South Africa: broadband below par

Broadband services in South Africa are very poor as compared to other countries around the world, a new study by the University of Oviedo's Department of Applied Economics and the University of Oxford revealed.

The Broadband Quality Study said globally the world average download throughput had increased to 4.75 Megabits per second (Mbps), while upload throughput was 1.3Mbps. The study was based on the Speedtest.net statistics.

Currently, South Africa’s fastest fixed line offering is only 4Mbps. While South Africa’s average download throughput of 1.71Mbps was the second fastest in Africa, slightly behind Morocco’s 1.81Mbps. An average upload speed of 0.4Mbps placed Africa’s largest economy behind the pace in 5th position behind Uganda (1.1Mbps), Kenya (0.64Mbps), Gambia (0.55Mbps) and northern neighbour Botswana (0.41Mbps).

The survey, which also factored in latency, placed South Africa way off the pace at 60 out of the 66 countries that were looked at.

The study confirmed that South Africa was significantly below the ‘applications threshold’, meaning that the country’s telecommunications offerings were not capable of consistently handling common web tasks like streaming low-definition video, application sharing and even some social media networking applications.

Africa on average was the poorest performing continent in the study, with average upload and download speeds of 1.18Mbps and 0.28Mbps.

- October 27, 2009 by  Peter Griffiths

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Source: www.africanews.com/site/Study_SA_broadband_below_par/list_messages/27675 (accessed 29.10.2009)