Not only Huawei and Xiaomi, which have become better known in SA, but Chinese brands like Vivo and Oppo, which didn’t exist two years ago and have bloodied Apple’s nose in China.
The top end of the smartphone market is saturated and these mid-market Chinese makes — including rejuvenated Lenovo-owned Moto — are likely to see great growth next year.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is also forecast to become a real thing in 2017. These IoT "things" are the non-cellphones that are connected to the Internet: fridges, cars with GPS, digital video recorders, webcams and other unintelligent devices. I have been deeply sceptical about the IoT not because I doubt the veracity of the trend, but because it has attracted the usual overhyped rhetoric of such new movements.
It also doesn’t help that a major distributed denial of service attack in October was mounted via these connected devices,
When I see IoT in action, and in a meaningful way, I’m sure I will be less sceptical.
The same is true of the blockchain, which smarter people than me say is at the point where the Internet was in the late 1990s before it became the digital glue of our world. The blockchain is a "distributed ledger" that tracks all the transactions in an open public way, meaning you can always see what has been transacted, and so on. Why then do Bitcoin exchanges keep getting hacked and millions of dollars worth stolen? I know it’s a contrarian view, but I’m waiting for wider adoption and better ideas before I embrace it.
Sadly, the same is true of another hyped technology, virtual reality. Right now the applications and content are limited — and the only two industries that appear to be likely beneficiaries are gaming and porn.
A similar hyped technology, augmented reality, has been around for years and it took a game — Pokémon Go — to turn it into a household phenomenon. But Pokémon Go has faded almost as quickly as it sprang up.
Artificial intelligence
There are two trends that are steadily gaining momentum and will pose an interesting moral and cultural dilemma as they become more mainstream and useful.
Artificial intelligence and autonomous cars will make our lives easier in many ways, futurists predict, but will also present innumerable ethical challenges.
Robot software already writes articles based on financial reports, and could provide some of the contract-writing basic services that lawyers now do. Many jobs are threatened, we’re told, but not those that require our natural creativity and left-brain thinking.
In the words of William Gibson, who coined the term cyberspace, "the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed". Certainly not in SA under this government.
- Shapshak is editor-in-chief and publisher of Stuff
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