SA’s mobile broadband speeds growing, fast

The latest Cisco Global Cloud Index reveals that South Africa’s mobile network performance improved by 50% from 2011 to 2012

Staff Writer

November 1, 2012

Cisco has released its latest Global Cloud Index (2011 – 2016), which reveals that South Africa ranks as one of the most improved countries in mobile network performance, having improved by 50% from 2011 to 2012.

According to the report, South African consumers had an average mobile download speed of 2.629Mbps; an average mobile upload speed of 1.253Mbps; and a mobile latency of 134ms.

Cisco used speed test results from Ookla, the Cisco GIST application, and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to calculate these average speeds.

Data centre traffic growth

In the second annual Cisco Global Cloud Index (2011 – 2016), Cisco forecasts that global data centre traffic will grow four-fold and reach a total of 6.6 zettabytes, annually, by 2016.

The company also foresees that Middle East and Africa will have the highest cloud traffic growth rate at 79 percent Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR); followed by Latin America (66 percent CAGR); and Central and Eastern Europe (55 percent CAGR).

Global Data Center IP Traffic Growth

Cisco predicts that global cloud traffic, the fastest growing component of data centre traffic, will grow 6-fold – a 44 percent combined annual growth rate (CAGR) – from 683 exabytes of annual traffic in 2011, to 4.3 zettabytes by 2016.

The vast majority of the data centre traffic is not caused by end-users, but by data centres and cloud-computing workloads used in activities that are virtually invisible to individuals.

For the period 2011 – 2016, Cisco forecasts that roughly 76 percent of data centre traffic will stay within the data centre and will largely be generated by storage, production and development data.

An additional seven percent of data centre traffic will be generated between data centres, primarily driven by data replication and software/system updates. The remaining 17 percent of data centre traffic will be fueled by end-users accessing clouds for web surfing, emailing and video streaming.

Key Highlights from the Study for South Africa:

South Africa ranks as one of the most improved countries in mobile network performance, improving by 50% from 2011 to 2012. Morocco received a score of 67%.

Overall consumer and business fixed network cloud performance in South Africa:
- Download speed of 2.045kbps;
- Upload speed of 764kbps;
- Latency speed of 95ms.

Overall consumer and business mobile network cloud performance in South Africa:
- Download speed of 2.629 kbps;
- Upload speed of 1.253kbps;
- Latency speed of 134ms.