Digital and internet apartheid by ISPs - Vumatel

For the past number of years I have tried to ask for fibre from Vumatel, I have submitted forms. Repeatedly they tell me that I must get 30%-50% interest in my neighbourhood. While I appreciate the need for reasonable uptake for a private business to provide a service, I am aghast that they want us to do their campaigning and signing up in townships when in suburbs I have seen Vumatel gazebos, banners flying proudly with people signing up interested parties. Vumatel is saying they have no interest in doing even the smallest activation in townships and therefore we have no interest. We also want fibre.

Why are township people, the Black majority subjected to expensive data connectivity prices while suburbia (overwhelmingly not Black) has fibre which has better speeds and is cheaper? Who do they get service providers reaching out for interest but we don't? We use the internet too, a lot.

If you go outside the Umlazi eThekwini Metropolitan Polise Service station you will see a number of young people on their mobile devices, using the available Wi-Fi. During exams times you will see learners with their books, laptops, phone and tablets studying while using WiFi.

It's simply can't be that the area whose people earn the least has worse service, worse speeds at a higher price and you have done nothing to remedy the situation. This is highly prejudicial and the fact that townships are almost exclusively Black, suburbs being mostly white, I dare say it is tantamount to being a form of ****** that this exist.

We can barely work from home, which means we are at high risk of contracting Covid-19 as we travel further to work places. Our kids have a harder time learning remotely, there is low uptake and ability to start home based digital businesses.

The people who are advantaged are in suburbs.

How can this be in an African country that Africans are disadvanted first and always as a matter of course. Internet services are new, post 1994 but the service is so discriminatory it is digital apartheid.