Cheaper broadband and more bandwidth will help ease traffic congestion on SA's roads, says Viv Crone, CEO of Spescom DataVoice.
"A large portion of white-collar workers are information handlers; they can be as effective at home as in the office. More broadband, at significantly cheaper rates, frees up workers to work from home."
Crone says if 10% of road users worked from home for one day every two weeks, SA will save about R6 billion on oil costs. This is a sufficient amount to provide free broadband in people's homes.
This comes after reports that government has allocated R647 million to state-owned Infraco, established to reduce broadband costs in SA.
Competition
MyADSL founder Rudolph Muller says with cheaper broadband and more bandwidth, SA will see a boom in the use of Internet Protocol (IP) telephony and development of online content.
He says this could seriously threaten traditional voice revenue for both Telkom and mobile providers.
"What we are seeing internationally (and locally) is that traditional telcos are investigating other revenue streams, like IP-TV, video-on-demand and other content to make up for the lost revenue from the use of VOIP [voice over IP]."
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