As it is throughout most first world countries, networking in South Africa is one of the highest growth areas in the information technology industry.
Again reflecting modern trends, there is a very strong interest in the Internet, which is having an impact on the lives of an increasing number of people. Many entrepreneurs are seeing the potential for doing business on the Internet and are using it for marketing and distribution purposes.
South Africa is a country of extremes when it comes to networking and information access. While the country compares very favorably in these areas with the rest of the first world in the academic, research and business spheres, it lags excessively behind in traditional black homelands and townships. In many of these areas, even a basic telephone is seen as a luxury.
Basic Telecommunications Infrastructure
The carrier services in South Africa are provided by TELKOM, a government-controlled corporation. The service of TELKOM is typical of any situation where there is not competition. Delays of up to six months in the installation of new services is not unheard of.
Their most relevant services are
DIGINET: a point-to-point digital transmission service with a maximum bandwidth of 1920 kbit/sec
SAPONET: an X-25 packet-switching network with a maximum access speed of 48 kbit/sec. Easy Access is their triplex dial-up service with speeds of up to 9600 bits/sec.
Metropolitan Area Network: a network which uses extended LAN technology for the purpose of high speed (30 mbits/sec and higher) data transfer over a wide geographical area.
TELKOM is also in direct competition with the commercial Internet service providers (ISP) with its own SAIX Internet service-clearly, a very unhealthy situation.
There are indications that TELKOM may be one of the first state corporations to be privatized, a move which would be widely welcomed by analysts in the business sector.
Internet
The Internet is fairly well established, and South Africa currently ranks 16th in the world, based on the number of Internet hosts.
Apart from SAIX (TELKOM's Internet service) there are six major commercial Internet service providers in the country. Among them, they offer a total bandwidth of approximately 8.5 Mbits/sec to the United States. The corporate environment views The Internet Solution as the most professional and reliable of all the providers
