Broadband Penetration Benchmarks: SA versus the World
2010 has been a good year for South African broadband. Consumers saw the first ever affordable uncapped ADSL services, Cell C joined the mobile broadband market with their aggressively priced 21 Mbps HSPA+ offerings and Telkom bumped up many 4 Mbps ADSL subscribers to 10 Mbps, free of charge.
There has also been strong growth in the mobile broadband market with Vodacom announcing recently that they have 1.9-million mobile broadband users while MTN has 1,729,236 mobile broadband data subscribers.
iBurst, Neotel and other fixed wireless broadband providers have also showed fair growth, serving just under 200,000 consumers with fixed wireless broadband services across the country.
While the better broadband speeds and cheaper pricing are encouraging, South Africa is still very far behind the developed world when it comes to broadband penetration rates.
According to the latest OECD Broadband figures there were 294 million fixed broadband subscriptions in June 2010 in the OECD area, up from 283 million in December 2009. The average penetration rate has grown to 24.3 subscriptions per 100 inhabitants up from 23.3.
The following tables provide an overview of exactly how South Africa compares with the best and worse countries which form part of the OECD.
| OECD Fixed (wired) broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants | ||||||
| Country | DSL | Cable | Fibre/LAN | Other | Total | Total subscriptions |
| Top OECD Countries | ||||||
| Netherlands | 22.0 | 14.8 | 0.9 | 0.0 | 37.8 | 6,245,000 |
| Denmark | 22.3 | 10.0 | 4.4 | 0.7 | 37.3 | 2,062,000 |
| Switzerland | 25.9 | 10.4 | 0.4 | 0.4 | 37.1 | 2,894,830 |
| Worst OECD Countries | ||||||
| Chile | 5.4 | 4.8 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 10.2 | 1,729,575 |
| Mexico | 7.8 | 2.2 | 0.0 | 0.1 | 10.1 | 10,843,812 |
| Turkey | 9.0 | 0.3 | 0.1 | 0.0 | 9.4 | 6,780,479 |
| South Africa | 1.4 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 1.4 | 699,368 |
| OECD | 14.1 | 7.1 | 2.8 | 0.1 | 24.2 | 293,926,687 |
| OECD Terrestrial mobile wireless broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants | |||||
| Satellite | Terrestrial fixed wireless | Mobile broadband subscriptions | Total | Total subscriptions | |
| Top OECD Countries | |||||
| Korea | 0.0 | 0.0 | 95.0 | 95.0 | 46,302,317 |
| Sweden | 0.0 | 0.1 | 75.5 | 75.6 | 7,060,837 |
| Japan | 0.0 | 0.0 | 75.3 | 75.3 | 96,115,074 |
| Worst OECD Countries | |||||
| Chile | 0.0 | 0.1 | 6.4 | 6.5 | 1,092,267 |
| Turkey | 0.01 | 0.0 | 1.2 | 1.17 | 841,945 |
| Mexico | 0.0 | 0.2 | 0.2 | 0.5 | 507,069 |
| South Africa | 0.0 | 0.4 | 7.3 | 7.7 | 3,829,236 |
| OECD Average | 0.0 | 0.5 | 36.2 | 36.7 | 16,738,331 |
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