Year of broadband

IT news in the first week of the year was dominated by doom and gloom stories about new strains of AV-resistant viruses and undetectable image-based spam. Happily, all that negativity has since been counterbalanced by positive reports about broadband prospects for 2007.

Internationally, broadband appears set to rise even further in importance this year. With the likes of Intel driving concepts like personal broadband with fancy new WiMax chipsets, we may soon see broadband connectivity ranked alongside food and water as a basic necessity of life.

Broadband is clearly approaching that status in countries like Denmark and the US, where it is considered a basic utility. According to the latest figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Denmark had the highest broadband penetration, with 30 in every 100 people subscribing to broadband by the middle of last year, closely followed by the Netherlands, Iceland and Korea. Although the US was ranked only 12th in terms of penetration, the total number of broadband subscribers was set at 56 million, followed by 47.8 million in China.

Although the number of broadband connections in SA is expected to reach only one million in the next year, broadband news on the home front is also encouraging. Industry players say they expect broadband and supporting technology to be in the IT spotlight in coming months. They also expect prices to fall and transmission speeds to increase. Let's hope they're right.

This adds up to an extremely positive outlook for broadband in 2007, but the reality is that the average person in the street is unlikely to be the first to benefit.

Warwick Ashford, portals managing editor

Perhaps the best news in recent days is that iBurst plans to spend R350 million on infrastructure to make provision for another 50 000 wireless broadband connections. This, coupled with Telkom's recent commitments to accelerate the provision of its broadband services and expectations of falling prices, means broadband adoption is likely to gather significant momentum.

As the UK market has experienced in the past year, competition is the key to falling prices. That finally seems to be proving true in the local market as well. Telkom has already revised its initial broadband prices and if wireless broadband providers continue to attract subscribers and Neotel eventually joins the fray in the broadband arena, then big things could happen relatively quickly.

ICT researcher Arthur Goldstuck believes that once the cost of broadband reaches similar levels to that of dial-up, the number of Internet users will grow exponentially. He also expects stagnant online activity to increase with more South Africans with connectivity shopping, booking, blogging, gaming, gambling and house hunting on the Net than ever before.

Maturity in online activity is bound to get a boost as broadband becomes more widely available and affordable; signs of it have already begun to emerge. This past week we saw that most South Africans are going online to do important real world things like looking for a job.

A poll of SA-based search engines revealed that "jobs" is the most searched word on the Internet by local Net users, which is probably as good an indicator as any of growing online maturity. This news is consistent with reports by online recruiters late last year that business was booming.

All in all, this adds up to an extremely positive outlook for broadband in 2007, but the reality is that the average person in the street is unlikely to be the first to benefit. If we are to get real about the situation, business is more likely to be the first and biggest beneficiary.

The obvious gain for business would be better, faster connectivity between branches and business partners. However, overseas broadband providers say there will be even bigger benefit in using broadband to improve business processes and to access new services like online backup, voice services and application hosting.

Providing such services also represents a huge opportunity for service providers to the local market. So for entrepreneurs willing to take the lead in showing business that broadband is about more than e-mail and the Internet, 2007 could be a very good year indeed.

OK, so the rest of us are going to have to be patient for a little while longer, but there finally seems to be light at the end of the tunnel. Indications are that 2007 may see the start of real broadband services in SA.

Here's to a good broadband year for the country!