In Bandwidth in South Africa – Part 1 – Cost I discussed the cost implications of the consumer internet and as we saw it did not come cheap. In this part I will be discussing the usage trends. It took awhile to get the statistics and I can safely say that they represent a reality that I was not ready for, see Number of Users bellow.
74% of the South African users are still using dialup! And a further 24% uses ADSL 384, I unfortunately could not get the 3G, Neotel and Fixed Line usage at the time of writing. Now let us move to ADSL CAP usage.
46% of the users use 1GB or less, no doubt due to the costs involved. I was troubled by those statistics and enquired further to no avail.
The point I am trying to make with these statistics is two fold:
- The challenges of writing web application in an environment such as this goes far beyond just writing code to get the site to work but adds a dimension of careful optimisation of traffic between the browser and the server in all respects caused by both the speed and cap of the link.
- Is this symptomatic or can this be fixed by the landing of new cables in South Africa, will bandwidth and cap prices go down to a reasonable and reachable price? Our friends at mybroadband.co.za think so. I am sceptical and will stick with the my first statement, optimise!