ITWeb has a good article on this subject:

Broadband in SA has been described as “pitiful” at best, as local providers continue to get slammed for misleading the public while government employs an “archaic” national broadband policy.

All the while, broadband offerings in SA continue to fall behind the standard offered in leading and even emerging economies. This is despite the recent influx of international broadband, delivered by a series of undersea cable across the continent.

WWW Strategy MD Steven Ambrose explains that SA has undergone an Internet revolution in the past few years; and specifically the international bandwidth bottleneck has been effectively removed, with Seacom and others coming on line.

However, he points out that local infrastructure has not kept pace with the availability of international bandwidth.

“The most stable form of Internet connectivity, ADSL, is still the sole province of Telkom, which has been extremely slow to increase speed and capacity on this network, not to mention slow on the provisioning side as well.

“In the absence of credible fixed-line competition, which was expected from Neotel, this situation has not changed much in the past five years.”

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Read the full article here.