10Mbps minimum broadband speed for SA: DFA CEO
Dark Fibre Africa (DFA) CEO Gustav Smit is of the opinion that the absolute minimum broadband speeds in South Africa should be 10Mbps for residential customers and 40Mbps for business customers.
Speaking at the 2012 MyBroadband Conference, Smit said that if someone tries to sell you a 1Mbps or 4Mbps service for your office, you should “chase that oke away”.
“That’s not the way we should do it in South Africa. We will never get this economy growing if we sell one and two and four megabit links,” said Smit.
“South Africans simply don’t know what 20Mbps or 100Mbps to the home means. An opportunity needs to be created for users to test drive serious broadband, and ISPs need to play a leading role in mobilising communities,” Smit said.
Enough fibre available already
Gustav Smit
The DFA CEO dismissed the argument that there is not enough fibre infrastructure to support these higher speeds.
The chief executive of DFA said that, between major fibre operators – including Broadband Infraco, DFA, Neotel and Telkom – South Africa already has a substantial amount of fibre waiting to be adopted.
Smit said that DFA alone deployed 6,000km of fibre in the major metropolitan areas which goes past 120,000 buildings. However, only 5% of these building are connected to this fibre network, which Smit said points to a major shortcoming.
He called on government to invest more in broadband in SA and highlighted the initiatives by the Australian government to invest significantly ($37.4billion) in a National Broadband Network project to provide high-speed fibre optic cable broadband to 93% of homes, schools and businesses by 2021.
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