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Gauteng broadband to go out to tender

The Gauteng government’s project to roll out broadband to 95 percent of the province’s households was expected to be put out to tender within two months, Lemmy Chappie, the chief information officer of the provincial Department of Finance, said yesterday. Speaking on the sidelines of the province’s inaugural information and communications technology summit yesterday, Chappie said the department had appointed advisory firm Deloitte four months ago to conduct a feasibility study of the department’s business plan for the project G-Link. With this project, the government aimed to roll out e-services and bridge the digital divide between those with internet access and those without.

Chappie said e-government services had already been rolled out to 1 650 schools and the remaining 600 schools would receive services by the end of the financial year. It would roll out basic broadband connectivity of between 1 megabite per second (Mbps) and 4Mbps over three years. By the fifth year, the government would implement enriched connectivity speeds of about 5Mbps. The Deloitte review, which partly sought to determine the funding required and the best model for the roll-out, would be completed within the month, he said. The options included a “build-transfer” approach, which would allow the successful bidder to fund the set-up of the infrastructure and reap the profits from the project over a period that was agreed with the government.

Ownership of the project would be transferred to the state once the period had expired, Chappie said. Broadband could be rolled out using technologies such as worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMax), Wi-Fi or long-term evolution (LTE). “The G-Link roll-out will be much cheaper if we use fourth generation (4G) technology,” he said. However, the availability of the requisite radio frequency spectrum was a hurdle. The provincial government had a memorandum of understanding with state agency Sentech, but it had not yet tapped into the state signal distributor’s spectrum.

Mandla Nkomfe, the Gauteng Finance MEC, said broadband had the potential to build essential infrastructure for the development of a connected government. It aimed to “harmonise service delivery platforms, create a single public sector communications network, reduce telecoms costs, and rationalise provincial shared service centres and data centres”.

Source: iol.co.za

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Gauteng broadband to go out to tender

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