A TIMELINE OF INTERNET ACCESS IN SOUTH AFRICA

With the availability of 1Gbps fibre connections and mobile speeds exceeding 200Mbps, it is easy to forget the long and difficult road which was travelled in South Africa to arrive where we are today. Not too long ago, most people accessed the Internet via a dial-up modem, paying per-minute for the privilege of visiting websites at a speed of 56kbps. To understand Internet access in South Africa, it is important to start at the beginning.

The Internet in South Africa can be tracked back to Rhodes University in 1988, when three pioneers – Francois Jacot Guilarmod, Dave Wilson and Mike Lawrie – established an email link to the Internet. The email link used the Fidonet mailing system as a transport mechanism to exchange email between the Control Data Cyber computer at Rhodes University and a Fidonet gateway run by Randy Bush of Portland, Oregon. Towards the end of 1991, the UUCP dial-up link was replaced with a full Internet connection that operated across a leased line at 9,600bps.

During the early nineties, most of the South African Internet developments happened at universities and academic institutions. This changed with the advent of commercial Internet service providers (ISPS). In November 1993, South Africa’s first commercial ISP – The Internet Company of South Africa – was formed. It gave four commercial companies live access to the Internet, with another six following a week later.

Residential Internet access followed, with 56kbps dial-up connections starting to gain popularity in 1997 thanks to products like MWEB’S Big Black Box. Telkom’s 64kbps ISDN Internet service also proved popular among techsavvy users, especially because it allowed for two ISDN lines to be bonded to achieve 128kbps. With residential dial-up and ISDN connections, users had to pay a perminute local call rate to stay connected. Telkom’s R7 Call package, which offered a flat rate for a call of any duration on weekends and after-hours, brought some relief for heavy users, but it was still restrictive.

Things changed quickly after Telkom launched its first commercial ADSL product in August 2002, which can be seen as the dawn of broadband in South Africa. The service offered unlimited access to the Internet at 512kbps, with unmetered local data and a 3GB cap on international data for around R1,000 per month. Even with the restrictive international cap, ADSL was a game changer which sparked an Internet revolution in the country. In 2004, two wireless broadband services were launched in South Africa - Sentech Mywireless with speeds of up to 512kbps, and Vodacom 3G with speeds of 384kbps. iburst followed suit in 2005 with its 1Mbps offering, and MTN and Neotel also launched wireless broadband products over the next two years.

Over the next seven years, the rate of broadband roll-out and innovation accelerated, with the mobile operators entering the LTE era, and many fibre providers entering the market with products offerings speeds of up to 1Gbps.

While there is a long road ahead to increase the availability of fibre-to-the-home services and making mobile data more affordable, South Africa has come a long away from the early days of dial-up to uncapped products with high enough speeds to rival international standards.