In June this year, Communications Minister Dina Pule announced at the ICT Indaba the medium-term target of 80 percent internet connectivity across Africa by 2020, a bold statement that holds a lot of promise for South Africa and the continent if we can get it right.

Per the agreement the Department of Communications signed with the private sector late in 2011, government plans to ‘achieve 100 percent universal broadband internet penetration by 2020’. The reality, as Mike van den Burgh, CEO of Gateway Communications notes, is that at the end of 2011, South Africa only had approximately 8.5 million internet users – approximately 17 percent penetration.