I’ve been in the US for 2 weeks now and while there have been a number of quirks of life here as compared with back home, not many have had the impact on me that the internet, or more importantly, the speed of internet connections, has had.

Like an animal born in captivity it is often difficult to comprehend the advantages held by the world outside the restrictive policies of ICASA and Telkom. In coming to the States I have had that world shown to me.

Back in South Africa I browse the internet from a 3G HSDPA connection. Not the fastest in the market, but certainly not the slowest. A 3G connection is advertised to afford the lucky customer a 1.8 Mbps download speed (upload is slower because of the type of connection, known as “asymmetric”). Of course, 1.8 Mbps is the absolute fastest your connection will ever be and since you share this connection with any number of other “lucky” customers in your immediate vicinity, there is a very small chance that you will ever see anything remotely near 1.8 Mbps.

I often check my connection speed using any one of a host of online free services for this purpose (check out www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ for an example). Most often I see speeds in the region of 150 to 350 Kbps (or about 0.14 to 0.34 Mbps), a far cry from my potential connection speed.

For this service I pay in the region of R400 per month.

I’ve just organised to have internet, cable and telephone installed here in the US at my girlfriend’s apartment. For the princely sum of $140 per month (or about R1000) we have:

• A 20 Mbps connection
• Over 250 Television channels
• Free telephone calls to ANYWHERE in the US at any time

I’ve just checked my download and upload speeds using the service above. I am seeing speeds of 8314 Kbps download and 2086 Kbps upload… These are actual speeds, not advertised speeds.

Of course, this makes the connection in South Africa completely laughable. If I were to download a 10Mb file using my 3G connection it would take me 6 minutes and 50 seconds. Here it takes me 1.23 seconds…

So what’s this all mean for us as e-Learning providers?

Well consider that the market for e-Learning is just taking off in SA while it is already highly advanced in places like the US, Europe and Australia.

In these countries it is possible to watch high quality video online without waiting eons for buffering and without having to pay for each megabyte downloaded. For companies and individuals in SA, online video streaming is, for the most part, out of reach for reasons of either connectivity or cost (or both!). For e-Learning this necessitates an in-house solution with video stored somewhere on a local server or courses handed out on DVDs.

Now think about things from the point of view of the e-Learning provider. They have issues of copyright and digital rights management (DRM) to consider. Placing the actual learning files on an in-house server or on DVDs is a huge risk. Providers would be much happier if they controlled all access to their content through a nice firewall such that direct copying of material is avoided (or at least made difficult). And so it is in the developed world – e-learning files are all stored on web servers out of direct reach but still viewable.

For these reasons, many overseas suppliers of e-Learning are understandably hesitant to share their files with us in darkest Africa (and believe me there is still that impression by many here in the US at least!). Subsequently, they have made little impact on our market and will continue to do so as long as our connection speeds are slow and their trust in us is questionable.

The future

Let’s jump ahead, say 3 or 4 years (the number is debatable!) to a time when Telkom has let us have a decent internet connection at a reasonable cost. Suddenly, online hosting of courseware becomes a possibility and in-house e-learning systems and courseware are shown for the cumbersome solutions they are. Of course, offline learning will remain a feature of our market for time to come as accessibility of remote regions remains a problem.

Now, with a great internet connection, the developed countries start to have a more attractive offering to the local South African market: Hundreds of courses built and improved upon during the 20 odd years since e-learning began in earnest, accessible online at any time from anywhere.

SA competition

Luckily for us providers in SA, there are some things these overseas providers will have a hard time competing on. One is local understanding of the market, who knows who, how to get an “in”. The other is localised courseware in respect of local examples and case studies and alignment with SAQA standards.

South Africa may be a gateway to the rest of Africa and because of this, we as e-Learning providers should not rest on our laurels, but at least in the early stages of international competition, South African providers hold all the aces by way of knowledge, ability and, more importantly, reason to align material with government specified outcomes. Any local provider not pursuing this line of reasoning will become the early casualties of the international e-learning competition that is just over the horizon.