“Be the change you want to see”

By Ajay Pandey, Neotel MD & CEO

Mahatma Gandhi coined the phrase I’ve used in my heading in circumstances that, theoretically, are light years away from the subject of technology – but the principle works in any context in which people have to move from an old order to a new one. In the South African telecommunications market, that move – from a monopolistic, tightly regulated fixed line situation into a less regulated, highly competitive one - is still a work in progress. However, the establishment some four years ago of Neotel as the official alternative to the country’s former monopoly has made Neotel the catalyst for change in the fixed line environment.We’re the change catalyst by default, of course. But we’re also the catalyst by choice.

Making sense of competition

There are two reasons. One is that we believe absolutely that competition is the life blood of a healthy economy and, because of lack of competition in the telecommunications sector, the South African economy has been held to ransom for many decades in terms of call rates and  bandwidth pricing that can be as much as five times higher than those in Europe, United States  and other parts of the world. South African businesses have, therefore, been at a serious disadvantage in communicating with their customers and supply chains in other markets.

The other reason that we choose to be the telecommunications change this country needs is that competition in and of itself is no longer enough to make a real difference to the quality of existence of businesses and consumers. Simply having two fixed line providers of the same sort, for instance, does have the effect of driving prices down – because, theoretically, subscribers have a choice between two similar services.South African subscribers, whether via their businesses or their homes, are not used to buying converged communications services. Which means that they don’t know how to shop for such services. They don’t know what to ask for and they don’t know how to compare one service with another. In other words, we have a perfect situation of a market that has “latent communication needs.”

Living proof

So, it’s been up to us, as the alternate  infrastructure and telecoms  challenger, to educate the public – to tie together all the telecommunications concepts that people are used to with all those they don’t know and help them make sense of what their voice, data, and Internet options really should be.

That responsibility, in turn, has meant that we’ve had to tie together all the practical elements of voice, data, and Internet delivery – at the level of infrastructure, regulation, and market peers and competitors.We’ve had to be – and must continue to be, until there is true competition in the market.

So, for instance, we made a deliberate decision to fully open subscriber access to bandwidth. At the time of our establishment, South Africa had only one submarine cable (SAT3/SAFE) connecting it with the rest of the world. An elderly infrastructure, it has failed three times in 2010 already, with subscribers having to be frighteningly reliant on redundancy systems – and being driven, as a consequence, to our doors in search of greater reliability and access speeds.

We are also consortium members of the Eastern African Submarine Cable System (EASsy) due to go live in August 2010, and the West African Cable System (WACS, still under construction) – which makes us the only South African telecommunication company to be able to give subscribers unlimited access to international connectivity and bandwidth. At the other end of that international connectivity, we link to Tata Communications Limited, one of our largest shareholders. Tata Communications is one of the world’s largest telecommunications operators, with relationships with almost 400 other operators globally and handling some 30 billion voice minutes.In other words, when it comes to international bandwidth, speed, reliability, and access, we do truly tie together the world for South African subscribers.

Sharing resoures

At an in-country infrastructure level, we have acted in the belief that telecommunication companies should absolutely compete on the streets when it comes to brand, products, services and price. It makes no sense, however, for each telecommunication company to try and build its own wired and wireless infrastructure in the face of a monopolistic incumbent that has millions of miles of copper cable already laid. We have ourselves laid some 3 000 kilometres of fibre optical cable in major urban areas in the past three years and other operators have begun to lay their own copper and fibre optical cable. Still, none of us can possibly put enough cable in the ground fast enough to be able to catch up with the former monopoly in any time frame that would really liberate the South African subscriber from economic disadvantage.

So, we have created partnerships with South Africa’s two largest mobile telecommunication companies, Vodacom and MTN, who each also have significant and influential shares of the rest of the African market. These partnerships give us immediate access to MTN’s and Vodacom’s 20-year old infrastructures while providing them with access to our expanded international bandwidth and reach.

Naturally, all three organisations benefit. More importantly, the South African subscriber benefits from better access, better speeds, and massively increased reliability.

Services that mean something

Overall, we’ve spent some R3.5 billion on developing an infrastructure that enables us, in the fixed line and wireless environment, to be all things to all subscribers. We’ve tied together the technology with appropriate services and products.

Making change official

You must also pro-actively lobby for positive regulatory change – and provide input to the change so that it is both coherent and appropriate to the end user.

To that end, we have campaigned strongly for geographic number portability (GNP) in South Africa, in order to enable subscribers to change fixed line providers without having to change their fixed line numbers. Gratifyingly, GNP is now being rolled out, with the consumer phase due to kick off at the end of April 2010.

The point being that technology of any sort is about change. The kind of change that permeates every aspect of society. It’s both absurd and irresponsible to try and benefit from that kind of change commercially without committing your own prosperity and progress to the change you want other people to accept. That means making the change comprehensible and then pulling all the threads together so that the change you’re advocating works positively for everyone who is touched by it.

(This article was supplied by Neotel)