Telecommunications

• 26% of Limpopo households have access to a cellphone

The major towns in Limpopo are adequately connected to all forms of telecommunications. The challenge is to integrate the rural communities with the urban economies.

Research conducted by the Human Sciences Research Council has found that 26.1% of households in Limpopo have access to a cellphone. This  is the third lowest of South Africa’s nine provinces, and significantly lower than the national average of 33.1%. This figure is still far higher than that for landline accessibility in the province.

Bringing down the cost of communication is seen by the national Department of Communications as its biggest challenge.
But reduced costs alone will not provide a sustainable solution.

Investment in infrastructure is urgently needed, and is happening in many areas. Deregulation of the telecommunications industry in South Africa, and the emergence of Neotel as competition to the established parastatal, Telkom, has created opportunities for increased competition.

More broadband
Excitement was generated in the telecoms sector in mid-2009 by the landing of the Seacom cable on the KwaZulu-Natal coast. The implications of the connection of the new undersea Seacom cable at Richards Bay are enormous. With a capacity of 1.2 trillion bytes per second (10 times what is currently available), the possibilities for telecommunications operators and service providers have been massively expanded.

Seacom is a fibre-optic cable that runs up the east coast of Africa, connecting South Africa to Europe and India via Kenya. The Seacom cable is owned by a company of the same name, but it has signed an agreement with South Africa’s second network operator (SNO), Neotel.
The cable is expected to be operational within South Africa by September 2010.

More good news for connectivity comes in the form of the start of the project to lay the East Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy). The US$280-million cable will run 10 500km under the Indian Ocean from Durban to Sudan and then on to Europe.

Cellphones
South Africa has the largest cellphone penetration rate in Africa, approaching 90%. Vodacom, MTN and CellC were joined in 2006 by Virgin Mobile as the fourth provider. Vodacom is the market leader with 26.5 million subscribers, followed by MTN with 17.2 million.

The telecommunications industry is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the national economy, with physical infrastructure, in particular, playing a big role in recent developments. Vodacom launched a R2.5-billion business unit in 2008, which offers data storage and hosting among other things. All of South Africa’s retail banks are exploiting cellphone technology as a way of reaching the previously unbanked.

Online resources
Communication Users Association of South Africa:
www.cuasa.org.za
Independent Communications Authority of South Africa: www.icasa.org.za
National Department of Communications: www.doc.gov.za
Sentech: www.sentech.co.za

















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