Cape Town - After a highly technical presentation on the status of cybersecurity and broadband in the province, members of the legislature’s standing committee on the premier and constitutional matters had to persuade the tech-savvy officers from the Department of the Premier to explain themselves in simpler terminology.
This occurred after Freedom Front Plus MPL Peter Marais prefaced his question to the officials, who included director-general Harry Malila and Centre for e-Innovation deputy director-general Hilton Arendse, by saying he wanted to understand in simple layman’s terms how the work the department was doing affected ordinary citizens.
The committee heard that 1 549 province-related sites, including schools, libraries and health facilities, had been upgraded to Phase 2 speeds of minimum 100Mbps, and that Phase 3 with minimum speeds of 1GMbps would start in October this year.
They also heard that there had been 309 291 users on the network during April this year, and that in that time about 216 terabytes of data were consumed at an average of 683 megabytes a user.
Marais said: “This all sounds very impressive, but I am not a guru in IT terminology so I will have to accept that what you said about cybersecurity, etc, is the truth. It’s all Greek to me.”
His question was about the effectiveness of the province’s broadband system for schools in areas such as Laingsberg and Beaufort West.
Marais said the last time the committee visited the Karoo on an oversight visit, the children sat with computers which they couldn’t use at the school because there was no wi-fi.
He wanted to know whether it was possible for doctors in remote areas to video conference professors at the three teaching and academic hospitals in Cape Town if they needed help.
With regard to the online school applications, newly-elected committee chairperson Lorraine Botha (DA) wanted to know how closely the department was working with the Western Cape Department of Educationn (WCED) to enable the process.
Malila said that since the committee’s oversight visit, Laingsburg High School had been provided with free wi-fi by the department at the rate of 3GB a device a month.
He said all three of the metro’s teaching hospitals were connected via broadband to regional hospitals, and he offered to take the committee on a tour of Groote Schuur to see how the process worked.
Responding to Botha, Malila said they were working closely with the WCED and this year in particular there had been fewer problems with the online applications to schools.
“The system went down on the last day when everybody was frantically trying to see whether their kids had been accepted or not, but it only went down for a very short time and our team was able to reactivate the entire system.”
mwangi.githahu@inl.co.za