If the events that have played out in the last 18 months are anything to go by, the most evident lesson to be learned right now is that doing business on the Internet is not for the faint-hearted. It has become apparent that one needs a steely constitution and a general sense of fearlessness tempered with resilience and adaptability to make it in this industry.
My theory is that, all things being equal, our download speeds have been affected in much the same way as that of the farmers in New Zealand.
Basheera Khan, journalist, ITWeb
Having just emerged from the initial phase of the dot-com bubble bursting messily everywhere you look, and in a time when even the Death Clock (www.deathclock.com) feels an icily keen sense of mortality, the local IT industry is rocked by a series of liquidations, downsizing and the like.
Just when you thought it was safe to go outside, Siltek gives up the ghost, and AfriCam announces that its streaming business locally was doing badly enough to mitigate a severe paring down of its services.
On the other end of the world, Wired News reported that farmers in New Zealand were struggling with slow Internet connections. So what, one might ask. After all, it`s only the privileged few in SA that have anything but slow Internet connections, in much the same way only the privileged few enjoy amenities such as running water and electricity in other places on the African continent.
It`s the electricity I`m interested in this week though. Because as it turns out, the New Zealand farmers` problem was found to lie in the seemingly innocuous electric fencing used to pen in the livestock - more specifically, the interference caused by the electronic pulses generated by the fencing.
Shocking theory
This interference is estimated to affect about 40 000 Internet users in rural New Zealand, where the effective download speed is reduced to about 30% of the connect speed of 56Kbps.
The problem is not just isolated to users of electric fences, though ... in fact, investigations into the interference has revealed that problems can crop up close to 6km away from where the interference is to be found.
Which brings us back to the question of AfriCam`s ailing performance locally. As the news reports confirmed, overseas usage of the site was doing just fine. Overseas, in countries where crime rates are significantly lower than they are here, and where electric fencing is nowhere near as common a sight as it is in South African suburbia.
My theory is that, all things being equal, our download speeds have been affected in much the same way as that of the farmers in New Zealand. For a company like AfriCam, whose very sustainability depends on reliable and reasonably fast connect and download speeds, operating successfully here was jinxed from the very beginning - by unwitting use of electric fencing by paranoid residents in a crime-ridden climate that looks like it will be around for quite some time. So who do we blame? Why, the government, of course.
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