Deprived IT in South Africa

One thing we South Africans can "pride" ourselves on is the fact we always see the glass as half empty. I've not met many South African who think the FIFA 2010 World Cup is a good thing, which I don't agree with, I think it is the best thing since the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990.

One thing is for certain; in the IT sector I can see a difference. One late night, many years back in the California while doing database benchmarks for SUN and Oracle, I wanted to order a pizza for delivery to the office, not knowing the places around I started a search with Google that was something like this "local pizza".

Immediately I was take to Google Maps, that not only showed me the local pizza places but also the contact detail, the menus, the directions AND the prices. Google obviously used my IP address to determine my geographical location and then provide search results based on my preference.

Now this kind of Google functionality is available almost anywhere except for South Africa until recently. Another thing I was used to was the lightning fast, super cheap, unlimited ADSL in the UK. Again not something I found when coming back to South Africa in 2007 after 8 years in the UK. Here (South Africa) the bandwidth is very expensive and the quality of service is not great.

NOT ANYMORE!!!
1) Thanks to the new SEACOM cable we now have much more bandwidth, and this is already apparent if you follow all the news on the Bandwidth Wars now in South Africa. We kind of need this as the rest of the world take HD TV for granted.
2) Google heavily invested in their South African operations in preparation for 2010 FIFA World Cup. We now have local version of Google Maps including street view coming. We have translation in and from Afrikaans, and I'm sure some other interesting bits that will be revealed as we get closed to June 2010.

So, to all the FIFA World Cup doom profits, 2010 has helped to reduce (not close it, I admit) the IT gap that South Africa experienced for a very long time.