Bridging digital divide a game changer
Nothing brought home the extent of SA’s digital divide and its economic cost more than Covid-19. Children at private schools switched almost seamlessly to online schooling, but those in government schools, without their own personal devices and fast, affordable home internet, were stuck at home twiddling their thumbs.
While nearly everyone in SA has a mobile phone, the majority find it too expensive to make meaningful use of the internet on their devices.
So it is not surprising that all the major fibre operators have plans to provide high-speed internet to the townships. What nobody has done yet, though, is prove how to do this at scale in a way that is profitable, bankable and dirt cheap.
Cracking this conundrum would deliver a huge economic stimulus. Think of free online educational resources and information the township schoolchild or unemployed young adult would suddenly be able to access. If only the government, instead of bailing out the state broadcaster or Post Office, would focus on providing fast, affordable internet to the underserved.
This is why my ears pricked up on hearing about the Kayamandi Fibre Project, driven by Isizwe and its internet service provider, PayGoZo, a passion project of entrepreneur Alan Knott-Craig. Kayamandi, a township of 22,000 homes outside Stellenbosch, is serving as Isizwe’s laboratory to prove that uncapped, high-speed internet can be provided to every township dweller for as little as R5 a day per device. By contrast, the average mobile data price in SA is R85 for 1GB on a contract, and many multiples of that for the cheapest pay-as-you-go option.
Since September, Isizwe’s PayGoZo has reached 3,500 homes with 1.5TB of data humming through the network on average each day at speeds exceeding 100Mbs per device — 10 times faster than some of its competitors’ offerings. By the end of March, it expects to have wired up the entire township.
The model relies on the high population density in the townships. So, whereas it costs about R2,500 to drop fibre and provide a router to a single suburban house, it costs about the same to reach 15 devices in a township. Shacks are serviced using aerial optic fibre cable strung across gum poles. A user’s internet pass can be used anywhere within the coverage area, not just in their own home.
Also key is that the project uses not only pay-as-you-go billing but time-based billing, where you don’t pay for the amount of data you use, but the time you use it for — a more transparent alternative.
So far, the rollout has been funded by private investors, but if the pilot proves the model is profitable and sustainable without the certainty that comes from monthly subscription fees, the aim is to raise R250m from the big banks to wire up all of Kayamandi, Nomzamo in Somerset West and Mfuleni in Gordon’s Bay by the end of 2023 — 110,000 homes in all.
After that the plan is to reach 1-million township homes over the next five years.
Isizwe.com CEO Steve Briggs says they are trying to do things on a scale that will attract the big infrastructure funders into the space. The aim is to spur market forces to solve the low-cost connectivity issue and bridge the “digital apartheid” that constrains the economy. This is why Isizwe has opensourced its model. In any event, it knows it will take many operators to make even a small dent in the township backlog.
The project shows just how crucial technological innovation is in crafting creative solutions to the country’s problems. The fact that it is private sectordriven, and likely to be profitable, is so much the better because it will also be sustainable. If it works and is widely emulated, the model could be a game-changer for the SA economy.