Roundtables

Better broadband beckons

Better business operations, new applications and a better economy would flow from faster broadband. How do we get there?

25 July 2014

Specialist internet backbone provider Akamai surveyed global internet speeds at the end of last year and the results were pretty dismal for South Africa: 97th place on the speed list and the only country surveyed in the entirety of Europe, the Middle East and Africa that had an average connection speed less than 4Mbit/s. If one could wave a magic wand and get our bandwidth problems fixed, what applications would be the most useful for this country? Simon Hudson, head of consulting at ECS Africa, says the one piece of technology he’s seen that could make a significant difference is remote medicine.

“There’s hardware that can deliver a doctor to anywhere in the country, but we just don’t have the infrastructure to do that.” On a more pragmatic note, he says that better connectivity means extending the edge of the business network right to the consumer. “For the insurance industry, for example, this could mean that if I’d just had a car accident, I could take photos with my phone, make a claim and my insurance app will upload it for me.”

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