The Department of Telecommunications and Postal Services (DTPS) is slowly edging towards the completion of the White Paper meant to revitalise and modernise South Africa’s information and communication technology (ICT) policy framework, with Telecommunications and Postal Services Minister Dr Siyabonga Cwele on Monday assuring stakeholders that the White Paper would be published before the end of the current financial year.

Addressing delegates at the eighteenth Southern Africa Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference (Satnac), he reiterated the DTPS’s determination to have the long-awaited policy entrenched by March, more than three years since its inception.

“We have finalised the national ICT policy review and we are working towards aligning the sector’s legal framework with the recommendations of the review to enable the rapid deployment of broadband infrastructure, to create open access networks that will reduce the duplication of infrastructure and direct competition towards services, to encourage the expansion of local manufacturing of ICT goods and small, medium-sized and microenterprise growth and to direct the allocation of spectrum as a scarce resource for national growth,” he said.

The DTPS in 2012 formed a dedicated ICT policy review panel, which delivered the final recommendations on the way forward to the Minister in April this year.

By May, Cwele had established an ICT forum, which, guided by the principles of the ICT policy review panel recommendations, the National Development Plan and South Africa (SA) Connect, would map out and set targets for the policy’s work programmes within four “chambers”, namely social, economic, governance and security and ICTs and disability.

This emerged as the nation’s implementation of SA Connect slowly continued, with the department aiming to appoint a lead implementing agent within the next month.

Earlier this year, partially State-owned telecommunications giant Telkom was designated the “lead agency” tasked with the first-phase connections within eight district municipalities, including Dr Kenneth Kaunda, in the North West; Gert Sibande, in Mpumalanga; OR Tambo, in the Eastern Cape; Pixley ka Seme, in the Free State; Umgungundlovu and Umzinyathi, in KwaZulu-Natal; and Vhembe, in Limpopo.

“As the South African government, we are beginning to implement our broadband policy . . . and plans are being finalised to expand broadband roll-out to the rest of the country starting next year,” he told Satnac delegates.

The second phase of connectivity would start in the next financial year and run until 2020, as all government offices in South Africa would eventually be connected to broadband infrastructure.

The plan envisaged access to universal average broadband speed of 5 Mb/s by 50% of the population this year.

By 2020, the department expected 100% access at a minimum speed of 5 Mb/s, with about 50% of the population able to access speeds of up to 10 Mb/s.

By 2030, 100% of the population was expected to have access to a minimum speed of 10 Mb/s, while 80% was expected to have access to speeds of up to 100 Mb/s.