There's cheering news in the latest report from World Wide Worx, the research outfit headed by industry stalwart Arthur Goldstuck.
In South Africa, banking, education, and indeed access to the Internet itself, has to be mobile.
Ivo Vegter, ITWeb contributor
The number of Internet users had been stagnant for years, thanks to the restrictive policies of the late communications minister, Poison Ivy, and her predecessors. Between 2002 and 2007, it never exceeded 7% of the population.
Since then, however, growth has accelerated handsomely, and this is expected to continue. Today, well over five million South Africans have access to the Internet, and by year's end, Goldstuck expects it to hit six million.
However, over 10% of the population is still a very shabby figure. To put this in perspective: developed countries like the US, Japan and the UK boast Internet penetration figures of around 75%. Turkey and Brazil boast about 35% access, Iran and Poland fall around 50% each, and in Vietnam it's 25%.
As much as IT industry commentators would like to point to Internet access as a driver for economic growth, one has to remember that about 80% of South Africa's population earns less than R5 000 a month, and most of these people do not have Internet access.
The upside in the statistics is that recent changes in telecommunications legislation, along with new infrastructure such as the privately built Seacom cable landed last year, appear to be having an effect.
Reports World Wide Worx: "Of greater significance [than the new undersea cable] was the granting of Electronic Communications Network Service licences to more than 400 organisations. This meant that service providers that were previously required to buy their network access from one of the major providers, could now build their own networks or choose where they wanted to buy their access. The result was that a market previously characterised by a limited range of providers and services suddenly exploded as small providers were able to repackage the services provided by the large telecommunications corporations in any way they wished. The large providers, in turn, began to offer far more competitive packages to both customers and resellers."
Besides the new enabling factors, new types of data-intensive applications, such as social networks and cloud-based applications, have also been driving adoption. In particular, there has been a marked shift away from dial-up to always-on ADSL access in the small and medium-sized business sector. According to World Wide Worx, every additional ADSL line into a small company can add up to 20 new Internet users to the total.
This kind of fixed Internet access is not where the future lies, however. In South Africa, fully 75% of the population has mobile phones.
At a recent ITWeb conference, FNB's manager for mobile commerce, Len Pienaar, reported that mobile banking, by transaction value, has always exceeded Internet banking. It sailed past ATM transactions, by value, in April 2007, and by late last year, mobile transactions were headed for three times the combined value accounted for by ATM and Internet banking.
In South Africa, banking, education, and indeed access to the Internet itself, has to be mobile. If it cannot be accessed via cellphone - and relatively primitive handsets at that - it will never have an impact on the majority of South Africans, and will never spur economic growth where it is most needed: among the tens of millions at the bottom of the economic pyramid.
The government was clearly short-sighted in its policy formulation during the 1990s, when both Internet access and mobile phones were viewed as luxuries for the rich. However, reality trumped policy when, in the interim, mobile phones became the most widespread communications medium in the country. The same cannot be said for fixed Internet access.
The consequence is that in the South Africa of 2010 and beyond, and indeed in the rest of Africa, if it's not mobile, it doesn't matter.
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