SA's broadband failure

Broadband in SA has been described as “pitiful” at best, as local providers continue to get slammed for misleading the public while government employs an “archaic” national broadband policy.

All the while, broadband offerings in SA continue to fall behind the standard offered in leading and even emerging economies. This is despite the recent influx of international broadband, delivered by a series of undersea cable across the continent.

WWW Strategy MD Steven Ambrose explains that SA has undergone an Internet revolution in the past few years; and specifically the international bandwidth bottleneck has been effectively removed, with Seacom and others coming on line.

However, he points out that local infrastructure has not kept pace with the availability of international bandwidth.

“The most stable form of Internet connectivity, ADSL, is still the sole province of Telkom, which has been extremely slow to increase speed and capacity on this network, not to mention slow on the provisioning side as well.

“In the absence of credible fixed-line competition, which was expected from Neotel, this situation has not changed much in the past five years.”

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) recently rapped Telkom over the knuckles for using the word “fast” in relation to the Telkom Simple ADSL product in promotional material. The ASA ruled that the speeds offered by this product “are the slowest available broadband speeds on the market”.

Ambrose maintains that the future of high-quality broadband is fibre to the premises and this has not begun in any meaningful way yet in SA.

According to Speedtest.org, SA ranks 90th in the world in terms of broadband speed, with an average download speed of 3.07Mbps and upload speeds of approximately 0.97Mbps. This compares to the top ranking country, South Korea, with download speeds of 39.04Mbps and upload speeds of 21.29Mbps.

The problem lies in SA's focus on quantity instead of quality, maintains Ambrose.

“The focus has been placed on access, and not quality, for so long, we all accept our Internet experience in SA for what it is. A comparable domestic 4Mb ADSL line in the UK, for example, offers far higher download speeds, lower latency, and overall a far higher quality of Internet experience than that of the nominally similar 4Mb ADSL line in Johannesburg,” he explains.

SA defines broadband as 256Kbps, while the International Telecommunications Union sets it from 1.5Mbps to 2Mbps and the US standard is 4Mbps.

“The government should strengthen its definition of broadband to set high, but achievable standards. If this is not done, ISPs will keep using 256Kbps as a mark of quality for their Internet service offerings. The end-user will continue to pay premium fees for a sub-standard service,” comments Frost & Sullivan senior research analyst Vitalis Ozianyi.

Ambrose has slammed the goals of the policy: “The speeds they are talking about are pitiful in the context of what is necessary to compete globally, and will look archaic when we look back in five years' time.

“Once again, only nominal speed of access was mentioned and not quality of experience. The policy speeds and access, as currently espoused, are not sufficient to allow SA to develop and grow in the manner necessary to compete globally,” he maintains.

However, not all is lost in SA's broadband future, maintain the analysts. “In one arena, SA is up with most of the world, and that is in mobile broadband access. The local operators continue to stay on a par, if not ahead, of what is emerging elsewhere in the world and are offering speeds and simplicity of access over wireless that are unavailable on fixed-line,” states Ambrose.

The main issue will be future growth, he continues, as wireless broadband has greater issues that centre around spectrum and capacity of the network, than fixed-line networks, and this will create quality of service issues going forward.

Ambrose points out that the evolution to first generation Long-Term Evolution (LTE) is already under way and much of the infrastructure in SA will be upgradeable fairly simply when devices become ubiquitous. LTE will assist in the efficient use of spectrum and improve quality of service as well.

However, Ozianyi does not believe any South African operator is keen on LTE yet. “There might be some talk about LTE trials and plans to offer the same in this year or next year, but the reality is that market forces are not conducive for the same.

“LTE is an evolution of current 3G offerings, thus it requires a coordinated evolution of current network infrastructure. One aspect that must be addressed is major investments in the required density of LTE base stations. However, it won't be surprising to see limited initial LTE offerings in the coming months,” he argues.

Vodacom and MTN have already begun trialling LTE technology on their networks.

This may be a necessary marketing tool as operators prepare for the inevitable shift from voice to data as the main source of revenue in the market. The future of broadband in the market depends on how soon competition will lead to the lowering of voice telephony charges to reflect reduction in call termination fees.