Western Cape premier Helen Zille wants every citizen in the Cape Town metropolitan area to have access to 100Mbit/s broadband by 2020. In addition, she wants government buildings and schools to enjoy that sort of connectivity by 2014.

Zille made the comments during her state of the province address to the provincial legislature on Friday.

The premier says the intention is to create a “special purpose vehicle or public-private partnership” aimed at bringing broadband access to “every school, every provincial and every municipal government facility” and ultimately to every citizen, while also reducing the cost of broadband for businesses in the region.

She says the initiative will position the province as the “broadband access leader in SA” and cites a World Bank estimate that a 10% increase in high-speed Internet connections in developing nations results in a 1,3% increase in economic growth.

According to Zille, the private sector is integral to both economic growth and boosting employment and that broadband access aids this while also promoting “social inclusion”.

While the number of Internet users in developing countries has increased dramatically in recent years, Zille says SA is lagging many other African countries when it comes to increasing Internet penetration.

Currently, only 20 provincial government buildings, 50 City of Cape Town buildings and 50 municipal sites enjoy connections of 100Mbit/s or more. Zille says this needs to be extended to more than 4 000 government facilities and she hopes to connect 70% of these — along with every Western Cape school — by 2014.

Even more ambitious is Zille’s stated intention of connecting “every citizen in the metropolitan area to affordable broadband infrastructure at network speeds in excess of 100Mbit/s” and all other citizens to some sort of broadband network by 2020.

She says achieving this goal will involve partnerships with a wide range of stakeholders, including “licensed telecoms service providers, commercial banks, the IDC (Industrial Development Corporation) and the DBSA (Development Bank or Southern Africa), local businesses as well as local and national government”.

Zille says there is a pilot project planned that aims to create “the largest mesh network in the world” that will connect all households in Khayelitsha, Mitchell’s Plain and Saldanha Bay, “including the Industrial Development Zone footprint”.

She says these projects will serve as a “powerful magnet for further investment from other spheres of government and from the private sector”. — Staff reporter, TechCentral