Geekery

SA: Land of expanding Broadband

Posted on 17. Mar, 2010 by Jake in News

According to a great article I read today on news.24, the amount of South Africans accessing the internet has increased by 50 percent in the past year. So, while we are still a country with a relatively small amount of internet activity, this is changing at a rapid rate.

It says:

“The Internet Access in South Africa 2010 study, conducted by technology research and strategy organisation, World Wide Worx in collaboration with Cisco, found that wireless broadband has grown almost three times as fast as fixed line broadband in SA.

The study revealed that most of the growth in fixed line broadband comes from small and medium enterprises (SMEs) upgrading to ADSL. This in turn has extended internet access to more than half-a-million South Africans working in small offices, who did not previously have access.”

Our level of connectivity is set to increase even more due to two factors, the production of new undersea cables and the introduction of terrestrial fibre-optic networks. This can only be good news for SA business. As the article points out, the group on which the study was based “noted that the ability to collaborate and share information in real time would help to increase business productivity and profitability across the region”. Sounds good to me.

Read the whole article here.

Tags: Africa, broadband, fibre-optic networks, South Africa, undersea cables