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Cape Town – Email is a morning thing in South Africa and locals delay browsing the web until they get home from work, data suggests.
This is according to data from internet service provider Webafrica which has said South African email peaks at 09:00 and falls dramatically after 15:00.
“Email traffic goes from a score of 0.65% of all internet usage at 6:00 to 1.54% at 7:00. It then doubles again to 3.35% at 8:00 (which seems to be the time when most people arrive at work) and then hits the peak of 3.81% by 9:00,” said Tim Wyatt-Gunning, Webafrica CEO.
The results tie in with recent research from Effective Measure which found that email makes up 89.7% of internet use for South Africans, followed by banking (68.2%) and online research (63.7%).
“We can trace these internet trends by analysing the percentages of our system usage at Webafrica but don’t panic about privacy invasion - we can only see the type of traffic travelling through our system not the individual content,” said Tim Wyatt-Gunning, Webafrica chief executive.
Night browsing
He said that the data shows that web browsing begins in earnest once the majority of people get home from work.
“Serious browsing of the web seems to only start when we get home with no bosses to look over our shoulders. There is a significant jump in usage from 18:00 which climbs every hour until 22:00 and then starts dropping off as we go to bed with a low point of usage at 04:00.”
Downloads also make a significant percentage of internet usage in SA, with Webafrica reporting that the majority of activity takes place at night.
“Our download traffic is pretty consistent throughout the day until we get home and then ‘boom!’ - it rises sharply from 18:00 until a peak just after midnight, only returning to normal levels when we get to work the next morning,” said Wyatt-Gunning.
Video traffic through YouTube and Netflix occupies 30% of traffic through the service provider at the 21:00 peak time.
But despite the demand for service, internet access in SA remains constrained.
Data from Statistics SA revealed that households in urban centres have wider access than rural areas.
“Households in Western Cape (23.8%) and Gauteng (17.2%) were most likely to access the internet at home while households in Limpopo (2.3%) were least likely to have done so,” said the organisation.
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