Africa: Broadband speed to increase by 240% in 2020

Nigeria to benefit from sale of 2.6GHz spectrum

Efforts to increase broadband penetration across Africa might finally be yielding some results as Broadband speed across the continent is set to increase by 240% in 2020. This is according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Complete Forecast for 2015 to 2020.

According to the report, Africa’s Internet Protocol (IP) traffic will grow 6-fold and fixed broadband speed will increase 2.4 fold with an average mobile speed connection of 5Mbps.  Internet traffic in Middle East and Africa in 2020 will be equivalent to 527 times the volume of the entire Internet in the region in 2005.

Nigeria is apparently not oblivious of this fact as it has recently licensed a 2.6GHz spectrum band touted to have the power to unlock the potential broadband speed available in the country.

The Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC in whose auspices the spectrum auction was carried out, is now claiming that the country’s broadband penetration would blossom tremendously as the bid winner rolls out services

Meanwhile from the Cisco Report, it is expected that growth in IP traffic will be a global phenomenon and support up to 10 billion new devices and connections, increasing from 16.3 billion in 2015 to 26.3 billion by 2020.

Mobile centric hub

Within Africa, a renowned mobile centric hub, there will be approx. 1, 5 networked devices per capita in 2020, 77% of which will be mobile-connected.

Advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT) are continuing to drive IP traffic and tangible growth in the market. Applications such as video surveillance, smart meters, digital health monitors and a host of other M2M services are creating new network requirements and incremental traffic increases. Globally, M2M connections are calculated to grow nearly three-fold from 4.9 billion in 2015 to 12.2 billion by 2020, representing nearly half (46 percent) of total connected devices. Within Africa however, M2M modules will account for 22% of all networked devices by 2020.

Video services and content continue to be the dominant leader compared with all other applications. Internet video will account for 79 percent of global Internet traffic by 2020—up from 63 percent in 2015. The world will reach three trillion Internet video minutes per month by 2020, which is five million years of video per month, or about one million video minutes every second. HD and Ultra HD Internet video will make up 82 percent of Internet video traffic by 2020—up from 53 percent in 2015.

“The digital transformation is happening now for billions of consumers and businesses users across the globe,” said Olakunle Oloruntimehin, General Manager for Cisco Nigeria. “Innovation is imperative for Cisco and its service provider customers to deliver scalable, secure, high-quality services and experiences over all types of broadband network infrastructures.”

It is not all good news however, as Distributed Denial of Service, DDoS, attacks which    can paralyze networks by flooding servers and network devices with traffic from multiple IP sources are projected to increase from 6.6 million to 17 million attacks. These initial findings underscore the need for more comprehensive security measures to protect data and reduce network exposure to such risks.

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