South Africa‘s internet connectivity is set to rise tremendously.
Cisco – a networking group – used their Visual Networking Index to project the estimated amount of network connections in South Africa by 2017; and the numbers are staggering.
The group projects that South Africa‘s Internet Protocol (IP) traffic will quadruple between 2012 and 2017. This means that the estimated number of network connections in the country will be more than 133 million.
Considering that South Africa is far behind in network connections when compared to strong economic countries such as the United States, 133 million is quite a bit.
If indeed South African network connections climbs to 133 million, that will mean that the compound annual growth rate between 2012 and 2017 will be 31%.
To put that into gigabytes, South Africa‘s IP traffic – both fixed and mobile – is expected to be almost 6.55 billion gigabytes per year by 2017.
Another interesting projection, which will surely have most internet-using South Africans jumping for joy, is that the average fixed broadband speed will increase from 2.5mbps to 6mbps!
Also, in four years time, the non-PC share of South Africa‘s internet traffic will grow exponentially to 20%.
Cisco said the projections follow the recent trend in global internet connectivity. Global service providers are building the “˜next generation‘ internet, and by doing so, almost half of the world‘s population will have access to the internet by 2017.
By 2017, the average household that has access to internet globally, will generate around 74.5 gigabytes per month. That is more than double the amount in 2012 – 31.6 gigabytes of traffic per month.
Some unusual applications that will also contribute to this growth are apps such as smart meters, video surveillance, chipped pets and livestock, asset and package tracking and digital health monitors, to name but a few.
The projected rise in internet traffic, could also be linked to the many efforts by international companies to make the internet readily and easily available in South Africa and the rest of the African continent.
We recently reported on local business Project Isizwe, that plans to help make the internet accessible to all South Africans – this will no doubt also contribute to our country‘s rising internet traffic.
Whether the projections turn out to be true or not, the fact is that the easy, accessible and affordable internet in South Africa will help our country in more ways than one.
Source: BusinessTech
