Reportback

South Africans can take heart, because we’re not the only ones getting a bum deal on broadband, according to comments made during the Broadband World Forum (BBWF), held in Paris, France, in September. As delegates spoke of the need for higher capacity, better services and lower costs, any African delegates would have felt right at home.

The bad news is that Africa risks falling even further behind, because technology developers, including Alcatel-Lucent, are focussing on innovations designed to deliver more broadband down the last mile of copper cables that are ubiquitous in the developed world. It’s a very sensible step, since technologies such as vectoring can eliminate ‘noise’ in the copper and deliver speeds of up to 100Mbps to each home over infrastructure that already exists.