Q&A Gamgee: The Future of Internet in African Households

What is the impact of recent trends in digital technology on people’s lives?

Paul Hendriks: The digital technology is evolving at unprecedented speed, and the Internet has become the true fuel to its advancements. This means that for billions of people around the world, the Internet is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. It is not only a pillar for personal and economic growth of the society, but for many, it is indispensable for executing routine daily activities, such as working, shopping or studying. This drives strong demand for fast broadband, but also for transparent network management, reliable cybersecurity and control over what type of content is accessed on the home network.

How is Africa performing in terms of the global digital revolution? What are the challenges and the ways forward?

Paul Hendricks: Africa is currently at the early stage of the digital transformation, mainly due to its low internet penetration. The lack of fast broadband stands out as the most common bottleneck for most of African countries, alongside other digital challenges such as strength of the power infrastructure and electrification rates. The silver lining of this situation is the impressive mobilization of resources to find innovative and affordable connectivity technologies. These currently include DSL, Cable, Fiber, mobile 4G, 5G and satellite, which will hopefully soon deliver significant results.

But even in regions with high internet penetration, there are consumer households that still battle with underperforming Wi-Fi…

Paul Hendricks: Yes, that is the paradox of our times, that the more digital our households become, the more challenging is the situation for the existing home network.

And here is where Gamgee can help. Our solution scans the entire network, finds and allocates the best bandwidth for each device, boosts the speed for essential devices (such as work laptop), smooths out the communication between multi-vendor devices, and enables seamless travel of bandwidth across the entire network. 

Moreover, it doesn’t carry the burden of hardware dependency – Gamgee can be run on many different router platforms and spares the necessary investment into new, unecological, and currently due to the chipset crisis hardly available network hardware. All of this helps to remove all remaining obstacles on the home network.

And here is where Gamgee can help. Our solution scans the entire network, finds and allocates the best bandwidth for each device, boosts the speed for essential devices (such as work laptop), smooths out the communication between multi-vendor devices, and enables seamless travel of bandwidth across the entire network. 

Mr. Paul Hendricks
Chief Executive Officer, Gamgee

Could solutions such as Gamgee help Africa to accelerate its digital transformation?

Paul Hendricks: We at Gamgee are mindful of the technological and economic challenges in some world regions, and it is our goal to contribute to the enablement of fair Internet access.

Bearing this in mind, Gamgee’s solution has been designed to leverage investments done in the past by upgrading existing routers with Gamgee router software, maintain its low software footprint at affordable price, and bring the services from cloud to the router to improve reliability and reduce latency. Furthermore, it makes users conscious of their data consumption that helps them optimize their daily usage and avoid exceeding the limit. All of this can improve the Internet performance in consumer households and bring about the benefits of a connected life.