Cybersurf

Hello good morning and welcome to Cybersurf, your weekly update on the Internet and especially today, cerrtain other techno matters. I am Steven Lang.

Last week I attended the mobility 2005 conference. It was organised by the World Wide Worx, a local company that specialises in internet and mobile research.

Last week’s conference was described as the culimation of a year long research project on the current and future share pf mobile and wireless technologies in South Africa.

I asked Arthur Goldstuck, the MD of world wide worx, about the highlights of the research:

Arthur:

Probably, the most significant findings relate firstly to the size of the market, which we’ve argued for some time now is overstated by about 20 percent. So rather than having 23 million cellphone users in South Africa, we probably have eighteen-and-a-half million cellphone users, although there are around 23 million active contracts in South Africa – that’s not the same as individuals using cellphones.

The other very signficant aspect is how extensively large corporates in South Africa rely on mobile technologies and what impact it has on their businesses.

And by contrast to that, how little use is made by small enterprises, small and medium enterprises of mobile and wireless technologies – but where they do make use of them, we find that the same high level of impact on their efficiency and on their ability to do business.

Steven

Some of the actual research was done by Peter Searll of a company called Plus 94 – and they found that in spite of the great success of mobile phones in South Africa, there is some confusion about new technologies.

Peter:

There is quite a big uptake on the using cameras on phones but for GPRS it’s very small; for 3 G very, very small and there’s a lot of confusion – people don’t know how to use it.

Have you ever tried to download anyting that requires WAP? I mean, I consider myself fairly technologically literate, and I struggled a lot of the time to do so.

So the applications and real useage of hese applications is not really so widespread.

Steven:
Peter Searll is a director of 94 Plus.

While everyone agrees that cellphones have been far more popular than even the most optimistic shareholders had hoped for ten years ago – the take up of the internet has been a little disappointing. After all, there are about six times as many cellphone users as internet users.

I asked Arthur Goldstuck if he could explain this.

Arthur:

There’s a simple answer for that! It’s cost, and that cost is related both to the basic cost of accessing the internet – the additional fee one has to pay every montyh simply to have access to that channel before you ever have even started using it. And the things you do on the Internet once you have that access are expensive too.

In terms of telephone access time, local calls charges arfe thei highest they have ever been, and that’s a major facto in holding back growth of Internet. Broadband is hugely expensive in South Africa.

So even though that’s an incentive for people to go online more often, the expensive of broadband is still holding back the growth of internet in general.

Steven:

That was Arthur Goldstuck, a well known author of books on technolgy and also managing director world wide worx. You can find the web site at www.theworx.biz – that is worx with an “x” and dot biz with a zed. So one more timewww.theworx.biz

That’s it for this fine Monday morning, thanks for joining me and till next week, remember to keeeep on surfing.