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COMMENT
African telecom industry
should prioritise true
broadband services
population that sees connectivity
as a fundamental right, he adds. For
them, broadband spells access to
educational, economic and social
opportunities. Mobile broadband has
an important role to play, but fibre-
based fixed-line infrastructure is also
vitally important in connecting mobile
towers and giving users affordable
last-mile access to high-speed services.
Mobile-first
Suveer Ramdhani, Chief Development
Officer, SEACOM
T
he telecom industry in South
Africa and the rest of the
continent is on the cusp of a
fibre and mobile broadband boom,
as network operators scramble to
meet the demand for video, cloud
applications and mobile solutions
among consumers and businesses.
That’s the word from Suveer
Ramdhani, Chief Development Officer
at SEACOM, who says that the priority
for the telecoms industry this year
should be to accelerate deployment
of true broadband services so that
African users can benefit from the full
power of the Internet.
Ramdhani says: “In Africa, we have
seen some progress in increasing
Internet penetration, but the
goalposts keep shifting. Many,
perhaps even most, Internet
connections on the continent are
sub-1Mbs connections that do not
meet the insatiable demand among
businesses and consumers for fast and
plentiful bandwidth.”
In Africa, one major factor driving
demand for high-performance
bandwidth, is a growing and youthful
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INTELLIGENTCIO
“Research from We Are Social
indicates that 75% of web pages
served to web browsers in South Africa
are accessed from mobile devices,”
says Ramdhani. “Across Africa, people
spend most of their time online using
mobile devices because of the world’s
shift towards mobility and because
it is the only affordable or available
means of connecting to the Internet
in many regions.”
However, the way that people use
the Internet on a mobile device
is different to how they use their
fixed-line connections. They use their
smartphones for social networking,
messaging, entertainment and utility,
while desktop users do more data-
intensive tasks such as file sharing and
video streaming.
Another factor is the rapid rise of
video. Data from Cisco shows that
video accounted for nearly 58% of
data consumption in South Africa
in 2015, which is expected to rise
to 71% by 2020. Streaming video
services such as Netflix and ShowMax
will be a major reason for this growth,
Ramdhani says.
In the business market, there is
growing demand for cloud computing
services such as those provided by
Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce.
com and a range of African service
providers, he adds. Many African
organisations are embracing the cloud
to fast-track modernisation of their
IT infrastructures.
“With the trends towards higher video
consumption and cloud computing,
users will need to find their way back
to a fixed-line connection,” says
Ramdhani. “Mobile operators will need
to look at their business models and
decide whether they will evolve these
models to capture all of our data
spend or whether they will continue to
provide relatively expensive services
for niche mobile use.”
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Ecosystem comes together
Ramdhani says that many elements
of the ecosystem have come together
in Africa for a boom in high-speed
Internet access. For example, an
explosion in local data centres and the
deployment of on-continent content
caches has brought global content
closer to the end-user, improving their
experience dramatically.
In addition, open-access infrastructure
players have reduced barriers to
entry for innovative service providers,
meaning that fibre to the business
and home is becoming increasingly
viable in African metropolitan regions.
“There is fibre from city-to-city and
fibre in rings around the cities, but not
enough to businesses’ and consumers’
doorsteps,” says Ramdhani. “Changing
this is a priority for SEACOM this year.”
SEACOM is also focusing on
connecting into more countries as
backhaul becomes economically viable
and expanding its ring around Africa
with aspirations to the West. “With
such low broadband penetrations
and with such high demand for data
volumes, the growth possibilities are
tremendous,” says Ramdhani.
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