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he internet community, as in the real hard-core underbelly of the beast, is relatively small in South Africa. With only one fixed broadband network commercially available from Telkom, and only a few genuine first tier mobile operators, it makes it very difficult to have too many players in the market. With big players like Mweb (with an annual marketing budget in excess of R50 million) it’s hard to imagine that many small players can enter and thrive in the market. Nonetheless the Broadband industry is steadily growing in SA, and the place to follow all the latest trends, tips and top dogs of the industry is the MyBroadBand Conference held annually. This year’s conference at Vodaworld attracted its largest audience ever, with over 1,600 guests and delegates attending from all over the country. This included CEOs and Directors from Telkom, Mweb, Cell C, Afrihost, and most of the major ICT companies in SA. The conference was opened and hosted by wellknown technology fundi and 702 radio personality Aki Anastasiou. While the bulk of the conference was aimed at delivering key note addresses from top ICT personalities like former Mweb CEO Rudi Jansen and Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub (amongst many others), the real attraction are the awards. The most prestigious of course being the ISP of the Year Award, which was awarded to last year’s winner Afrihost. The ICT personality of the year went to Cell C CEO Alan Knott-Craig, no doubt due to his aggressive pricing strategies which breathed new life into the mobile operator and put them back into the Broadband provider race (Cell C went on to also win the Mobile Service of the Year). The big talk of the conference was LTE. LTE stands for Long Term Evolution and is sometimes referred to as 4G. It’s the updated (souped-up) version of EDGE / HSDPA technologies currently employed by mobile data providers. Now before we say anymore, let’s clear up some debate / debacle around the use of the term 4G in relation to LTE technology. The reason this needs to be discussed is mainly because there was a major dispute brought by Vodacom against Cell C branding their HSDPA+ network as 4G. Cell C eventually lost the dispute brought before the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). However Vodacom’s tenacity may come back to haunt them. A large part of their winning argument was based on the International Telecommunications Union’s definition of 4G as LTE-Advanced or WirelessMan Advanced. Since they are not deploying such technology at present, Cell C will now be actively pursuing a similar action against
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Supersizing South Africa
Vodacom’s labelling of LTE as 4G. So what is LTE? I had a gentleman describe it (very convincingly) as a satellite that shines a data spotlight on you (and your phone) and can deliver up to 4Mbps instantly. I’m afraid my misinformed friend is fairly far away from the truth. As exciting as it would be to imagine little green spacemen beaming my Walking Dead episodes from iTunes straight into my mobile device (or directly into my brain), this is simply not the case! LTE uses GSM Radio broadcast technology. It broadcasts in much higher frequency ranges than existing 3G and HSDPA services, somewhere in the 20MHz spectrum. It also uses different frequency modulation (which is what turns the radio signal into data). So even though it’s based on similar technology, it will require new hardware in the form of LTE compatible dongles or routers, and new LTE broadcast towers. Vodacom currently have 70 live sites providing LTE coverage and 8ta will have several in place very soon (they
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