By Shane Chorley – The dial up tones of 56kbps modems are unmistakable to Internet veterans in South Africa.
Not only could you not use your landline when you wanted to connect to the Internet, users had to deal with challenges such as backlogs of emails when they went online and having to clear out their mailboxes to make space for new mails to be downloaded from the email server.
Fast forward to today and the Internet is not something that we just occasionally connect to. We now spend a large portion of our lives online, with multiple devices in the home being connected. People forget that these days, apart from mobile phones, tablets, smartwatches and TVs, we are now seeing even more devices being connected, such as security systems, energy backup systems and even large appliances such as fridges.
It doesn’t matter who you are. You can be a farmer in the middle of nowhere; what is important today is not having a telephone line of old, but a reliable internet connection, be it via fixed line, mobile or satellite. What this shows is that our lives are heavily dependent on the internet. The Internet has moved from something that was occasionally used on demand, to something that has become a permanent feature in our lives.
Up until about 2008, the internet was highly regulated in South Africa, with the incumbent holding a monopoly. The biggest change happened in January 2009, when the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) began issuing Electronic Communications Network Services (ECNS) licenses to other infrastructure providers in the country.
In the time since, we have seen a boom that has driven internet adoption in South Africa, with private investment going into infrastructure deployment. While internet adoption and usage would have grown regardless, deregulation has sped up the process, giving us steadily increasing line speeds, and even forced the incumbent to change the way they do business.
This has also helped bring down prices. At one time, South Africa was ranked among the most expensive places in the world for internet connectivity cost. We are now on level footing with international peers when it comes to supplying internet services. This is especially the case with home usage, though we are now starting to see increasingly competitive pricing for business connectivity too. In fact, data price deflation has occurred across all types of connectivity providers, including the mobile operators.
We still have challenges with expanding coverage, given the vast nature of the country, but residents living in urban areas are spoilt for choice when it comes to connecting to the internet. The gap that remains to be closed is providing cost-effective high speed internet to the lower LSM market.
Looking forward
While there have been steady improvements over the years, there are still regulatory changes that are needed to drive expanded accessibility and more competitive prices. A topic that is often mentioned is the allocation of 5G spectrum, which will have a noticeable impact on the mobile space.
In addition, the government should look at providing better guidance around the laying of fibre: at present multiple operators are all going it alone in trenching and laying their networks. You are seeing situations where small towns have multiple infrastructure providers, and there are just no economies of scale.
Furthermore, some providers have closed networks that are only accessible to their own Internet Service Provider (ISP) customers and not the broader pool of potential users. Where they justify their investment based on the potential return from their customers, open access providers invest as they are looking to open up the market to multiple ISPs – over 140 on Frogfoot’s Network alone – as this gives users much more choice.
While the larger operators with thousands of customers countrywide will have the finances to weather the storm, it will be a bigger challenge for operators who are restricted to smaller towns or are in a niche market to make enough money from simply providing an internet connection.
The Internet ecosystem
The challenges over the past year have shown us that we can use the internet to accomplish almost anything. There used to be misconceptions that you could not carry out many functions online, such as sales for example. However, we now know – from experience – that there are certain sectors where organisations can function fully over the Internet.
There’s a positive and negative to this ubiquitous access to the internet: by having mobile devices that are connected to the internet, we now have information at our fingertips, while the world has been made a smaller place. Over the past year, we have also seen that it is definitely possible to work or study from almost anywhere, as long as you have connectivity.
The downside is that we are reachable or contactable at all times, while our plethora of devices are sharing increasing volumes of personal data with third parties. This can include your device manufacturers, your phone operating system provider, social media networks, and even to companies that use a behavioural model to provide financial services and healthcare.
Users are now part of the ecosystem of the internet, and it is quite difficult to stay out of it, which poses challenges, especially for children, from whom social interaction forms part of their childhood development. While parents will have to balance these requirements carefully, the positive impact is undeniable, with millions of children around the world being able to continue with their studies despite lockdown restrictions.
Experience has shown that South Africans often underestimate their bandwidth and data requirements, and demand is likely to grow further as users add more devices, and engage in activities such as using cloud-based services, online gaming, video streaming, video conferencing, and more. Digital service providers such as Microsoft and Amazon have recognised this, and have turned to setting up data centres in South Africa.
Soon, even a 1Gbps connection, which is the highest available at the moment, will no longer be sufficient to meet the needs of a connected home or business. And, infrastructure operators, such as Frogfoot, are already preparing to cater to this growing demand by investing in improving and extending their fibre networks well beyond the cities to connect smaller towns, as well as to increase backhaul connectivity between these areas and the sub-sea cables.
Shane Chorley is the head of sales and marketing at Frogfoot