Telecommunications

KwaZulu-Natal’s coastline has seen two significant fibre-optic cable landings.

The small Dolphin-Coast village of Mtunzini has assumed an importance that goes beyond its status as a conservancy and home to rare vultures. It has become the site of South Africa’s link to the world of fibre-optics. According to the sa-venues website, the land around Mtunzini, east of Eshowe and south of Richards Bay, was given by Zulu king Ceteswayo to John Dunn, his diplomatic advisor. Now the land is playing a much more direct role in connecting South Africa to the world.

In mid-2009, the Seacom fibre-optic cable landed, bringing a capacity of 1.2 trillion bytes per second (10 times what was previously available), and the prospect of the greatly intensified competition offered by Neotel, South  Africa’s second network operator (SNO).

In February 2010, the East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy) landed, bringing with it connectivity for 18 African countries at a cost of R1.75-billion. Telkom and MTN are among the companies backing the project, which is expected to come on line in late 2010. Parastatal Telkom controls the Sat-3 under sea cable, which links the country to Europe via the west coast of Africa.

The telecommunications industry is one of the fastest growing sectors in the national economy. In 2009, MTN announced a R4.6-billion infrastructural operation to upgrade its network for its 17.5 million subscribers. One of the sites scheduled for upgrades is New Germany in KwaZulu-Natal. Vodacom has been a leader in rolling out rural\ services, establishing 13 base stations north of Durban. Vodacom’s advanced iBurst wiMax facility is available in KwaZulu-Natal.

According to World Wide Worx, 5.3 million South Africans (about 11% of the population) were Internet users by the end of 2009. Broadband subscriptions were 60% up from the previous year in 2008, to a total of 818 000. With increased bandwidth in the offing because of the new cables, this number is expected to climb exponentially in the near future.

Access to Internet by means other than a computer is a growing trend: a  Nielsen Online survey found that the number of South Africans using devices such as cellphones to visit websites increased 53% (7.5 million people) in the last quarter of 2009 compared to the same period in 2008.














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