We at Miro believe in this so much, that we adopted this song as our official theme song! The group Timbuk3 goes on to sing: “Things are going great, and they’re only getting better!”. That just about sums up the Internet Industry in South Africa and the opportunities that await us.

 

Why am I so positive? According to Internet World Stats’ 2009 study, only 9.4% of South Africans are connected to the Internet, while the global average is 24.7%. If we only develop our Internet connectivity to the global average, that leaves us with 15.3% of our 50 Million people to be connected - or 7.65 Million Internet connections! 

 

As we know by now, this will not be done effectively by the incumbent operators!   The network operators most likely to capitalize on this opportunity will be the ECNS license holders, and mostly through wireless technologies in the license exempt frequencies. South Africa has one of the most liberal telecommunications regulatory environments in the world, where anyone can get a license to build network infrastructure (ECNS License) for an initial cost of around R 10 000. This gives you the same rights as the incumbent operators as far as developing infrastructure and providing services.

 

International bandwidth is no longer an obstacle as the Seacom and Eassy cables more than satisfies Southern Africa’s needs for fast global connectivity. The last challenge that remains is to get all this bandwidth to the people, and this is where we get excited. We believe that the best solution for this demanding task is a combination on our technologies, such as carrier-class backhaul links from RADWIN and last-mile access solutions from Ubiquiti and MikroTik.

 

The side-effect of this connected community is a snowball effect of services required. The 2 obvious solutions that spring to mind is VoIP and IP Video.

 

Voice over IP will provide cost-effective voice communication services, using this new broadband network as a carrier. The only stumbling block in the large scale roll-out of VoIP services has been the limited availability of broadband access. The next opportunity is the provisioning of IP Security surveillance systems that can be monitored via your broadband connection, providing you with access to your video systems from anywhere on the Internet.

 

Where most other industry sectors are struggling to find new applications and opportunities, we are spoilt for choice! There are over 7 Million people out there waiting for these next-generation services. What are you waiting for?

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