{"id":551857,"date":"2007-03-26T15:38:27","date_gmt":"2007-03-26T15:38:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/wordpress\/technology\/551857-local-content-the-way-forward.html"},"modified":"2007-03-26T15:38:27","modified_gmt":"2007-03-26T15:38:27","slug":"local-content-the-way-forward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/technology\/551857-local-content-the-way-forward.html","title":{"rendered":"Local content the way forward"},"content":{"rendered":"

Currently a significant portion of the content accessed by broadband consumers in South Africa comes from international sources, which requires large amounts of expensive international bandwidth. <\/font><\/p>\n

The problems associated with South Africa\u2019s geographic location and the related international bandwidth predicament was recently highlighted by Telkom\u2019s Steven Hayward, pointing to the limitations that this scenario brings to broadband offerings.<\/font><\/p>\n

Dr. Kai Wulff, Managing Director of Kenya Data Networks, says that local content can go a long way to limit the need for international connectivity and make it easier to offer high speed, low cost broadband services to consumers.<\/font><\/p>\n

This local content should not only be local websites serving the local community, but should include companies like Yahoo or Google moving their point of presence to South Africa. <\/font><\/p>\n

Further innovative steps like content caching will save the operators a great deal of money on international bandwidth. This caching is however not limited to basic web-site caching, but can include P2P content caching which can limit the negative effects of file sharing over peer-to-peer networks.<\/font><\/p>\n

Local hosting a problem<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n

The situation of international content is however aggravated by the fact that there is no effective pricing differentiation between local and international bandwidth for hosting companies.<\/font><\/p>\n

The result is that many local content providers opt for cheaper international hosting, which further increases the demand for international connectivity despite the content being designed by South Africans for South Africans.<\/font><\/p>\n

The scrapping of unlimited local ADSL bandwidth further made it nearly pointless for bandwidth intensive websites to be hosted locally as there was no clear business case for local hosting.<\/font><\/p>\n

This issue has however been highlighted on various occasions in the past with little to no effect.<\/font><\/p>\n

In everybody\u2019s interest?<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n

More local content may however not suit the need of all providers, especially if an operator is making a great deal of money through selling international bandwidth. This is currently the case with Telkom, which makes one wonder whether Telkom is really interested in boosting local content. <\/font><\/p>\n

The promotion of more local content is good news for the IT community and South Africa\u2019s economy as a whole, which begs the question as to why more pressure is not placed on Telkom to develop pricing models to encourage local content.<\/font><\/p>\n

Unless there are clear financial incentives for content providers and ISPs to host services locally and for large international content players to move their servers to South Africa the situation is unlikely to change in the near future.<\/font><\/p>\n

Comments<\/a><\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With the high cost of international bandwidth hampering the roll out of affordable broadband services, local content may be a partial solution to the problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-551857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551857"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=551857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551857\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}