Massive bandwidth opportunity

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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HOSTING the 2010 Soccer World Cup will speed up the provision of massive bandwidth in South Africa and should bring down the price of telecoms services, an industry analyst predicted yesterday.

Will Hahn, a principal analyst at international IT consultancy Gartner, Inc, told a symposium in Cape Town that the Fifa requirement for high definition television had major implications for South Africa’s telecoms infrastructure.

“HDTV is the most bandwidth hungry, the most powerful application of television that you can have today,” Hahn said.

South Africans themselves were unlikely to be able to watch 2010 on HDTV, “but the broadcast itself will be HDTV capable and that has implications for the broadcasting infrastructure.”

“It’s got to be brought up to speed, so certainly it will accelerate the day when you will be able to see things in HDTV.” Hahn said the big screens at fan parks would be an ideal opportunity to introduce South Africans to HDTV. “It really is an extraordinary medium.”

Other benefits of generous bandwidth included video casts to cellphones and television delivered via the Internet.

“Casual use of enormous amounts of bandwidth — which unfortunately you guys can’t contemplate yet — is part of what you want to change in South Africa,” Hahn said. “Imagine, you pay an Internet access bill once, it’s a flat rate, and you do whatever you damn well please.

“You watch TV off the computer. I’m confident that you will, I can’t tell you exactly when.”

Another Gartner analyst, Mark Raskino, told local IT players that South Africa was missing out on major economic benefits by failing to develop itself as an IT hub on the Indian model.

He urged South Africa not to respond to the shortage of IT skills by following the UK example of outsourcing.

“[You] have education here, so there’s massive opportunity to become an IT service centre, an IT economy,” Raskino said.

“At the moment you are leaving opportunity on the shelf.”

He told delegates they should take the initiative themselves.

“You don’t set up an IT industry by waiting for the government to do it.”

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