It was back in 2009 when Winston the pigeon challenged South African telecommunications heavyweight Telkom to a data race.
It was back in 2009 when Winston the pigeon challenged South African telecommunications heavyweight Telkom to a data race.
Winston flew a 4GB memory stick nearly 100 kilometres in the same amount of time it took the Telkom ADSL line to transfer 4% of the data.
Internet services have improved noticeably since then, but South Africa still has one of the lowest average connection speeds in the world, according to an Akamai Technologies report.
The report provides insight into key global statistics including connection speeds, attack traffic and network connectivity and availability.
South Africa ranked 80th worldwide for average connection speed and 126th for peak connectivity speed for the first quarter of 2013.
The powerhouse economy of the continent also remained the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) country with the lowest average connection speed, Akamai reported in October.
The internet user base is increasing though, from 5% of the population in 2000 to 41% in 2012, according to the International Telecommunication Union in Geneva.
Even though this is behind African countries such as Morocco (55%) and Egypt (44%), it shows that we're heading in the right direction, fuelled by the explosion of smartphones on the market.
A survey by the South African Network Society revealed that only about one third of South African adults use the internet.
High costs of internet access are a major point of consumer frustration, which aren't helped by Telkom's monopoly of the market.
While the telecommunications giant has some competition in wireless and mobile broadband and undersea international cables, it dominates when it comes to fixed lines.
Despite alternatives like Cell C, MTN and Vodacom, the competition is too weak to significantly reduce sky-rocketing costs of internet services just yet.
Internet costs in South Africa are among the highest in the world.
Point Topic, a UK-based firm providing information on broadband communications, released its residential broadband tariff report for the second quarter of this year.
It revealed that SA's average fixed residential broadband speed is 12.8Mbps, compared to 43.5Mbps of the global average.
The average price of R114 per megabit is also shockingly higher than the global average of R17 per megabit.
Earlier this year, the Competition Tribunal imposed a penalty of R499 million on Telkom for abusing its position in the telecommunications sector.
Telkom, in which the government holds plenty of shares, was accused of not investing in its infrastructure nor reducing prices for consumers.
Following these accusations and increasing pressure from new service providers, Telkom was forced to prepare a plan to trim its prices in the following years. These price cuts will apply mostly to wholesale services such as undersea cable international lines or national high-bandwidth transmission lines.
We can only hope that costs will drop sooner rather than later.
Despite positive indicators that the internet’s medieval stage in SA could be over, it's frustrating that a company once beaten by a pigeon deprives us of fast, reliable and affordable internet that other countries have been enjoying for years.
