Website launched for your Broadband Policy Comment

[Anakha56]

http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Broadband/9811.html

Website launched for your Broadband Policy Comments

South African National Broadband Forum launches website to assist consumers to comment on Draft Broadband Policy

The Department of Communications (DoC) recently released its ‘Draft Broadband Policy for South Africa’. This policy aims to facilitate the provisioning of affordable access to broadband infrastructure to citizens, business and government and to also stimulate the usage of broadband services at national, provincial and municipal levels.

This policy has however come under fire for is poor definition of what affordable broadband is, the lack of clear and measurable progress targets, the absence of a public consultation process and the short period which the DoC allows for comments.

“We’ve done an initial assessment of the draft National Broadband Policy and, unfortunately, believe that while it has value, it is not a strong enough document – it is a rather general and vague piece of work that does not sufficiently reflect the considerable work available on broadband policy internationally,” the SANBF said in an official statement.

“Consequently we feel that the point needs to be made to government that they should consult stakeholders directly in the manner that the US Federal Communications Commission is currently doing.”

Website to make comments easy

“It is disappointing that the DoC are not organising any public consultations on the policy document. The period for comment on the draft is also too short to gather serious, considered input,” said Steve Song from the South African National Broadband Forum (SANBF).

The SANBF has stepped in to assist interested parties to comment on the draft policy and have their voices heard. “We’ve created a mechanism for easily commenting on the framework, using an online service called a.nnotate.com,” said Song.

The SANBF encourages all stakeholders to comment on the draft National Broadband Policy after which the organization will extract a summary of comments from the annotations as well as submit the annotated text to the DoC.

The website where you can leave comments can be found at: http://bit.ly/SA-broadband-policy

Start making notes people it could help us get better broadband.