A lot is said about the poor state of South African home Internet access – the high cost and therefore limited penetration of broadband, etc. Sadly, the situation is not much better in most in workplaces…

As a consultant, I’ve worked in a number of large organizations in South Africa and most have Internet access that can best be described as pitiful. My current client is a large multinational mining company, a world leader in their field. Today I tried to do some Internet banking but gave up after waiting for five minutes for the ABSA Direct logon page to appear. The Internet connection is unstable and never seems to be up for more than an hour without interruption. When it’s up, the speeds are atrocious. Sadly, this is similar to the experience I’ve had at most clients I’ve worked at.

In contrast, I’ve also experienced first world Internet access. When I was at our campus at St Leon-Rot in Germany in May I downloaded at speeds of 800-1100K/s (that’s kilobytes per second). We have several thousand employees in Walldorf and St Leon-Rot, so it wasn’t like I was sitting on my own in the office at the end of a fat pipe. I ran out of Linux distributions and *BSD releases to download and had to resort to sucking down bootlegs from The Internet Archive to try and fill up my USB drive ;-)

I’m not sure if the sad state of affairs in South Africa is because of the high cost of Internet access or because employers don’t perceive access for their employees to be adding business value? The real reason probably lies somewhere between…