Blogging from ISPA iWeek - Day 1

I'm blogging from iWeek. Some excellent speakers so far and interesting chats with some of the thought leaders in the South African Internet space.

Njeri Rionge, CEO of Ignite and founder of Wananchi, one of Kenya's largest ISPs, gave a talk about the face of the internet in Africa at the moment. Only 4% of Africa's population has access to the internet. She posed the question: "What do we as Africans want from Africa?"

Bill Manning gave a surprisingly interesting talk about IP version 6, and how Telcos are creating barriers to implementation. He made the strong statement that the 'internet is on its last legs' using the current IPv4 system.

Niall Murphy from TheCloud spoke about their very successful WiFi business with more than 10,000 hotspots in Europe. He spoke about the opportunities for service providers as long as they realise that the future is in mobile devices. I met Niall a bit more than a year ago when he was in South Africa. He gave me some good advice, but being young(er) and cocky(ier), and perhaps a tad too idealistic, I didn't listen to him. Needless to say, I learnt the lessons the hard way (or stupid way, depending how you look at it. In essence Niall put the point across that it's dangerous to build large public outdoor Wi-Fi networks, as the penetration into buildings is very low and Wi-Fi enabled mobile devices are not everywhere, yet.

Rael Lissoos from Magnolia Wireless gave a very entertaining presentation about how they've been delivering Triple Play (Voice, Data, Video) in the townships. They started by connecting schools to each other, which then progressed into a whole host of other services at much lower rates than our incumbent telcos are charging.

More after lunch!