One step forward

Seacom is down again, providing another reminder of how reliant we've become on the undersea cable since its relatively recent launch. We're handling the outage better than we did last time, however. Most of the Internet users I canvassed hadn't noticed any impact on their connections, whereas complaints were widespread when this happened before. The South Africans I spoke to this time were more worried about the other big outage of the week - BlackBerry's BIS service going down in several regions.

South Africa still trails far behind the rest of the world for both quality and performance.

Simon Dingle, contributor, ITWeb

These are turbulent times for the South African Internet. New undersea cables are lighting up, pavements being dug up, covered and then unearthed again. Wireless operators are fiercely at each other's throats and service disruption is a part of daily life.

I was very happy to be visited by Telkom this week when a technician told me they were replacing cables in my area and upgrading the exchange, “to prepare for 40Mbps”. Progress. Slow but steady. And users are impatient.

We still have a long way to go.

One of the best tools for tracking broadband quality and value around the world is the Net Index service run by Ookla Net Metrics. It accurately compiles the results of Internet speed tests into charts and lists that can be manipulated to reveal very telling stats - especially if we're tracking the progress of telecommunications in Africa.

And, by Ookla's reckonings, South Africa still trails far behind the rest of the world for both quality and performance.

Updated in real-time, the service reveals the top three countries for broadband download speeds at time of writing are Lithuania in top spot - with an average speed of 33.29Mbps; South Korea is second with 29.50Mbps; followed by Sweden with 25.94Mbps. The first time we find an African country on the list is at number 56 - Ghana, with an average of 5.56Mbps.

South Africa is the fourth best African country for downloads, following Rwanda and Kenya. We're number 100 globally, with an average download speed of just a scratch under 3Mbps.

Things have been improving, however. Especially if we compare upload speeds - an area in which I have watched SA jump up 20 places in the last year.

I am particularly focused on upload speeds because this is where connectivity will enable the next major shift in cloud computing, from my perspective, entailing private clouds becoming a reality for individuals. It will also give Africa what it needs to express itself online for the first time with regional content creation and software development progressing - not to mention citizen journalism.

Ghana might be 56th for downloads, but it is 31 for uploads, with an average speed of 4.13Mbps. South Africa does less favourably, at 97th in the world, but it has come a long way from 108th last year.

So while we aren't quite seeing the leapfrogging that some predicted at the turn of the century, we are seeing Africa systematically catching up in pockets.

The eastern Africa submarine cable (Eassy) and the West African Cable System (WACS) are also both online, and we will soon begin to see these bandwidth channels' impact on international bandwidth pricing.

But the real challenges are in our domestic networks - so it's nice to hear that Telkom is currently upgrading. The company also recently introduced its own uncapped packages, taking the fight to third-party service providers that sell bandwidth on top of Telkom's infrastructure.

At a recent breakfast conference hosted by The New Age newspaper, minister of communications Roy Padayachie said local loop unbundling was on his list of priorities. That will essentially open up Telkom's old copper network to other players. My personal feeling is by the time this happens, it will no longer matter.

Telkom, for one, has been deploying its next-generation fibre network. Its competitors have been working on their own deployments. By the time the local loop unbundles, the only people who will need it will be small ISPs - and I suspect many of them will have been consolidated into larger players like MWeb and Altech by then anyway.

But all these new toys cost money. So while we're driving down bandwidth costs on one end of the scale, we're creating new infrastructure capex that must be amortised on the other.

And this brings us to the essential question of cost and value for money. It's all good and well upgrading networks and installing new cables - but it's not much good if consumer broadband services are too expensive. And the bigger questions of education and economic improvements through broadband availability hinge on how efficiently we can get connectivity to less privileged demographics.

The average global cost per 1Mbps of a home broadband connection is currently $9.96. The EU, as a region, is well below this average at $5.12, while the APEC region is $13.48.

The best value in the world, according to Ookla, can be found in Denmark, for $3.62 per megabit per second. South Africa is number 58 at a relatively staggering $39.02, followed by Egypt at 59th.

No other African country makes it into the top 64 countries tracked for value by Ookla.

This reveals the maturity of South Africa's broadband market compared to other African countries. We really are a hybrid economy that, on one hand, resembles some of the greenfield aspects of, for example, Kenya, while also displaying the cost economics of developed European markets.

This makes it difficult to make predictions about where we're headed and how soon we'll get there. There aren't many case studies, barring a tenuous couple in South America, for us to look at. One thing we have learned so far is that leapfrogging the first world is not a likely scenario - but we are likely to jump ahead of the rest of the continent. And things are getting cheaper - but not very quickly.

The rest is a mystery, and I look forward to its uncovering.