Low-cost Wi-Fi starts slaying dragon of affordability guarding the digital divide
• Toomuchwifi moves out of pilot mode to roll out fibre-backed plans in townships and underserved communities
Mobile data coverage in SA is, to a large extent, excellent. Naturally, the more rural an area the spottier and weaker the signal, but there are few places in the country where you cannot connect to the web on your smart device via at least a sad but functional 2G connection.
If you glance at the coverage maps of the major mobile providers it looks as if the Karoo and the Northern Cape are on the neglected side of that spectrum for spectrum, while the metros are nearly bathed in 3G and 4G options.
We all know, however, that network coverage is far from the primary barrier keeping people offline in SA; rather affordability lays claim to that grubby crown. Thankfully — and finally — we are now seeing the low-cost WiFi movement wins adding up to some meaningful gains — only five painful years since the DataMustFall movement became a national talking point.
Among the win(ner)s is the offering from internet service provider (ISP) Toomuchwifi. I first read about this group last year in an interview with Balancing Act Africa — a telecoms and internet consultancy — which published an interview with CEO Ian Thomson.
At that stage it was still in “pilot mode”, but with the help of a funder it ran a campaign offering free data vouchers to people in exchange for participating in a short quiz geared towards Covid-19-awareness.
Then last week I read with interest that it has graduated out of pilot, and is rolling out fibrebacked Wi-Fi plans in townships and “underserved communities”, with packages that break down to about R4 per gigabyte with line speeds of 4Mbps and 10Mbps, which should suffice for streaming standard definition movies and video calls.
For comparison’s sake, a gig of mobile data with my own mobile provider costs R85, which is already a substantial decrease on its previous prices. Purchasing volumes must be considered too. The smallest valid-for-30-days data bundle you can buy from my mobile provider is R12 for 50MB. Bytefor-byte, that is a 400% markup on the 1GB bundle.
I know I’m comparing mobile to fixed here and that is not a straightforward comparison. With mobile internet connectivity data is usually priced by bundle size (R100 for a gig, or something similar), while broadband or fibre connection providers these days largely seem to price their packages by speed with data caps that may or may not apply.
Given this, it is not easy to compare packages directly. Even within categories (mobile and fixed) the packages are structured in a way that makes comparison between networks an exercise in self-flagellation. I suspect that is the point.
Still, the most economical packages in both mobile and fixed connectivity are certainly heavily skewed towards the benefit of the wealthy. For example, a number of the big banks now run virtual mobile network operators (VMNO), many of which have excellent deals on fixed LTE (4G) connections, but these are regularly limited to their customers, and often top-tier customers at that.
These kinds of packages are no doubt boosting data-use volumes and are great for my wallet and yours, but they don’t go far enough in dealing with the real need — connecting the genuinely disconnected.
The disparity becomes stark and startling in considering data costs relative to what people earn. Data from the Southern Africa Labour & Development Research Unit shows that to be among the top 10% of South Africans you need to be taking home R7,313 a month. That is terrifyingly low, in personal and economic terms. The dividing line between SA’s top- and bottom-half earners is a piddly R1,149 a month after tax. So let’s say you are bang average — and honestly speaking the typical Business Day reader is not — then just a gig of data costs about 10% of your income.
The rule of thumb for home loan affordability, by comparison, is 30% of your income. Imagine that you were spending R300 on your bond or rent each month; where would you be staying?
Truly low-cost Wi-Fi options such as Toomuchwifi go far to answer the question that connectivity activists and the general population have been asking for years: how the *expletive* am I supposed to afford this?
Toomuchwifi is not the only company pushing the envelope, thankfully. Other ways ISPs are changing things up include waiving installation costs and long-term contracts.
AdNotes Rural TVWS Network — a project of the Council for Scientific & Industrial Research, the UN Development Programme, the Old Mutual Foundation and the office of the KwaZulu-Natal premier — are now offering connectivity via the “white spaces” in the TV broadcast spectrum in limited areas.
The department of science & technology’s Technology Innovation Agency (TIA) is offering FibrePoynt, which uses antenna technology to close the provision gaps. And Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet is hoping to come online for Nigeria later this year, and more areas of the continent in 2022.
I am desperate to see these all go mainstream, these and every other affordable option or solution our best minds can come up with. This is how we go from a third of SA jobseekers out of work to a nation of gig workers and entrepreneurs. Doing remote and repetitive tasks for a
pittance might not be your dream job, but it is better than nothing. It offers people a path out of incomeless despair.
This is how we connect learners to thousands of free courses online, to millions of educational resources and fascinating web pages. Where there is not potential for direct income streams, at least there is a distraction, an opportunity to see and imagine another life, to engage with someone far away, to engage with someone close by but different.
Now, in the deep darkness of our crushing unemployment figures and the loss of school days, we should be throwing everything we have at closing the digital divide, inch by inch if we have to.
THE MOST ECONOMICAL PACKAGES ARE HEAVILY SKEWED FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE WEALTHY