Its not about geography, it's about infrastructure.
For a good couple of years visiting my parents in inland South Africa (just outside the major sprawl of the PWV), I was regularly seeing 1 to 2kbps speeds on dial up modem. South Africa only has one phone company, Telkom.
The price of copper affects the quality of the telephone lines. We live in an area that's quickly growing, but the availability of copper is low. So there's shared telephone lines, which creates noise, which slows down modem connections.
Yeah, they can string out more copper cables to work through the shared lines, but when those copper cables disappear as quickly as they are put up, it is very difficult to make progress. Copper theft in South Africa is big.
And the shared telephone lines are deemed acceptable because Telkom support it only for telephone calls, not modem connections. They are reluctant to fix things that are not broken.
So landlines are effectively useless in fast growing areas, there's not enough copper cable to go around to give people a decent clear line to a dial-up ISP, let alone broadband.
I've moved my parents over to mobile broadband now, with a Mifi device that appeared on the market last year, so those download speeds are hopefully a thing of the past.
Essentially, developing countries need to skip their subpar landlines and invest heavily in mobile broadband abilities. They can't afford the long term cost of replacing copper cables over and over and over.
For a good couple of years visiting my parents in inland South Africa (just outside the major sprawl of the PWV), I was regularly seeing 1 to 2kbps speeds on dial up modem. South Africa only has one phone company, Telkom.
The price of copper affects the quality of the telephone lines. We live in an area that's quickly growing, but the availability of copper is low. So there's shared telephone lines, which creates noise, which slows down modem connections.
Yeah, they can string out more copper cables to work through the shared lines, but when those copper cables disappear as quickly as they are put up, it is very difficult to make progress. Copper theft in South Africa is big.
And the shared telephone lines are deemed acceptable because Telkom support it only for telephone calls, not modem connections. They are reluctant to fix things that are not broken.
So landlines are effectively useless in fast growing areas, there's not enough copper cable to go around to give people a decent clear line to a dial-up ISP, let alone broadband.
I've moved my parents over to mobile broadband now, with a Mifi device that appeared on the market last year, so those download speeds are hopefully a thing of the past.
Essentially, developing countries need to skip their subpar landlines and invest heavily in mobile broadband abilities. They can't afford the long term cost of replacing copper cables over and over and over.