When designing or updating a computer network, selecting one type of medium over another is an

important issue and crucial. Once the time and money have been spent installing a particular medium, a
business must use the chosen medium for a number of years to recover these initial costs.

The high data costs are stifling the growth of South Africa’s lower income households, what is said here
is that low income consumers are paying higher charges and in return not seeing benefits of the
competition in comparison to high income consumers who are able to buy larger quantities of data
(News24 2018).

The high cost of communication is one of the biggest barriers to economic growth in the country mostly
South Africa. It increases the cost of doing business for investors while preventing the poor from having
access to the information at affordable prices(Sowetan live 2019)

Personally data is expensive and it depletes very fast and its very expensive for less data. I would not
have access to the internet due to high data costs. In the century we live in most of the activities we do
needs data to access them. I also would not be able to afford as I am not financially stable as yet, reason
being I am a student still. Therefore it has a bad impact, because I continuously have to purchase data.

Costs are associated with all types of media and there are different types of costs. It is necessary to
consider more than just the initial cost of the supporting devices.

Low data costs would have a good impact in the South African’s economy because low incomed
households will afford data, especially because these days in order to access anything on a cellphone or
laptop you need access to the internet. The economy growth will increase because more people will
afford data. Another advantage is that there will be more income in the networking companies, which
implies that because there will be so many people using the internet and more people will have to be
employed to work for those networking companies. But the disadvantage here is that the network will
be slow because many people will have access to the internet.

Properly considered media selection criteria and lower data costs will result in sustainable development
and growth in South Africa, because lower data costs will make people buy more data, meaning the
income growth will increase.
 Reference List

White, C. 20210916, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User's Approach, 8th
Edition, Cengage Learning

[Online]. Available at: https://www.news24.com/ high-data-costs-challenged-low-income-households-

20180302 [Accessed 21 April]

[Online]. Available at: https://www.sowetanlive.co.za/opinion/columnist/2019-12-03-first-step-to-

reduced-data-prices-goods/