Still in Pursuit of the Fast Lane - Adoption, Usage, and Global Impact of Broadband Technologies - page 10

benefits as a result, and their experience has be-
come an excellent word of mouth marketing tool
for broadband service providers
Pent-Up Consumer Demand: Home users
who have been on the Internet since the mid or
late 1990s have become frustrated with the limita-
tions and cost of dial-up, and have been ready to
spend a higher upfront monthly amount on a better
form of connectivity. Many such individuals have
been exposed to the merits of broadband on their
travels overseas or have heard about the benefits
of the medium through communication with their
friends, colleagues and families settled overseas.
Whilst it is true that consumers have resisted the
price levels set by Telkom and others, the need
for speed is ever present. The World Wide Web
of the current decade is fundamentally different
from that of the nineties, as discussed above,
whereby web designers usually took account of
slow (typically, dial-up) connections by building
sites that could download quickly. However, in
a broadband-dominated developed world, where
most web sites are hosted, this priority is fading
into the background. Bandwidth intensive sites
have resulted in dial-up connections becoming ill
equipped to handle the flow of data. Therefore,
lengthy downloads result in higher cost to dial-
up users, and timeouts mean wasted time, money
and energy… over and above simple frustration.
The 3CC framework summarises the drivers
and inhibitors of growth in broadband usage
within a South African context. The updated ver-
sion (based on that initially published by Beneke
(2008) is represented in Table 6.

services, reinforcing the notion that South Afri-
cans are obtaining a raw deal in contrast to users
overseas. Many broadband providers in South
Africa restrict the usage of their service in a
number of noteworthy respects. These issues are
discussed below.
Firstly, whilst most standard broadband ser-
vices in developed countries effectively aren't
capped, ADSL accounts in South Africa typically
feature data caps ranging between two and five gi-
gabytes. The mobile broadband networks, strictly
speaking, don't cap individuals, but charge users
in a manner which results in the service being
prohibitably expensive for bandwidth intensive
applications. This means that using a broadband
connection in South Africa is not feasible for many
individuals wishing to download music albums,
full length movies or even stream live television.
In this respect, either the data cap will be rapidly
exhausted or, if the user is subscribed on a pay-
per-usage basis, the end-of-month account is likely
to be exorbitant.
Although a number of uncapped packages
have been launched into the market by innovative
broadband providers, these are typically labelled
with a disclaimer purporting 'fair usage'. Whilst
fair usage is seldom quantified, this is usually
deemed to be in the region of 30 gigabytes per
individual account per month. However, on a
4Mbps ADSL line, this amount of data could con-
ceivably be downloaded in two days, leaving the
user effectively limited, or even blocked outright,
for the remainder of the month. Until recently,
Telkom, the largest provider of broadband con-
nectivity in South Africa, considered downloading
large amounts of data through an ADSL line to
be 'abuse' of the service. This despite marketing
its 'Do Broadband' service explicitly claiming
the package may be used for online gaming,
downloading music, and the like.
Secondly, many broadband service provid-
ers utilize 'protocol shaping'. This technology
gives network preference to certain applications
over other applications. In order to comprehend

A WARPED VIEW OF 'BROADBAND'

The perception of broadband in South Africa is
somewhat distorted compared to how the technol-
ogy is perceived in many developed countries.
In this respect, there appear to be significant
disparities between the characteristics of local
broadband services and international broadband