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:

1. 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.
2. 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!

I am a Web Application Developer based in Johannesburg, South Africa and I have written about optimising the ASP.NET generated HTML more than once. I thought it would be appropriate to explain what I mean when I refer to the South African bandwidth environment. The answer comes in two parts, firstly the cost of bandwidth in South Africa and second the availability of internet access in South Africa. Let me tackle each separately.

The cost of bandwidth in South Africa

Firstly, the sake of simplicity I will assume a cost of $1 at R10.00, which will be close enough to reality to be acceptable. 

There are a few ways that one can connect to the Internet in South Africa, none are cheap. Let me list a few:

1. Dial-up, yes this is still a very popular way to connect to a service provider but is very limited in bandwidth but one of the cheaper options, starting at R79 per month plus call time.
2. GPRS through a GSM phone, mobile but also at a cool R2/Mb outside a data bundle.
3. ADSL, a sore point in this country as Telkom SA has the only network that supports it, a monopoly of grand proportion. A 1Gb/Month will cost  R145 plus the ADSL rental from a cool R152 per month for a 384kbps amounting to R297, it is worthy to note that there are fully inclusive offers that are cheaper at R199. It is also worthy to note that if you do not use the full allocated bandwidth given by the contract, it will be lost at the end of the month, so if one has used 500Mb the remainder 500Mb will be lost on the last day of the month, I call it theft but there is very little we can do.
4. iBurst, offers iBurst wireless from R49/Month for 40Mb at speeds up to 1Mbps, if you can get their signal.
5. 3G/HSDPA is offered by all South African mobile operators and even Telkom at a cool R2/Mb or on contracts from R179/Month for 350Mb and can achieve 1.8Mbps.
6. WiMax, offers from 64kbps but prices are generally not published so far.
7. Neotel’s, our 2nd fixed line operator, offers look good from R399 including Voice, 2.5Gb data, device and more. But more than that an extra Mb will cost R0.08 but they have a small foot print and do not operate everywhere yet.

Most of the above comes with a device (modem, router or other) that is calculated in the price over 12 or 24 months.

To wrap this off, there is no cheap way to access the Internet from South Africa but to compound the problem there is currently only one international bandwidth supplier in South Africa, Telkom SA, this will be changing in a few months but will it help? I’ll talk about that in Part 2.