Date: 08/09/2008

Source: Department of Science and Technology

Title: SA: Mangena: Address to the Southern African Telecommunications Network and Applications Conference (SATNAC) 2008 (08/09/2008)

Programme director,
Conference chairperson, Mr Marius Mostert,
Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Telkom South Africa, Mr Reuben September
Chairperson of Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA), Mr Paris Mashile,
Director of the International Telecommunications Union, Mr Malcolm Johnson,
International and local delegates,
Distinguished guests,
Ladies and gentlemen

Today's fast-paced world requires services anywhere, anytime and anyhow. This requires technological developments that can integrate video, text, voice and data into one seamless communication environment for business, social interaction, collaboration, information sharing, playing and learning.

However, a number of challenges continue to hamper our people's realisation of the benefits derived from these technological advancements. Some of our key challenges include:
* High telecommunications costs, especially broadband,
* Unresolved barriers to entry into the telecommunications markets, especially for Small Medium and Micro Enterprises (SMMEs),
* The regulatory environment relating to telecommunications licensing issues,
* Limited research, development and innovation capacity, and
* Lack of proper economic models for providing connectivity to the marginalised rural communities where telecommunication network operators are reluctant to invest in infrastructure.

While information and communication technologies (ICTs) remain critical tools for harnessing socio-economic development, we continue to struggle with basic issues of rural connectivity, affordable broadband, universal access and provision of ICT-enabled government services.

Painful as this is, the majority of our people are still excluded from the mainstream information society.

As a department responsible for promoting research, development and innovation, we believe these problems will persist unless we energetically implement sound policies and strategies to enhance other efforts of achieving economic growth and improved quality of life for our citizens.

To this end, it is imperative for government, industry, academia and civil society, to pull their resources together towards strengthening our National System of Innovation (NSI).

On the policy front, my department has taken great strides toward strengthening our National System of Innovation. Last year, we obtained cabinet approval for our Ten Year Innovation Plan, titled "Innovation Towards a Knowledge-Based Economy."

This new policy direction builds on the founding NSI pillars, the White Paper on Science and Technology of 1996, and the National Research and Development Strategy of 2002.

The strategy regards ICT as one of the key technology missions alongside biotechnology, advanced manufacturing technology and technologies for poverty eradication. These technology areas remain strategic priorities in the Ten Year Innovation Plan.

My department supports an ICT research and development (R&D) and innovation programme, which aims to develop a strong base of research expertise and development of novel ICT products and services in geo-spatial technologies, mobile and wireless technologies, information security, human language technologies, cyber-infrastructure, high performance computing, open source software, as well as software engineering and development.

In line with the Ten Year Innovation Plan, the ICT R&D and Innovation Strategy aims to create world class research competencies; support a strong and robust innovation chain leading to sustained development of a vibrant high-tech ICT industry; as well as marked increase in advanced human resource capacity.

The Meraka Institute, otherwise known as the African Advanced Institute for ICT, based at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), has been mandated to lead and manage the implementation of the strategy.

Having highlighted these strategic and policy directions, it is pleasing to realise how pertinent this conference is to our national imperatives. I am aware that during the conference, our researchers will be sharing and highlighting success in their respective applied research in ICT.

This will help position us for developing a strong base of research expertise, and technology innovators of new products and services.

We also recognise that intellectual property is an instrument for economic growth and improvement of the quality of life. To this end, we are also in the process of promulgating the Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research and Development Legislation, which will not only encourage the development of South African intellectual property (IP) by providing public funding, but also assists in managing such intellectual property to the full benefit of the people of South Africa.

The proposed legislation not only provides an enabling environment for intellectual property creation, protection and management, but also supports the commercialisation of IP by providing greater clarity on the ownership of IP generated through publicly financed research.

The legislation also provides a framework for the establishment of capacity to ensure that South African institutions are better able to identify, protect and commercialise intellectual property arising from research conducted at those institutions.

Naturally, services to science, engineering and the technology fraternity are highly important for us. To ensure our researchers and scientists interact seamlessly with their peers globally, we are implementing a high speed South African National Research Network (SANReN) as part of our growing cyber-infrastructure initiative, alongside the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC).

The SANReN network is designed specifically to provide the research community in South Africa, and later to Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the rest of Africa, with a very high capacity Next Generation Network. SANReN, together with the CHPC, is aimed at moving towards the goal of "infinite computational power, infinite bandwidth and infinite data capability."

To illustrate what high capacity connectivity it can offer, SANReN has enabled South African Radio Astronomers to participate much more fully in the electronic-Very Long Base Interferometry (e-VLBI) project. The connectivity provided to Hartebeeshoek Radio Astronomy Observatory (HartRAO) is via a 10 Gigabits per second (10 Gb/s) ring network connecting the CSIR main campus to HartRAO, and the SANReN ring has been installed to all the major universities and research institutes.

The Johannesburg SANReN ring has effectively removed local institute connectivity bottleneck, and focused attention on why addressing international connectivity is so important to South Africa's longer term goals of becoming a major world player in ICT.

These cyber-infrastructure programmes will now allow our researchers and scientists to collaborate with their peers and partners globally on science, engineering and technology in mega science projects in astronomy such as the MeerKAT and Square Kilometre Array (SKA), bio-medical science, climate change, bioinformatics, and advanced manufacturing, amongst others.

As one of the priorities, government is intending to fast-track the roll-out of ICT infrastructure for rural connectivity. My department's role is to scale up existing R and D and innovation work in "low-cost broadband technologies" in support of the connectivity initiative.

Through the Meraka Institute, we are actively involved in the deployment of a solution suitable for the African context using "Wireless Mesh Network" technologies, to provide affordable last mile broadband connectivity.

The common objectives include the reduction of costs of telecommunications and provision of economies of scale, affordable broadband infrastructure and promotion of greater use of ICTs throughout the economy and in support of SMME development, health and education service provision.

In our Ten Year Innovation Plan the development of space science and technology has been identified as one of the five priority areas. We have now established an intergovernmental committee to develop a Space Science and Technology Strategy.

In order to create an institutional framework for implementing the strategy, we are in the process of finalising the National Space Agency Bill through parliament. Among others, the purpose of the bill is to foster research in space science, communications, navigation and space physics; advance scientific, engineering and technological competencies and capabilities through human capital development outreach programmes and infrastructure development; and foster international co-operation in space-related activities.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are cognisant of the fact that satellite communications is undergoing a period of rapid change. This provides us with more options for advancing our telecommunications landscape. For example, satellite based personal communications service systems from a global low-earth orbiting (LEO) satellite constellation will soon offer voice, low-rate data and facsimile service to small inexpensive terminals.

These technologies are less capital expensive and are better adapted for use in remote regions and sparsely populated areas than the earlier communication systems.

Moreover, satellite communication systems with very high capacities will allow for high rate direct user access with interactive user terminals. These systems are expected to play an important role leading to advanced internet access. We regard these satellite communications offerings not as competition, but as complementary to terrestrial telecommunication technologies. Most importantly, it is our view that the economic growth of the developing regions could be significantly enhanced by affordable broadband satellite services.

Other R&D and innovation projects that my department is funding include development of novel applications and platforms to support e-learning and other content delivery methods using mobile communication platforms and services.

The Human Language Technology (HLT) research activities focus on things such as text-to-speech translation, inter-active voice response (IVR) in indigenous languages, allowing people to choose their language of communication. In line with government policy of encouraging the use of free and open source software (FOSS), most of the products and services emanating from this research are based on open source software platforms and frameworks.

We recognise that research for the sake of research will not add value to our efforts of improving our economy.

In order to foster and support national innovation initiatives, we are in the process of establishing the Technology Innovation Agency (TIA). The TIA is designed to help close the gap between the formal knowledge base and the real economy.

As a result, the TIA will be able to address the barriers to the commercialisation of technological innovations by, among others, consolidating the fragmented funding instruments.

With the advent of TIA, we look forward to the era when most of the applied research successes will translate into real economic value for the inventors and the people of South Africa.

Despite the challenges already alluded to, allow me, in closing, to reiterate opportunities that lie ahead if government, industry, academia and society work together to find new ways of addressing the digital divide.

The proliferation of mobile communication technologies; the internet; the convergence of technologies; the promise of "ubiquitous computing, pervasive networks and the internet of things" will indeed usher in a new era of digital opportunities.

May this conference offer great opportunities for fruitful deliberations.

I thank you.