SA’s telecom market is abuzz with huge investment in fibre and mobile but in rural and outlying areas where such connectivity is unavailable, satellite continues to be the most affordable and reliable option. The cost to communicate using this technology has dropped more than 70% over the past decade, making its use more accessible.
While a lot of investment is going into fibre, that is mainly in the large cities and metros. In far-flung areas, satellite is the cheapest, most reliable form of access. Much of this comes down to the unavailability of mobile and fibre internet access in these places.
Operators have long struggled to justify the cost of building expensive infrastructure in sparsely populated and low-income regions, leaving few options — such as satellite — on the table.
Kathleen Janse van Rensburg, satellite product manager at Vox, said that satellite service is typically used by consumers, with businesses that include farms, hotels and schools.
“You can definitely use satellite for business-type services. We have businesses like mines, hotels and schools that use [it].”
Vox, one of SA’s large technology and telecom players, has been investing much of its resources in recent years to connect people in outlying parts of SA. In addition to existing satellite services, the company has focused its fibre rollout in secondary towns in recent years.
Rival operator Telkom, is also a big player in the satellite market.
“Where we believe fibre can’t reach, we do propose satellite. And a large portion of rural areas are covered by satellite. A lot of bank branches, including their ATMs, are connected through satellite” says Pushkar Gokhale, chief digital and strategy officer at Telkom’s infrastructure unit Openserve.
Janse van Rensburg says service packages for satellite typically cost R500-R2,000 depending on the speeds that a customer needs. This a fraction of what it was in the past.
“Four or five years ago, that whole package would have cost about R10,000 just for internet connectivity.”
Despite its wide use in many parts of SA, satellite technology does have major drawbacks, due to long distances that signals need to travel between satellites in the sky and antenna on the ground. The two major disadvantages have to do with latency (the time is takes for signals to reach their destination) and limited bandwidth (the amount of data that can travel through a signal).
“Unfortunately, latency is a big problem with satellite services. Your data has to travel 70,000km before you have any internet breakout,” Janse van Rensburg said.
Fibre and mobile are therefore seen as being superior forms of access where available.
Neither Vox nor Openserve have their own satellites, but rather sell services on behalf of satellite operators to their customers. Vox sells on behalf of companies such as France’s Eutelsat.
Liquid Intelligent Technologies, which also provides satellite services in the region, signed a deal with Eutelsat in September to expand its offering to SA, Uganda, South Sudan, and the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Rural internet connectivity, or that of areas outside big centres such as Johannesburg, Cape Town or Durban, remains a sore point in SA.
While access to internet services is necessary, the cost of building networking infrastructure in underserved areas remains a challenge. With internet connectivity a big part of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s economic agenda, telecom regulator the Independent Communication Authority of SA (Icasa) has made rural connectivity a part of the licensing terms for the upcoming spectrum auction.
Stats SA says the percentage of households with access to the internet at home, or for which “at least one member has access to, or used the internet” was 64.7% in 2018. In largely rural provinces such as Limpopo and the Eastern Cape, this percentage is considerably lower, at 46.2% and 55.3%, respectively.
The issue of connectivity in outlying areas is a global phenomena. Apple’s recently launched iPhone 14 range of smartphones now has the ability to connect to satellites for making emergency calls in areas that lack mobile coverage.
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