Yes, the issues are substantially bigger. South Africa can't even provide reliable electricity in the cities, never mind elsewhere. People living there tell me it's not a problem. If they're not bothered by that, I doubt they give a damn about google searches. If memory serves me correctly that's been going on for about 10 years now.
There's the electricity issue (we call the rolling blackouts "load-shedding") which affects the cellular base-stations and telco exchanges as much as anything, but also another more obvious issue for content delivery: the local loop.
For the past 15+ years (as long as I've had Internet access), the incumbent telco (TelkomSA) has not been forthcoming with upgrading or maintaining the ADSL infrastructure. Finally, there seems to be traction with FTTx providers, but this seems limited to affluent pockets of a few thousand people in the country. All the new fibre offerings serve the same locations.
While it's hopeful this will improve the situation in the medium-term, the backhaul from ISP to eyeball is oversubscribed at least 30:1 for ADSL, with equipment being replaced by (IMO) inferior network equipment. Additionally, there are reports of automated line-conditioning software which should improve local loop connectivity, but I've seen DSL sync issues only since the software has been implemented.
The (ex-public, privatised under Telkom) Exchanges have been neglected and have recently been divided into three groups: Earners, Maintainers and "Lost Causes". The latter two will not receive upgrades from ADSL1 and the Earners will likely migrate to newer technologies. This is largely due to copper-theft and vandalism of exchanges/cellular base-stations (which are oversubscribed enough that wireless technologies routinely sustain 3000-20000ms latencies). The oligopoly running cellular networks have no incentive to improve this, since the Regulatory Authorities don't really seem to push competition as well as we'd like.
TL;DR: There are issues, but rose-tinted glasses make me hopeful in the medium term. Claims are that wireless will fix everything seem bleak, since base stations become oversubscribed faster than they can be built/upgraded (and the backhaul from them is measured in megabits/s, rather than gigabits/s charged at ~US$0.15/MB).
* Anyone can buy a prepaid SIM from any supermarket and access the Internet within 10 or 20 minutes. Last time I visited France, it took me 4 days to achieve a similar result.
* Mobile data is cheap when buying in bulk. I pay USD2 per gigabyte.
* LTE coverage is growing fast and RTT is good. For example my ping time to google.com is 30ms.
Conclusion: Private ownership and free markets lead to good service and low cost. ESKOM proves that state ownership of companies and monopolies lead to bad service at high cost.
My father was an electrical power engineer. It's quite a lot harder than one would think to distribute power with a nationwide grid.
It's never really made sense to me that we even have a nationwide grid. Why not local grids with local power plants? That's what islands use. While there is economy of scale in a big power plant then you need a bigger grid to consume its power.
There are many ways to generate electrical power. I expect many aren't used because power companies can't earn money from them.
I expect you'd have fewer scheduled blackouts if the rural areas had their own local generators.
I've just gotten into the PDX Renters Unite! Facebook group. Rental prices in Portland are skyrocketing largely due to venture-backed companies hiring from out of state.
The solutions are largely straightforward, for example "inclusionary zoning" would require that new housing developments include a certain proportion of affordable housing. But inclusionary zoning is forbidden by Oregon State Law.
In what way does that law serves the needs of the people? Well that was not considered by the legislators, no the developers lobbied them, no doubt set them up with hookers and blow so as to maximize shareholder value while throwing lots of young people out on the street.
And instead of basic infrastructure the West (which milked colonial Africa for centuries, and continues to do so post-colonially, placing friendly lackeys in power to ensure underdevelopment and advantageous for them business climate), comes with feel-good schemes like "One Laptop Per Child" etc...
South Africa's electricity supply crisis has nothing whatsoever to do with the West or colonialism, it's entirely about bad governance and a lack of long-term planning.
The country has around 40GW of installed capacity, dating from over-investment before 1994, but the state opted to both not build new stations and not carry out any maintenance on the existing stations for years so about 10GW is now offline and unusable. Hence the frequent power outages.
