SA Broadband: Exactly how bad is it?

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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The state of broadband in South Africa has been criticized for years, and it has now been shown that the country’s poor broadband services mean that citizens cannot take full advantage of economic and other benefits the Internet offers.

Broadband Quality Study

The Broadband Quality Study conducted by the University of Oxford and the University of Oviedo’s Department of Applied Economics set out to establish where countries feature in terms of broadband quality, and whether they are on the right side of the digital divide.

“Only a few years ago, the analysis of broadband diffusion focused on who had an Internet connection and who did not.  As bandwidth intensive applications, such as video, became pervasive, the broadband gap is being redefined as a quality divide,” the Broadband Quality Study stated.

The first Broadband Quality Study was published in September 2008 to highlight each country’s ability to benefit from next-generation web applications and services. The research team found that broadband quality is linked to a nation’s advancement as a knowledge economy and countries with broadband on their national agenda had the highest broadband quality.

The results of the second annual global study on the quality of broadband connections released recently, reveal that 62 out of the 66 countries analyzed had improved the quality of consumer broadband services since last year.

Overall results

The study found that the overall average broadband quality increased across the globe.  The average download throughput increased by 49% to 4.75 Megabits per second (Mbps) while the average upload throughput increased by 69% to 1.3 Mbps.  The global average for latency decreased by 21% to 170 milliseconds.

Asia showed its strength in the broadband market by occupying the top 3 positions in the 2009 Broadband Leadership table.  South Korea tops the table, followed by Japan and Hong Kong.  Sweden, Switzerland, Netherlands, Singapore, Luxemburg, Denmark and Norway completed the top 10.

Thirty nine countries have a broadband quality above the threshold required to deliver a consistent quality of experience for the most common web applications today, such as social networking, streaming low-definition video, web communications and sharing small files such as photos and music.

South Africa

The Middle East and Africa had the worst broadband quality score of all regions, and South Africa was no exception.  South Africa’s Broadband Quality Score (BQS) – calculated using download, upload and latency values – is 21, significantly lower than the international average of 31.  SA finished 60th out of the 66 countries surveyed.

South Africa’s score means that it is well below the ‘applications threshold’, something which gives an indication that local Internet users are not well equipped to take advantage of the most common web applications available on the Internet.

For Broadband Leadership – a combination of broadband availability, penetration and quality – South Africa finished 61st out of 66 countries.  South Africa was also the worst performing country in terms of broadband leadership in ‘efficiency economies’, a term used to describe the second stage (out of 3 stages) of a country’s economic development.

Some good news is that South Africa fares well in terms of its mobile broadband quality.  The international ‘Mobile Broadband Quality Divide’ has download and upload thresholds of 1.3 Mbps, something which can be achieved on both Vodacom and MTN’s HSDPA/HSUPA offerings.

Urgent attention needed

These poor scores show that South Africa needs to urgently address the poor state of the country’s broadband services, something which may well be the reason for the Department of Communications’ recently released draft broadband policy.

The study suggests that a national broadband agenda should be established with goals for availability, penetration and quality.  Broadband equipment vendors were urged to focus on simplicity, usability and interoperability.

The report further suggests that service providers should build a broadband business model based on quality as the key differentiator, adding that customers should keep devices up to date and conduct regular speed tests.

SA Broadband Quality – how bad is it?