The lack of light in deepest, darkest Africa is not a reference to the load shedding, impassable national roads or fenced in communities where no mere mortal can venture. The darkness in Africa can be summarized in an image like the one below where there is a solitary light on somewhere in Joburg.
This is a ‘night-time’ map showing all active multiplayer users playing Halo 3 on Xbox Live and is updated every 15 minutes here. More detailed analysis makes us realise that it is an indication of a primarily western console (the Japanese are more Playstation fans) for a game that is a bit out of date and has a cult following amongst American college students. However, you can’t help noticing a solitary dot in Africa where some Halo 3 die-hard getting pwned by network lag.
I looked for various statistics and particularly nice diagrammatic views on broadband penetration in South Africa and cannot come up with anything as compelling, and obvious, as that little dot. Regardless of the source of statistics one thing is certain – in South Africa we have a pitiful level of broadband penetration; that is if you are willing to stretch the definition of broadband to include anaemic little 1Mb lines.
We know the reasons (high cost) and we know the culprits (Telkom, Department of Communications) but do we, the privileged few who can fork out a few grand a month for unreliable and relatively slow broadband connectivity, really know what we are missing? I don’t think we have a clue.
Broadband is not about providing access to quality education for the underprivileged. It is not about providing a means for skilled doctors to diagnose remotely. It is not about providing video conference facilities to corporates or running feature rich business applications. Businesses don’t really need broadband to transact – credit card transactions, swift payments and airline reservations are pretty lean.
In our capitalist driven globalized world, broadband is about connecting consumers to sellers through as big a pipe as possible so that they can buy stuff. But not just any old stuff mind you, we’re talking about the stuff that people don’t really need but want - because they can afford it. The people that have the disposable income and they will buy virtually anything for $10 without taking the time to see if it is really useful.
Broadband delivers YouTube videos which in some cases are better than the crap on TV, are free to produce (for YouTube at least) and provides a page or platform for a few on the hundreds of thousands of viewers to click on an advert and buy some related stuff. Do you like the Elvis video you’re watching? Well click here to buy a dancing Elvis phone – hmm, I know t least one person that would if it was easy, cheap and delivered.
Broadband delivers movies and TV shows that we have already seen before but will watch again because there’s crap on TV and besides we liked that episode anyway. The producers have made their money selling Grey’s Anatomy for prime-time TV and sold as many box sets as they can, so why not put it out there and squeeze the last life out of it from millions of lazy Americans. Follow this link to hulu.com and you will find it there.
Broadband delivers music and videos that can be directly downloaded onto you iPod which you buy anyway because iTunes has looked at your playlists and offers some recommendations – which you more or less agree with. They might as well sell it to you cheap to save you the hassle of ripping a friends CD – besides if you buy it on iTunes you get cover art, which is cool.
Broadband delivers a community of your gaming peers who will spend hours shooting at each other on Xbox Live. You’ve paid handsomely for the game but they will get you and millions of others to pay a subscription fee to play with each other and once your ‘friends’ have paid for and downloaded the newest map pack – you have to follow suit.
Broadband delivers the ultimate platform to buy stuff – eBay. Where you can sell stuff that you don’t really want and buy stuff that you don’t really need. It is all hooked up to the idea of being permanent continuously connected to monitor your bids – an opportunity to find more stuff and tracking your deliveries, rating suppliers and all sorts of other things to make your purchase of someone else’s junk more fulfilling.
Broadband delivers Facebook, lauded as a big player in Web 2.0 which provides narcissists a place where they can create a page on the Internet and invite people who didn’t like them in school – all so that they can have a score on how much they are loved which can be viewed by people who are either jealous or don’t care.
We don’t have broadband and we don’t get what it delivers.
There is no Xbox Live in South Africa, no iTunes, no hulu.com. We don’t have eBay wired into our culture. Leon Bambrick commented recently that after selling his soul to the devil it turned up on eBay for him to buy it back – we don’t understand jokes like that. We, thinking that we are well wired, are relieved that the HD-DVD vs BlueRay war is over so we can go and buy some plastic disks with bits on – we don’t realise that the rest of the world doesn’t care since they are already downloading HD content on their 100Mb uncapped line for less than the cost of a BlueRay disk.
We are fed marketing bull like Vodacom’s music download service MusicStation which promises an ‘iPod-like service’ that gives South Africa the ‘opportunity to leapfrog many European countries in digital music distribution’ – what drivel! You can’t leapfrog anything with the cost per meg of bandwidth. It’s like Telkom offering HD movie downloads for free – but at 15GB per download it will cost a few grand per movie.
Web 2.0 is driven my consumers and marketers and we have neither in South Africa. With broadband penetration estimated at less than 500,000 people we are, in the minds of the rest of the Web 2.0 world that one insignificant dot on the map above – hardly worth attention. Some of the other darker areas on the map are emerging markets for Web 2.0 and they are watching India, China and others. After all an undersea cable between Japan and China doesn’t seem like such a big engineering challenge compared to laying one down on the African coast where we still have frikkin pirates patrolling the waters!
Business has been bleating for ages about the cost of bandwidth and how it hinders their business. Promises of cheaper bandwidth won’t live up to expectations – investors need a return on their delayed business plans and dealing with pirates. Besides, duopolies don’t go into price wars.
Over time we probably will have sufficient bandwidth and a good enough price to satisfy South Africa’s needs in terms of education and connection of more of the population to the Internet. We have bigger problems to deal with in terms of skills, literacy and even electricity. The oversupply of bandwidth to the privileged who want to buy stuff on the Internet is not going to be high on anyone’s agenda.
In terms of Web 2.0 we will not fall behind the rest of the world – we are behind and will never catch up. The growth of cheap ubiquitous communication in other parts of the world is orders of magnitude higher than we can ever sustain and if we do ever begin to close the gap technically we will be culturally misaligned and disconnected – unable to integrate it into our lives and businesses.
Are we missing out on something? I’m not sure and I don’t think anyone can say. Those who have iTunes, eBay and YouTube integrated into their daily lives are not here and cannot offer a comparison.
But I can’t shake the feeling that there is something going on out there that we have not and will not grok.
Simon Munro
deliveryfocus.net