South Africa’s connectivity future depends on people, not just percentages

HERE'S the truth about how connectivity is seen broadly: Walk into any boardroom and you will hear comforting numbers, 99.9% uptime and megabits per second north of 100.

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C-suites might talk about ironclad SLAs. On paper this all looks flawless.

But consider this: in the real world those numbers mean nothing to a child in an informal settlement who has no access to a fibre line or to a factory worker whose family is stuck on expensive cellular data that runs out before the month does.

If we are honest, the South African connectivity industry has spent years fighting for the same slice of the affluent pie while the majority of the country, people who genuinely need the opportunities that being connected enables, remain priced out, or to put it more bluntly, locked out.

We would do well to reframe our focus, to cast our gaze if only for a moment, away from those who have connectivity towards those who have very little or no affordable connectivity at all. It's about appreciating the gap between KPIs and lived reality.

Are we happy with the status quo?

An obsession with technical metrics is mirrored inside many companies too.

Skills shortages - especially in the IT industry — have turned hiring into a desperate scramble.

Companies poach skilled technicians from one another at premium rates, only to watch in horror when culture dissipates as new technicians cannot work in teams, cannot adapt to challenging conditions in the lower end of the market, or - plainly put — arrive with the wrong attitude. The status quo presents the same problem at both ends of the value chain. We have a sector that measures the wrong things.