Estate Living Magazine Alfresco Living - Issue 36 December 2018 | Page 58

Speak to me
The future is a strange place, and people communicate
differently there. Millennials are finding interesting
new ways to chat – and those changes are being
driven by fibre and 5G technology.
To baby boomers (people aged 54 to 70s), 2016 doesn’t seem all
that long ago. To switched-on millennials (aged roughly 15 to 35),
those three years have been an eternity. In the three years since
then, a number of things have happened that will shape the future of
communication, and that will make the fibre-enabled, 5G-powered
technological generation gap even greater than it already is.
terrestrial or satellite television, and that doesn’t know what to do
On New Year’s Day 2016, streaming entertainment service Netflix
when the Wi-Fi goes down or the data runs out.
launched in South Africa. Suddenly, it really made a difference
if you had a fibre-enabled broadband connection, as you could US-based network infrastructure provider CommScope recently
stream and watch movies and series on your mobile device, either surveyed more than 4,000 baby boomers and millennials in four
via Netflix, or via YouTube, or via Multichoice’s swing-for-the-fences major global cities – San Francisco, London, Hong Kong and São
challenger Showmax. Paulo – about their communication habits. The digital shift was
painfully clear.
Also in 2016, mobile service providers Vodacom and MTN were
in court demanding that over-the-top services like WhatsApp be Some 67% of millennials in the survey agreed or strongly agreed that
regulated in South Africa. WhatsApp, of course, lets users send social media is their major form of social communication, compared
messages and make voice or video calls using mobile data – and with only 35% of baby boomers. Millennials also said that they spend
because those users only pay for the data they use, WhatsApp (and close to triple the number of hours per day (1.7) on social media,
others like it) is much cheaper than SMS and cellular voice calls. If dating or messaging apps than baby boomers (0.6); and the same
you’re using uncapped Wi-Fi, those costs become, in effect, zero. millennials reported spending more than double the hours per day
Vodacom and MTN lost their case, their voice and SMS revenue (1.6) receiving social media messages – including texts, links, snaps,
took a massive knock, and by late 2017 Vodacom was announcing pictures, videos, etc. – than baby boomers (0.6).
that it was making more money from mobile data than from voice
calls.
Say what you like about data-driven messaging services requiring
sophisticated smartphones to run (and, as you’d expect, Vodacom’s
By 2018, a household package of uncapped 10Mbps fibre and Van Zyl certainly did have a lot to say about exactly that) … as more
Netflix was costing consumers less in a month than their DStv and more, cheaper and cheaper smartphones enter the market,
Premium subscription. In October, Jannie van Zyl, Executive Head: consumers – led by digital-native millennials – are shifting their
Innovation at Vodacom, was defiantly telling the 2018 MyBroadband communication habits to data.
Conference that WhatsApp calling was really not hurting Vodacom’s
voice call revenues all that much. But by then, then battle had already This, of course, is great news for fibre providers. Speaking at the
been won and lost. recent FTTX Council Africa Conference in Durban, Africa Analysis
GM Dobek Pater said that the fibre market was seeing a marked
In South Africa and across the world, a generation has emerged that migration towards secured communities in South Africa and in other
doesn’t use voice calls or SMSs to communicate, that doesn’t watch African countries.
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