Africa’s Broadband Speed Poised to Surge by 240% in 2020

A fresh report has indicated that broadband speed in Africa is set to increase by 240% in 2020, as operators in the industry intensify efforts to increase broadband penetration across the continent.

This was revealed in the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Complete Forecast for 2015 to 2020. According to the report, Africa’s Internet Protocol (IP) traffic will leap 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.

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.