by SAVIOUS KWINIKA
Editor-In-Chief
JOHANNESBURG, (CAJ News) – SOUTH Africa has vast opportunities for business and job creation across the internet of things (IoT) ecosystem.
This is according to an industry executive, Mark O’ Donoghue, as IoT gains traction in the country.
The Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at Link Africa said IoT data transmission is not only where the money lies in the increasingly interconnected IoT world.
Described by Gartner as one of the top five game-changing technologies, IoT is already so widely in use that 3,74 billion IoT devices are expected to be connected by 2025, producing nearly 80 zettabytes of data.
IoT deployments are gaining pace across every industry sector and along with this growth, new opportunities are emerging for organisations specialising in storage, analytics and application development.
Link Africa noted IoT and the delivery of real-time or even incremental data is creating entirely new industries, with all these opportunities underpinned by technologies such as 4G and 5G.
“There is a race on for larger 4G and 5G throughputs,” said O’ Donoghue.
He said while 3G and 4G networks can deliver incredibly good services to a wide range of IOT services, the world of real time data was growing at a rapid pace.
Real-time services require extremely low latencies and with this requirement and the need to take all this data back into server/cloud environments, fibre is seen still as the fastest and most widely scalable medium to backhaul these technologies at scale.
“5G or 6G are appropriate for short range use, and you will have to aggregate all of those 5G or 6G towers into a backhaul at some point, to pull that data into a core,” the executive said.
Noting South Africa’s high unemployment rate, O’ Donoghue said schools and universities should be moving to educate young South Africans on the opportunities in the interconnected, IoT world.
“We need to educate them about these technologies and data science, and teach them how they could turn their knowledge into a business,” he said.
“We need to think outside the box and look at new business from a connectivity perspective,” O’ Donoghue added.
Link Africa is a leading South Africa’s independent fibre network operator.
– CAJ News