20 years of the Internet in South Africa
Gulf War
www
Nintendo
console
1991
Telkom
First SA ping
Oceanus
sinks
Bosnia
“Surfing”
Linux
1992
Interception and
Monitoring Act
co.za
CODESA
Rwanda
Adobe PDF
Mosaic
Vodacom
& MTN
1993
Internet Africa
Chris Hani
killed
Channel
Tunnel
JPEG
Apache
1994
SAT-2
New
South Africa
Barings
Bank
amazon.com
Windows 95
Green Paper
1995
Telkom SAIX
Rugby World Cup
champions
Dolly the
Sheep
AltaVista
DVD player
1996
Telecoms Act
ISPA
African Nations
Cup champions
PalmPilot
Hong Kong
to China
1997
“Blue Paper”
Truth and Reconciliation
Commission
SATRA
Belfast
Agreement
Google
1998
iMac
ISOC-ZA
Planet Hollywood
bomb
Euro
adopted
Napster
Akamai
1999
Mark
Shuttleworth
Thabo Mbeki
president
Bush vs
Gore
Y2K
Dot com
bubble
2000
TENET
Mozambique
floods
9/11
iPod
Wikipedia
2001
SAT-3
Telecoms Act
amended
US invades
Afghanistan
Mac OS X
2002
ECT Act
ADSL
Solar eclipse
US invades
Iraq
Skype
iTunes
2003
Cricket
World Cup
Indian Ocean
tsunami
Facebook
Ubuntu
2004
Telecoms
Big Bang
3G
Equatorial
Guinea plot
Pope John
Paul dies
YouTube
Xbox 360
Neotel
2005
VoIP
SALT
Human genome
published
Amazon
EC2
Blu-Ray
player
2006
Electronic
Communications Act
Kenya
riots
1 billion
Internet users
iPhone
2007
SANReN
Rugby World Cup
champions (again)
Large hadron
collider
Amazon
Kindle
Dropbox
2008
Mobile > Fixed
Xenophobia
Altech VANS
judgement
3D TV
Credit
Crunch
2009
SEACOM
Interplanetary
Internet
Gulf oil
spill
iPad
2010
EASSy
FIFA
World Cup
Arab
Spring
2 billion
Internet users
iCloud
Local Loop
Unbundling
2011
Fibre broadband
COP-17
The Future...
• The Internet of Things
– Much larger than Internet of People
• Mobility – The Personal Internet
– Most will access through mobile devices
• The Social Internet
– Anonymity may be impossible
• Enterprise ICT will be in the Cloud
– Extending across multiple networks
• The Internet will become a lot more content-aware
– Good: Content Delivery Networks will make streaming predictable
– Bad: Deep Packet Inspection may continue to limit user experience
• Content – The Net Generation
– On-demand will be much larger than broadcast; long-tail economics