The ongoing power crisis is starting to threaten one of the fundamental drivers of South Africa’s digital economy: Internet access.That’s because one of the biggest unforeseen consequences of Eskom’s persistent load shedding is the increasing failure of both telecommunications and Internet services to homes around the country.
This is particularly prevalent in rural and outlying areas, where battery theft from mobile communications towers is more rampant, impacting services that rely on mobile links for their connections to the global Internet. There’s a very real risk, therefore, that the longer the crisis continues, the further the already gaping digital divide between poor, middle-class and wealthy South Africans will widen.Mobile and fibre service providers are in a quandary.
There’s no way around the fact that the large network providers are going to look after their highest-paying subscribers and shareholders first and foremost. An Internet outage in Sandton will make headline news and lead to calls for strikes and boycotts, but a two-week outage in rural KwaZulu-Natal is now par for the course since rolling blackouts became the new normal.
Many WISPs, on the other hand, invested in off-grid and power backup solutions from the start, mostly because that was always the only reliable way to ensure consistent power supply in the outlying and lower density areas they service. Some even invested in their own fibre networks, while those that maintain battery backups for wireless links can respond far quicker to theft than the larger, less nimble providers.