The next property boom

Off he went, to a farm near Rustenburg, or some such place. I imagined my friend lurking in a quiet pub not frequented by bands of prop-forwards in shorts. I could picture him restoring antique Bailey hand planes, or raising pot-bellied pigs. He wrote romantic stories of snakes in the kitchen and grass seeds in your socks.

Yet, I didn't quite get it. He's a wired sort of guy who makes his living with Internet-related work. A large 1930s flat in Killarney with original parquet floors seemed more his style. If he wasn't fleeing from something, what exactly was it that he was seeking?

Then it struck me. He lives just around the corner from the Royal Bafokeng Sports Palace. Located in Phokeng, just outside Rustenburg, this is one of the stadiums that will be used for the 2010 World Cup.

Like all stadiums, it will need a very fat data pipe to feed the hungry media hordes and supply HDTV images to the world. In Germany 2006, they had 40Gbps per stadium. We have 13 stadiums, and a Sentech source at the time said one might expect the requirement to double for 2010.

So, Rustenburg could end up sitting at the far end of an 80Gbps pipe. By comparison, that's two-thirds of the design capacity of Telkom's old SAT3 undersea cable. The 13 stadiums combined need as much bandwidth as the entire Seacom cable will carry. Eighty gig is like 80 light-years. You can say it, but you can't really visualise how stupendously humongous it really is.

In Germany 2006, they had 40Gbps per stadium. We have 13 stadiums, and a Sentech source at the time said one might expect the requirement to double for 2010.

Ivo Vegter, ITWeb contributor

I've been there. In Phokeng, I mean, not at the far end of an 80Gbps pipe. I had to stop near the local stadium to buy shoes, since I had forgotten mine at home. Protocol demanded that a meeting with His Majesty Leruo Molotlegi, King of the Royal Bafokeng Nation, could not be conducted in sandals.

Besides the king and the protocol officer, about 27 people live in the area. I met 10 of them. I bought the height of Italian fashion (rendered in high-quality leather-look plastic) from an 11th. The 12th is Mzilikazi, but he's dead. The 13th is the friend in question. The remainder are either veterans of the failed Bophuthatswana invasion, or the off-duty taxi drivers who told the mutineers they couldn't come in. Of these, my friend, and perhaps the guy with the hotline to the fashion houses of Milan, are the only ones with Internet access.

Imagine the bandwidth he'll have, once the foreigners leave and the taxi drivers go back to boring gunfights over ordinary taxi routes?

The same will happen in Polokwane, Limpopo Province, population 23. I have met a few Internet users there, but they were few and lived very far apart. Most residents run funeral parlours or panel beaters, or drink brandy beneath stuffed bulls' heads, painted blue, watching rugby. They don't really use the Internet much.

Orkney is a little town on the road to Leeudoringstad. What they do in Orkney, I cannot quite recall, despite a television series that promoted the exciting town 20 years ago. If you took the entire cast, and added the caterer, the mayor, the local barman, and the Oppenheimer family, you might just have enough people to form a football team to play in the 40 000-seater Oppenheimer Stadion. But they wouldn't be very good.

Still, a town the size of a football team will be surfing the Net through an 80Gbps fibre-optic link direct to New York, London and Tokyo.

Now, does a hectare of farmland near Orkney sound attractive? They sell them at Orkney church f^etes for three or four 50c tickets, my sources tell me. (I have sources in very unlikely places, telling me the most unlikely things.)

All in all, I suspect my city-shy friend may be on to something, out there in Brits, or Rustenburg, or wherever he is. They say the best time to buy is when there's blood on the floor. Is he in on the ground floor of the next property bubble?

In bandwidth alone, his little plot of land just outside the middle of nowhere could be worth millions, a few years from now. Laduuuuuuuma!