True broadband still lacking

By Alex Kayle, Senior portals journalist

Johannesburg, 05 Aug 2009

While the fibre optic Seacom cable holds a maximum capacity of 1.28Tb, linking south and east Africa to international networks, only 80Gb of this bandwidth has been bought in SA.

This is according to Steven Ambrose, MD of World Wide Worx, who pointed out during the ITWeb Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Conference in Midrand that the roll-out of broadband has been sluggish and that national infrastructure is still lacking.

“The key to SaaS or any form of cloud computing is internal infrastructure to feed the massive cables coming into the continent.

“In many ways we are still paying exorbitant rates on bandwidth and it becomes difficult for companies to move business into the cloud using true broadband,“ said Ambrose.

“It will take between five and 10 years before the infrastructure backlog comes right. Our biggest challenge is the infrastructure and because of the regulatory structure it will take five years to catch up.”

Cable revolution

Ambrose noted SA will experience a revolution as cable operators Seacom, GLO-1 and Teams arrive this year, with Eassy, MainOne and the West Africa Cable System making their way to the continent in 2010 and 2011.

The combination of the deregulation of the telecoms market, the roll-out of Electronic Communication Network Services licences, and the arrival of high-speed broadband is expected to result in cheaper high-quality broadband; which will drive SaaS adoption.

However, Ambrose argued that SA is only starting to see a slight shift in connectivity pricing, adding there has been hardly any pricing changes for the consumer and SME. He expects significant pricing drops in Internet costs will only materialise in 18 months' time.

World Wide Worx research reveals ADSL growth hit 558 000 users in 2008, while wireless broadband reached 794 000. The Internet user base in SA this year has seen its highest rate of growth since 2001, increasing by 12.5% to 4.5 million Internet users in 2008, 5.2 million in 2009 and this is predicted to reach 8.4 million in 2013.

According to Ambrose, mobile broadband is still king, with the majority of South African users relying on wireless. However, he noted this is changing: “Most business people have ADSL at work and then use 3G at home, and this is mostly determined by cost factors. From this year's research, last year 11% of SMEs were using wireless and this has dropped to 9%, as cheaper fixed-line broadband comes into play. Telkom is trying to push people onto its metro Ethernet.

“We predict that we will only start to live in the cloud by 2020 in SA. However, what we will start seeing next year is a true broadband culture demanding to be connected wherever they are.”