South Africa is lagging behind its African counterparts in terms of broadband. Whereas SA is only starting to get 10GB Ethernet now, the rest of the world is talking about 100GB Ethernet.
So said Malcolm Kirby, sales and marketing executive for Dark Fibre Africa, during an overview of the implications of fibre-optic infrastructure for broadband in SA, at the ITWeb Broadband conference held in Fourways, yesterday.
Kirby claimed open access for all ensures lower cost of entry to new service providers. He added that more service providers and better communications bring increased investment and economic growth to regions.
He noted: “In 2002, SA was ranked 67th globally for broadband and was number one in Africa. By 2007, SA had dropped 25 places to 92nd globally and was fourth in Africa behind Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt. By contrast, over the same period, Nigeria rose 24 places, Kenya rose 12 places and Senegal rose 10 places globally.”
All access
One of the biggest challenges, according to Kirby, is customer churn. “Telcos need to provide good quality services and content, and to do this they need bandwidth. From a coverage point of view, they will need access to customers, cover the commercially viable areas and slowly into the other areas.”
Kirby said future services such as IPTV, telepresence, cloud computing, virtual computing, file sharing, Web 2.0 services and video on demand require high quality broadband.
He added that with the upcoming high capacity undersea cables, it's no good having all of the high-speed bandwidth if the public cannot get access to it. Dark Fibre Africa has rolled out fibre in the main metropolitan areas, namely Gauteng North and South, the Ethekwini area of KwaZulu-Natal, and the Western Cape.
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