The verdict is in. South Africa sucks for free wifi. Wifi is available but you almost always have to pay for it, at least in the hostels and coffee shops I’ve been in so far (Big Blue Backpackers in Cape town is one exception… and it’s fast). Even when you’re told you get free wifi, you’re often presented with a voucher for 10mb or 10 minutes of it, instead of the unlimited wifi that I’m used to in the rest of the world.
I spent a good chunk of my day yesterday in a cafe at a shopping mall in Durban working. I got chatting to a guy on his own computer who is a software engineer and was doing some work while his wife shopped. He gave me a bit of a rundown about the state of internet in South Africa and it’s not promising for digital nomads. Basically, there are only a couple of providers so everything is expensive. He also started talking about technical stuff and I sort of tuned out but the gist of it is that unlimited internet in South Africa isn’t readily available and probably won’t be for awhile. You can get it but it’s super expensive, especially when compared to the great deals you can get in the UK and North America, not to mention the fact that it seems readily available everywhere else in the world I’ve been.
So to combat the expensive and sporadic internet issue, I’ve bought one of those USB dongle modem things. The brand is Vodaphone and I was told that it’ll work in other African countries as long as I buy a local SIM card. I’m a bit dubious about that part but if I can get a good amount of use out of it here in South Africa, I will sort the rest out later. The modem itself cost me almost R700 and I had the option of buying a faster one for R1800. I’m not sure of the difference in speeds but the cheaper one is a lot faster than I would have expected. I haven’t tried to download anything but I have made Skype calls with no problems and there’s virtually no wait time as webpages load.
I buy airtime on my pay-as-you go phone, convert it to data using my phone, take my SIM card out of my phone and put it into the USB modem, plug it in, hit ‘connect’ and there ya go – online! The only problem is that I haven’t worked out how long the data lasts for exactly and I don’t seem to have any way of tracking it. Data gets cheaper the more you buy. So I can get the minimum of 9MB of data for R9 and I can buy the maximum of 1.2GB for R289 with a bunch of other options in between. I initially bought 30MB and it lasted longer than expected. I’ve since bought 600MB for R189 and it’s been going strong for days. Although for almost £20, I would hope it’d last me at least a couple of weeks.
Paying for data rather than time means that I can write emails and blog posts without spending anything until I actually post them. If I were planning on making some calls on Skype, doing some downloading or watching videos then I would probably use the hostel’s hourly wifi here instead, but for general internet use, it seems ideal.
This is all new to me but it’s great to know that I can get online anywhere there’s a phone signal. If I decide to rent a place somewhere, suddenly needing wifi isn’t an issue and it opens my options up a lot. Same goes for not having to always look for accommodation with wifi. Plus it means I can hang out in whatever cafe I want to and still get online. I always hate it when I find a great cafe only to discover they don’t have internet and this gets rid of that little problem.
I’ll keep you posted on what I think of this miraculous little device. Here’s hoping it’ll work in Tanzania!
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