Addressing the gap in digital access

Andiswgile is a 24-year-old mother from Kayamandi, Stellenbosch and a fibertime™ customer. She works for a call centre, which is based in Belville, Cape Town. Andiswgile spent two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening commuting to and from work.

A fast, uncapped fibre connection at her home means that she can now work from home, saving her around 80 hours of commuting time and hundreds of rands in taxi fare, a life-changing time and money-saving, while her ability to show up as a mother is transformed.

Hers is one of thousands of stories of people whose lives have been deeply affected by fibre installations at their homes.

The digital divide

The lack of access to fast, reliable and affordable internet has long been a stubborn brick in the metaphorical wall of inequality that separates the haves from the have-nots in South Africa. It’s time for us to grab our sledgehammers and get cracking on smashing down that wall. I believe that proper, affordable, fast internet is somewhere where we can make a real, measurable impact in a relatively short time. 

The COVID-19 pandemic brought the digital divide into stark light as children were called to stay home from school and adults from work. While educational institutions in wealthier neighbourhoods managed to continue teaching via the use of online resources, learning for many children in poorer communities came to a sudden halt.

Similarly, workers with internet access were able to continue doing their jobs, while those without saw their ability to earn an income disappear.

As of January 2024, according to Stats SA, there were 45.34 million active internet users in South Africa. With a population of roughly 61 million, that means that around 16 million South Africans don’t have internet access.

An additional layer of complexity to the equation is that many of those who have internet access only have that access through mobile devices or through mobile service providers, who offer their services at far higher prices than fixed-line operators, it’s great that we have those services and I’m not knocking them, but the costs are a huge barrier.

I’d argue that high costs have arguably become a larger obstacle than connectivity for most South Africans.

Let’s connect people in townships to the Internet. 

In 2010, I was watching my daughter, who was using my tablet. She was two years old, she was surfing the web to her heart’s content, and it dawned on me that not only did she have great books, but she was likely going to go to a great school, and she also had unlimited access to the internet.

An advantage, already so acute, already almost impossible to overcome for a child from the township, was ever widening. I became obsessed with the idea of providing cheap, fast internet to those residing in townships. The ambition was to create a solution while also creating a viable, profitable business.

While there is currently a study being conducted by the Bureau for Economic Research in Stellenbosch, which is nearing completion, we still don’t know what the exact economic impact of internet access in the country is.

However, anecdotally, we can tell that there is an enormous economic and educational outcome from bringing affordable internet into an area that didn’t have it. 

We increasingly live in a world where every aspect of your life is lived online, and when you put an uncapped connection into someone’s home, you change their life. Think sending a CV for a job application or making a Home Affairs appointment, which you can only do online, which can be the difference between having to go and stand in queues for an entire day, or even multiple days, or just going there for a few hours.

Social media is obvious, but so too are platforms like LinkedIn, conducting video calls, selling goods on online marketplaces, and parents being able to know where their kids are and what they’re doing, because they’re at home on the internet.

Setting about tackling a problem so deeply rooted in inequality, with Apartheid’s lengthy shadow, and specifically its legacy of spatial planning and the associated poor township infrastructure, is no simple task. Additionally, ineffective governance in townships and the fact that virtually none of the rules of suburbia or traditional business apply amplify the enormity of the task.

Execution

The idea to bring internet connection to townships may sound clear and simple enough, but I can vouch for the fact that it’s not and that it’s easy to get distracted. Various companies started, through a combination of business challenges and getting sidetracked by the comparative ease of doing business in the traditional suburbs, saw projects lose either their focus or their viability. 

In 2017, fibertime™ was created. It required an extremely clear intention and needed to function without distraction. The idea was to create an internet service provider that is one hundred percent focussed on townships and will not provide anything less than a fibre connection. I’ve learnt along the way that anything other than fibre is not worthwhile.

A lot of people go into the townships thinking, well, something is better than nothing, but we agreed that we're going to take every possible risk to give people the best available internet connection. 100 Mbps up- and download speed as an absolute minimum.

Already, users in Kyamandi, Mangaung, KwaMashu, Imfoleni, Kraaifontein, Nyanga, Gugulethu, Kwa Nobuhle, Motherwell, Zwide, Alexandra, Ivory Park and elsewhere are connected while rollouts continue in East London and Tshwane too. Customers can buy R5 vouchers, which give them 24-hour access to the network.

can choose to buy one every day, which means that for R150 they get a full month of uncapped fast fibre internet for the entire household to use, or, if they can’t afford that, they can join the network again when funds are available.

And because the entire neighbourhood is connected, a device that’s linked to the network can be used anywhere in the area that has coverage, meaning in many ways it is a mobile solution also.

A township digital revolution that’s gaining momentum

Available in every single home of the areas serviced, installation is free, and every home gets a router installed.

So, when the internet rolls out in Alex, every household gets a router, no exceptions. The pay-as-you-go fibre solution is also a first for South Africa and a model that has proven extremely effective in the country.

I believe this level of rollout can be achieved everywhere there is a township. There are an estimated 17 million homes in South Africa. I think it's massively underestimated, but officially, there are 17 million homes in South Africa.

Four million of those homes are in the suburbs, and they're effectively one hundred percent connected to the internet. The other 13 million homes are in townships and rural areas, and most of them can be connected.

Looking even wider, there are three billion people who live in areas without proper internet access around the world. The very exciting potential exists to connect everyone of them to fast, reliable, affordable internet.

Alan Knott Craig, founder of fibertime, which explores the issue of affordable fibre access in South Africa.