The African continent is home to less than 0.1% of the world's fixed and wireless broadband subscribers, according to research from the Department of Communications.
Deputy communications minister Roy Padayachie revealed this statistic last week at the State IT Agency's GovTech conference, at Sun City.
He attributed Africa's low levels of broadband penetration to "poor national broadband strategies", often featuring an incumbent monopoly telecoms operator.
In countries like South Korea and Iceland, next-generation networks (NGNs) have flourished, because of excellent national broadband strategies by those countries' governments, he told delegates.
"The nation with the highest broadband penetration rate is Iceland - with 26.7 people out of every 100 [connected to high-speed Internet]," he said.
Silver lining
Padayachie stated that poor present-generation broadband infrastructure could make it easier for low-penetration nations to move swiftly to NGNs.
Nations with poor broadband networks, he explained, may be able to "leapfrog" a step - or a generation - and go straight to high-efficiency NGNs.
This could, perhaps, best be compared to the way that limited fixed-line telephone infrastructure aided the rapid uptake of cellular infrastructure and devices in SA in the late 1990s, he noted.
Padayachie cautioned that solid state policy is essential if countries lacking high-speed Internet services are to develop NGNs.
Far superior
An NGN, noted Padayachie, is a "far superior animal" to ADSL, and can be regarded as an "umbrella term" for Internet Protocol (IP) networks carrying voice, data and video (triple play).
Due to the likely convergence an NGN encourages, such networks can pose difficulties for regulators, he noted. "Technological development will always outpace the regulator - but in an IP environment regulation must seek to stop the inhibition of services."
Neotel's head of enterprise sales, Vishal Dhume, explained: "IP alone is simply a 'dumb' network, and an NGN is created by adding 'intelligence' on the network."
In an NGN environment, the application layer is separate from the transport layer. This allows new services to be provisioned quickly, without adjustments to the physical network. It also enables the provision of bandwidth on demand, he added.
Locally, Telkom is developing a national NGN, a project to which it has assigned R30 billion.
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