A review of ICT in South Africa

Throughout its early history, South Africa demonstrated a strong capability for technological appropriation through early adoption, exceptional innovation, and support for entrepreneurship and sound business development in the ICT industry. The very short historical summary that follows illustrates these attributes very well, however, the statistical evidence that follows demonstrates a major national failing – spreading these admiral attributes to the population as a whole. This failing led to the significant triple threats of inequality, poverty and unemployment that now threatens the nation’s economic growth and socio-political stability.

• 1860: First telegraph between Cape Town and Simonstown;
• 1878: First telephone lines in South Africa, just 2 years after Alexandra Graham Bell filed his telephony patent;
• 1879: First undersea cable between South Africa and Europe, followed by a near hiatus lasting 89 years before the launch of SAT-1 undersea cable linking South Africa to Europe, and another 41 years before the launch of the high capacity fibre optic submarine cables of Seacom and EASsy launched the current era of high capacity international data connections;
• 1898: First RFQ for a wireless telegraph system intended for use in the Anglo-Boer wars of late 19th century;
• 1991: The launch of the Internet in South Africa - the first IP packets were sent between the computing centre at Rhodes University in Grahamstown and the home of Randy Bush, an early Internet pioneer based in Portland, United States. The statistics presented in these and pages to come show that South Africa struggled to spread the value of the Internet to all its citizens, after this highly commendable early start;
• 1994 launched the era of ubiquitous mobile telephony in South Africa, and the current round of discussions concerning the launch of the latest ICT products and services, the 5G and IoT world of the 4IR.

This proud history of creative thinking, entrepreneurship and innovation, masks a major failure in the developmental philosophies of South Africa; the exclusion of vast segments of the population from the fruits of technological advances. The SAKAN family believes that the time has come for South Africa to correct the shortcomings of history, and steer the nation away from the known destructive outcomes of such exclusion, which has led to the extremes of inequality, poverty and unemployment that now threatens the stability and future growth of the nation.

The statistical representations that follow illustrates the immense challenges that South Africa faces in ensuring that the majority of the nation's children and youth have access to the technologies that will equip them for the uncertain 4IR future. The young residents of economically marginalized households will remain marginalized if we do not address the very low levels of Internet access at home as illustrated by the first chart. Similarly, connecting such economically households will be a major challenge given the comparatively slow growth of the nation's fixed broadband infrastructure as illustrated in the second chart, nor will such connectivity be effective if we do not address the affordability challenge illustrated in the last chart. These statistics represent the starting point for this SAKAN initiative – they will be refined, with errors corrected where they exist and as new statistical data becomes available, and as the process itself unfolds.

The Triple Challenges of Inequality, Poverty and Unemployment are extremely complex and fully interrelated amongst themselves and with nearly all other socioeconomic challenges that afflict modern humans and all nations. The SAKAN concept proposes just one small but vital avenue to address these complex challenges – through ICT-derived information and knowledge, as enshrined in the now 15-year-old World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and its Declaration of Principles and Action Plans. South Africa is a signatory and active participant of the WSIS initiative. The SAKAN concept also aligns well with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in its use of ICT for the delivery of all 17 SDGs. The statistical summary of South Africa’s ICT sector is just the beginning of a much deeper analysis that must determine the SAKAN implementation process as a whole. The ICT statistics selected are those most relevant to the nation’s Triple Threats.

Section Conclusion

In conclusion of this SAKAN section, the statistics presented above are just a beginning of lengthy perhaps life-long development process. One of the key tenets of the rapidly changing ICT industry as it fuels the 4IR, is the demand for continuous learning that goes far beyond the capacities of national education systems of all levels. The SAKAN process supports such a concept, making available the on-line learning materials for the very young economically marginalized citizens, their older pears and elders, and for the whole community. The process must evolve with technological advances, and with changes within the South African society.

While the SAKAN target is clearly the economically marginalized population of South Africa, evidence from more progressive developing nations like China, Japan and South Korea show that the SA-LAN concept has migrated to serve the needs of even the wealthy communities who already have full connectivity at home: The "community" spirit of the LAN-Houses fosters such social gatherings, made even more relevant by the highly competitive and potentially lucrative eSport movement. SAKAN ends this section with yet another reminder of what can be achieved, a very small visual survey of South Africa's peer developing nations they continue to use the concept proposed by SAKAN.