Ideate

1 min. with a Superhero: Henk Kleynhans from Skyrove

by Fred Roed on 28/04/10 at 4:10 pm
1 comment

This morning we have the great privilege of mixing it up with someone who’s entrepreneurial spirit pumps deep in his veins. Henk Kleynhans, founder of wireless internet provider Skyrove, has been shaking things up on the ISP front for some time now. He’s giving up some of his valuable time to talk to us. Henk, what first gave you the idea to start Skyrove?

I moved into a student digs in 2003and couldn’t afford to get ADSL myself. (at that stage R1200 for a 3GB cap on a 512 kbps line). About the same time, Wi-Fi was becoming a mainstream technology and was being built into all new laptops and a variety of other devices. I realised that I’d be able to afford internet access if I could share my ADSL connection with neighbours using Wi-Fi. I couldn’t find any solution that would enable me to do this so decided to build it. I needed to solve my own problem. “Scratch my own itch” so to speak.

Seeing that Ideate is a blog for entrepreneurs, and you fit the mould of the quintessential entrepreneur, could you give us your definition of ‘entrepreneur’?

I’d say an entrepreneur is someone who is able to take raw talent, convert it into a valuable product and solve a problem in the marketplace. I’ve been thinking about how often Skyrove has hired talented people without having placed adverts or by first creating job descriptions.

It is crucially important for entrepreneurs that more educated young people enter the workforce. You don’t need “jobs first”, but rather “workers first”, the entrepreneurs will create the jobs.

Right now there is a shortage of entrepreneurs in South Africa. As a result, young educated people are leaving the country in droves. The only way to see a reversal of this is to create an an environment where entrepreneurs can flourish. The Silicon Cape Initiative has made great strides to raise awareness about this and I hope we’ll get buy-in at the highest levels.

Here at Ideate we couldn’t agree more. Now, Skyrove is a model that targets both end-users and resellers to provide wireless hotspots – is this not a dangerous model in the ever-changing environment of African internet provision? With mobile internet becoming more pervasive and end users empowering themselves with their own internet devices on the move, is Skyrove’s model under threat to the mobile networks?

Internet provisioning is a highly competitive field with many players with much bigger pockets than ours. That being said the market is very, very far from being properly serviced by current solutions. Skyrove currently uses Wi-Fi which is the fastest, cheapest and most stable wireless technology and is open for anyone in any country to deploy without the need special licencing. I think Skyrove is potentially more complementary to mobile networks as opposed to being a threat to them as their networks are struggling to provide the services expected from subscribers.

How fast will the net be in the next 2 years?

I’m hoping that consumers will be seeing 20 Mbps to-the-home. However, I think with the recent flood of “uncapped” offerings we are seeing a trend of South African internet being slowed down, rather than speeding up. When an ISP gives you an uncapped internet package, there is no incentive for them to deliver internet traffic to you as fast as possible. I think we need something like a “Bandwidth Grading Council” to grade different ISPs’ service levels with regards to shaping, contention, local and international speed tests. That way we can at least see competition between different ISPs’ uncapped offerings.

Great idea. Hopefully it would spare us from problems that have become all too common within certain ISP’s. Any spectacular predictions in the next 5 years for your industry?

I’m hoping to see a variety of payment systems such Vodafone’s M-PESA and Zain’s ZAP becoming the predominant payment mechanisms in South Africa. There really is no good reason for your internet service provider not to offer you payment services except SA’s ill-conceived obsession to protect an old-fashioned banking monopoly. Besides, if banks can provide internet access, ISPs can provide banking services. Bill Gates said many years ago: “Banking is necessary. Banks aren’t”.

Awesome stuff Henk, thanks for your time. We’re banking on you to grow into one of the premier names in internet provision. Keep us posted, and Ideate readers, we encourage you to check out Skyrove’s offering. Not only is it a great, innovative offering, but you can make money out of it too. Now that’s an entrepreneur thinking BIG.

Fred Roed is the marketing guy in the Ideate crew. Fred is the CEO of web marketing company World Wide Creative and the co-founder of online learning portal Heavy Chef. Fred loves writing about people out there doing marketing right. Follow Fred on Twitter here. View more articles by Fred Roed.

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