Personally I don\u2019t believe that we will ever have enough broadband out of and into South Africa. Even with Seacom and the continual muttering of the upgrade of SAT2 and other cable projects\u00a0 we will not reach the point\u00a0 any time soon where we have a glut and companies will literally pay you to use their bandwidth!<\/p>\n
Even adding the capacity of the New Dawn satellite that Andile Ngcaba, chairman of Convergence Partners has been dreaming about, we will not reach that point in the next five or even ten years.<\/p>\n
Andile has been talking about an African satellite ever since he became the director general of the department of communication in the nineties. The satellite is a joint venture between Intelsat and a South African investor group led by Convergence Partners which Andile now heads. The payload will be optimised to deliver wireless backhaul, broadband and television programming to the continent and is expected to enter service in early 2011.<\/p>\n
It is doubtfully if New Dawn will be a serious contender to play in the broadband internet space. The cost structure of a satellite service is too high to compete with fibre cables and will only make its presence felt where there are no broadband connections to the hinterland from any of the submarine cables.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t subscribe to the notion that broadband will become a whole lot cheaper in the short term. Yes there will be a marginal reduction but not at the level every one is talking about. My reasoning is that while we are landing all this capacity, it still has to be connected with the rest of the country. Neotel is busy increasing its capacity between the main centres. Telkom is upgrading it fibre network and there is Infracom but it seems to concentrate on the educational network.<\/p>\n
Perhaps World Wide Worx is right when, in its latest study, it makes the point that the cost will only come down marginally, but users will get a larger cap.<\/p>\n
But to clarify my statement in the opening paragraph, it will take huge increases in international connectivity before we reach saturation point. Because South Africans are becoming more Internet literate and only now are starting to discover what they have been missing all those years the demand for broadband will grow exponentially.<\/p>\n