Online education, like online collaboration for work, had been evolving for several years but it was a fringe activity. Then the Covid-19 pandemic happened and everything changed. The pandemic was like a wrecking ball, breaking down any resistance to digital transformation, forcing institutions, businesses and people to embrace the digital revolution.

This has coincided with a significant rise in micro-courses, with a strong focus on upskilling within focused lanes. This is reshaping how individuals acquire knowledge and skills. Consider the cost and time requirements to do a degree in IT and then specialising in software engineering, as opposed to someone starting from the bottom up, building real-world coding skills and being able to demonstrably add value – even while working remotely! It is disruptive.

However, it doesn’t end with education. The fast shift into a digital world has changed how people access and engage with the world. Across the world, and even in South Africa, many essential services are moving online. One may have views on the efficacy of government engaging with communities via digital channels, but the direction is clear. It is where the world is going.

Then, there’s healthcare. Telemedicine is a growing industry globally. Besides accessibility, it has the potential to reach communities excluded from mainstream centres and, through the power of being digital, could unlock basic medical services at a significantly reduced cost. Again, we might not be there as a country yet, but the world is headed in that direction.

The days where political engagement and even activism were the preserve for those at the centre of action are long gone. Today social media and other digital platforms offer people – from anywhere in the world – the ability to become engaged and influence the political narrative. It encourages active citizenry.

Zoom Fibre’s group CEO often speaks about a moving experience in a lower-income area being served by the company’s fibre: meeting a young man who, ordinarily, would have been excluded economically or at the very least have had limited opportunities, but though his fibre connection had upskilled himself and was working for a global tech giant – from home. Economic activity, in 2025 and beyond, is most certainly not limited to brick-and-mortar jobs. The internet has brought the world to the fingertips of those who are connected.

Digital exclusion

However, despite these rapid advances in technology and the opportunities they create, large swaths of our country and continent simply don’t have access to quality, high-speed fibre. Being connected to the internet is one thing, but being connected in a way that enables economic, education and civic engagement is another entirely.

Simply put, more people need access to fibre. It is an enabler of economic transformation. It has been widely researched and shown that access to high-speed internet drives job creation and fosters innovation in communities. The World Bank has estimated that a 10% increase in broadband penetration in low- and middle-income countries can lead to a 1.38% increase in GDP.

But what is “high-speed internet”, and what is the minimum to be able to participate in the digital economy? It is a lot faster than you might think.

A single virtual education class, for instance, might require 3Mbit/s for standard video or 5Mbit/s for high definition. However, this is just one-way traffic. Interactive tools demand even more. Fibre’s ability to handle these demands ensures a seamless learning experience, free from lag or interruption. This reliability is especially vital as e-learning, telemedicine, work collaboration tools and more evolve to incorporate virtual reality and augmented reality, which enable immersive experiences but require significantly higher bandwidth — often 100Mbit/s or more. Fibre’s capacity for gigabit speeds positions it as the backbone of both current and future digital innovations.

Minimum internet speeds for multi-user households

Very few households have only one internet user. A family that has parents working online, students attending online classes and siblings streaming content will use significantly more bandwidth than a single user. Without this bandwidth, something will give.

A minimum of 50Mbit/s upload and 50Mbit/s download is recommended as a baseline for households with more than one person. Again, the sceptic may argue that this is considered high. High for whom? If we want to compete globally, this is the absolute base that we should be working from to ensure that multiple high-bandwidth activities can occur simultaneously without compromising performance.

Turning the lens inwards

It is abundantly clear that to realise South Africa’s potential and to start narrowing the digital divide significantly, fibre network operators like Zoom Fibre must prioritise fibre infrastructure investments to be able to deliver the minimum viable speeds the country needs to compete effectively. As such, we took a long, hard look at our network and realised we were faced with a two-pronged challenge: first, the viability of the network and maintaining world-class service required shifting the base offering to a 50Mbit/s upload and download package, and secondly, if we want our communities to benefit from the true power of fibre, they, too, needed these types of baseline speeds.

As such, effective from July, Zoom Fibre will offer 50Mbit/s upload and download as the base package. However, we are certainly not tone deaf, especially that we serve large communities that are sensitive to cost pressures, the very same communities that, prior to having access to fibre internet were excluded from the digital world. As such, we have created a 30Mbit/s upload and download ring-fenced package to accommodate all of our current 10Mbit/s and 20Mbit/s customers who don’t want to, or who cannot, migrate to a 50Mbit/s package. This ring-fenced 30Mbit/s package will only be available to current customers coming up from smaller packages.

Then, with our eye on the future sustainability of our infrastructure, as well as the need to provide internationally competitive internet speeds, our new base package of 50Mbit/s up and down will be available to all internet service providers at a price discounted from what they currently pay. We believe in the power of fibre, and we believe in the power of our country.