The pandemic has changed the nature of work globally. Even with the rapid switch brought about by this global pandemic, the transition has been relatively smooth. This could be attributed to South Africa’s significant improvements in connectivity in the past decade. Even prior to the pandemic, the digitization of businesses has created a high demand for stable, high-speed connectivity. This is most notable by the increasing reliance on fibre. This is due to it’s ability to deliver high-capacity connectivity speeds at a relatively low cost. With the growth of e-commerce, connectivity is now more critical than ever.
With the metropolitan areas covered, the next goal is to roll the same change out to small towns and municipalities. However, the development is dependent on the few large players in the market. A national network must first be established before it can be rolled out to smaller regions. Du Toit, CEO of Vox Telecom, projects that it will take two to three years to establish this large-scale rollout by themselves and other big players. Once fiber has been rolled out to the key residential areas, he projects that one million homes will be passed within the next 18 months. This will allow Vox Telecom to upsell other services such as security services, hosting or even cloud, digital store fronts.
Despite the clout on 5G technology, Du Toit suspects mobile 5G will not have the impact as predicated. As there are still unknown factors such as the impact on battery life of the device and network congestion. He sees it as a narrow spectrum technology since it requires several base stations situated close to each other. Ultimately, over the course of the pandemic, it has been proven that fiber delivered high-speed uncontended connections whereas mobile connectivity was highly contented and congested. Thus, serving as the ultimate business case for the development of fiber.
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