Page 37 - EngineerIT January 2022

INDUSTRY, TECHNOLOGY, PRODUCTS AND INNOVATION

HARNESSING THE POWER OF AGRITECH impact solutions and empower
smallholder farmers.
TO HELP SA’S SMALLHOLDER FARMERS South African smallholder farmers

face various challenges, that prevent them
from achieving their full potential, such as
s part of its multi-million Rand investment in agriculture, Microsoft South Africa has security concerns, a lack of infrastructure,
selected The Awareness Company as the beneficiary of its AgriTech Programme. access to competitive formal markets,
AThe Awareness Company will develop and roll out three high-impact solutions in production and business skills, funding and
the agriculture sector within the next year – positively affecting one of the country’s critical financial support to re-invest in farming
sectors and helping to drive growth and job creation. activities, as well as compliance with food
The AgriTech Programme’s main objective is to drive digital transformation in the safety regulations and legislation.
agriculture sector by collaborating with a technology company that will develop high- “Technology – specifically agritech –
has the ability to empower our country’s
smallholder farmers by enabling them
to become more productive, efficient,
competitive, commercially viable and
sustainable,” says Lillian Barnard, CEO of
Microsoft South Africa.
However, many South African
smallholder farmers are failing to
leverage available technologies that will
allow them to scale into commercial
farms. Limited digitisation leads to low
productivity, inefficiency and low levels
of competitiveness due to a lack of
actionable insights.
This is where the AgriTech Programme
and The Awareness Company come in.

MTN reigns supreme in MyBroadband mobile insights report

yBroadband Insights has Mbps and an average upload speed of 13.82 Mbps last year.
released its annual 2021 Mobile The speed test app runs connection tests to servers at NapAfrica’s Internet peering
MNetwork Quality Report, which points in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban to provide a vendor neutral testing
shows that MTN has the best mobile environment for download speed, upload speed and latency. These servers are connected
network in South Africa. MTN reigned via a 10Gbps link to NapAfrica to ensure there is ample capacity for accurate speeds of even
supreme in all major South African cities, the fastest broadband connections.
with one exception - Vodacom had the
best network in East London. MTN scores the highest average download speed
The MyBroadband Insights Network MTN had the highest average download speed at 64.23 Mbps, followed by Vodacom at
Quality Report uses a carefully designed 35.05 Mbps, Telkom on 27.23 Mbps, Cell C on 19.26 Mbps and Rain on 13.07 Mbps. MTN
methodology to accurately measure and also had the best network in Johannesburg, Tshwane, eThekwini, Cape Town, Bloemfontein,
compare the network performance of Gqeberha, Polokwane, George and Kimberley. The only city where MTN did not reign
mobile operators. The data collection supreme was East London, where Vodacom came out on top.
includes drive tests with a specialised MTN’s exceptional performance results from investing more in infrastructure over the
testing vehicle and equipment and crowd past five years than its rivals. Vodacom has, however, started to outspend MTN last year and
sourced data. is keen to regain the top spot in the network quality rankings.
The report is based on 1,35 million A device analysis revealed that the peak speed of 751 Mbps was achieved on a Huawei
results from MyBroadband’s speed test P40 Pro 5G, followed by 732 Mbps on a Samsung Galaxy S21+ 5G and 695 Mbps on a
app, which were recorded between 1 Samsung Galaxy Note20 Ultra 5G.
January 2021 and 31 December 2021. The
research shows that South Africa had an For more information about the mobile network quality reports, visit
average mobile download speed of 40.86 https://research.mybroadband.co.za/reports.html

EngineerIT | January 2022 | 35