Build IT, they will come

What a load of croc.

First off, we've been hearing this for nigh on ten years now.

Some major event in the not so distant future ("Second Network Operator licensing, blablabla") that will bring about the Second Coming of Bandwidth Jesus.

SA has fockoll local content. Google anything for local only content and you will find literally fockoll. There's nada there. We're bone dry when it comes to local services for the most part. That's not something that's gonna change just because the floodgates have opened or because Jesus and his Olympians have arrived! It takes years to develop good content and services for consumers that will stick around to drive bandwidth adoption up. So I fail to see the correlation between mobile video of Olympians targetted for a six week period and broadband heaven.

Granted, we have great international services. But that's where number two of FAIL comes in.

As has been pointed out numerous times already, having big pipes connecting the continent (SEACOM, etc.) does not solve the problem of getting to that floodgate of bandwidth, since you still need to carry that bandwidth into every nook and cranny of a country: It currently costs more to provide bandwidth from Cape Town to Jo'burg than it does to do so from Cape Town to London (not sure if NeoTel has had any impact whatsoever on that, or any of the Vodacom/MTN fibre rings for that matter). And people keep forgetting this!

Point is, if you cannot handle 1.28 TB/s of data from SEACOM internally, than you're still stuck with crap access. And what is gonna drive infrastructure growth for consumers: content! Not the six-week olympics! But CONTENT. The Google's and Yahoo's of this world. Stuff that people use day in and day out. Not some fad. And six-weeks is the very definition of a fad.

Mobile video - bollocks. They've been trying to sell that for the last 4-5 years now without an inch of success. So how's that gonna change anything over six weeks!?

/Venting

PS.: William Hahn...you're a muppet.
 
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The problem is:

What percentage of the population in SA actually use the internet and are internet savvy?

In all likelihood you'll find that it is a small percentage, of around 11%. We have a large percentage of people in SA who don't have access to a computer let alone the internet. And this is the reason why, costs are hight and there is no local content. We are simply a drop in the ocean compared to 1st world countries where every man and his dog has a PC and is actively online.
 
“Mobile TV will carry much of the video traffic during 2010 as increasing numbers of attendees and remote audiences show a willingness to view sports on the small screen,” he says.
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I only see tourists making use of mobile TV and then they'll be like <enter cheesy foreign accent here>:
"What is a data bundle? And why is it only lasting for an hour?" :rolleyes:

With current trends anyway...
 
I share sentiments with KampfGherkin, this has been said million times over about SA and our ridiculous bandwidth costs but indeed I do belive that maybe the best way to win this war is to fight it within...

By that I concur with KampfGherkin again to point of local content. I don't blame our developers though because to develop content that is predominantly for SA citizens is a huge risk considering the amount of internet connections/users we possess. It makes very little business sense, but somebody is going to have to take that risk, eventually.

Let's develop our own content coz we all know that our developers a blarry good, jus take a look at the likes of 24.com, afrigator, myadsk and so forth. The standards of our developers are well in-line with our international counterparts, we jus have no audience locally to be self-substainable.

The key lies in trying to get a computer with a decent internet connection to as many people locally as possible - I would say that's th e governements job but then again you know what happens when you entrust them with tasks like that... Telkom, InfraCo, Sentech, Ivy etc...
 
nothing is going to change until those dollar\pound\rand sighs are taken out of/away from the hungry eyes of these greedy politicians.
 
In all likelihood you'll find that it is a small percentage, of around 11%. We have a large percentage of people in SA who don't have access to a computer let alone the internet. And this is the reason why, costs are hight and there is no local content. We are simply a drop in the ocean compared to 1st world countries where every man and his dog has a PC and is actively online.
Click to expand...

Coming from SA to the even more 3rd world (China), its all about the bandwidth costs. China working wage is approximately the same as SA if not less.

In China, people sit in internet cafe's in the poorer citys and are online for 1-2RMB (+- same in Rands) an hour.

Can't do that in .za

Sort out the pricing, and content will come, but we all know that, and re-hash it again, and again, and again.

China may suck for internet, but coming back home to SA sucks even more, sigh.

Investment in infrastructure can be done at the city level, maybe need to get City of Cape Town into doing something, or have one of the railway or electricity companies get a telecommunications licence...

Its no wonder ISP's are using Wifi to transmit stuff around with the intercarrier fee's Telkom charges...
 
I agree totally about the pricing all they need to do is bring the price down and more people will use the internet the demand for local content will increase
 
lsheed_cn said:
Investment in infrastructure can be done at the city level, maybe need to get City of Cape Town into doing something, or have one of the railway or electricity companies get a telecommunications licence...
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All three of these have been tried.

City level infrastructure = impossible politics.
Railway company with communications license = Transtel, and it helped nobody.
Electricity company with communications license = Eskom, and that became Infraco, and that became nothing.

The only real hope is more competition, and that is what we (hopefully) now have with ICASA having lost against Altech.
 
supersunbird said:
Sounds like the local version of a movie, except the name is a bit diffirent:

"Field of nightmares"
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"Field of nightmares, the Ivy strain" part two "Field of nightmares, Return of iCaSa" :D
 
TheRoDent said:
All three of these have been tried.

City level infrastructure = impossible politics.
Railway company with communications license = Transtel, and it helped nobody.
Electricity company with communications license = Eskom, and that became Infraco, and that became nothing.

The only real hope is more competition, and that is what we (hopefully) now have with ICASA having lost against Altech.
Click to expand...

Competition without goverment parastatals!

Ideas and concepts like Broadband Infraco should become something of the past - quickly.
Instead of using tax payer money to build infrastucture - the private sector should be allowed and as The Rodent has said - with Altech's win, this in part should be a reality.
Neotel already has most of the country covered with their NGN network.
What would lead the DoC to believe that there are no other foreign investors that would be able to pull it off as well?

For goverment to say that there was no one around willing to bring in a submarine cable and that they should be responsible for creating (stifling :rolleyes: ) competition is ludicrous.

May we see the demise of goverments role in the telecomms sector, an upsurge in business and a spiralling descent in prices!
 
I don't know if Transtel helped no-one.

From a quick google, Neotel basically bought their licence.
http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article.php?a_id=107121

WAN scale networking needs infrastructure, and infrastructure's big requirement after equipment is right of access, which is what City Government, Electrical, and Railways have.

*Also telephone companies, but we know what happened with T/el"con"^HTelkom...
 
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