Ongoing investments into South Africa’s digital ecosystem bode well for the country – and its citizens and organisations – as more work, education and entertainment shifts online.

Multiple businesses are injecting billions of rands into the country’s digital ecosystem, notably for fibre-optic cables, wireless networks and the data centres that host content, which is a marked difference from just over a decade ago.

Previously, a major obstacle for Internet users was the lack of subsea cables landing in the country, which posed a challenge for those who needed to quickly and reliably access content hosted in international data centres, says Frogfoot sales and marketing head Shane Chorley.

However, the ever-increasing landing of more subsea fibre-optic cables in South Africa has had a positive effect, particularly the cost of accessing the Internet, which has declined.

With the explosion in the number of subsea cable projects looking to connect Africa with Europe and the US, the focus shifted to local distribution and many companies have made significant progress in extending local fibre networks and ensuring that users around the country have more widespread access to a quality Internet connection.

However, one of the biggest improvements for South African users has been in the local data centre space, he says.

“Over a decade ago, the vast majority of Internet traffic had to transverse the various undersea cable systems, but now investment in local data centres has reached the point where major digital providers, such as Google and Microsoft, are hosting their content in nodes here,” he explains.

This has led to increasing interest from international companies, with global operators seeking to invest into South African data centre operators, Chorley notes, highlighting the recent acquisition of a majority stake in Teraco Data Environments by US-based Digital Reality.

“This can be seen as a sign of trust in the local digital infrastructure ecosystem and can help in persuading more global content operators to host their infrastructure or data locally.”

With latency having a direct correlation to the user experience, continued investment in South Africa’s digital infrastructure ecosystem will be required to support the broad adoption of online activities, and bring content closer to the users, perhaps using a far more distributed data centre architecture than what can be seen currently.

Further, fibre network owners can further upgrade their equipment and ensure sufficient backhaul capacity to provide higher line speeds for individual users.

“While going higher than 1 Gb/s – the highest consumer offering on many fibre networks – might seem like overkill at present, the continued growth in data consumption tells a different story,” Chorley comments, pointing out that the switch to remote working resulted in a 30% increase in data consumption by home users on Frogfoot’s fibre network.