While the concept “digital divide” has been well recorded and defined since the mid 1990s, the concept “Cloud Computing”, as an extension of the idea that the internet is a cloud, is largely characterised by its vagueness. The concept was first referred to in an article by Jessie Holliday Scanlon and Brad Wieners in 1999. In this they referred to the novelist William Gibson, who in 1999, while preparing for his first video teleconference, referred to the process of communicating via the web as “going through the cloud”. Gibson apparently asked one of the technicians while preparing for the conference, how the signals would travel across the Net, and was told that it was  not going through the “Net”  but  through "the cloud."  Thus the internet as a cloud metaphor was born. With the development and growth of Web 2.0 and its emphasis on services rather than software in the early 21^st century, the idea of the Net as  a “cloud”  has steadily grown among IT companies and internet based businesses as an evolving business model that can be used to extend services to a wider customer base. Chief among them are Microsoft, Google, IBM,  Oracle, Amazon.com to name but a few. Because of it evolving nature it is difficult to describe Cloud Computing in a single definition. According to the US based National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)  cloud computing can be described as “a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” To put it differently, on-line companies provide Internet-based accessible data centres and  computing time to customers, which could be either individual or corporate. Cloud computing services are currently offered in three forms namely,  Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Since cloud computing is network/internet based it has two crucial requires to be successful:  sufficient memory and fast and affordable bandwidth. The first problem was relatively easy to overcome by making more and faster memory available to server farms, the second, fast and affordable bandwidth, is more problematic as Cloud computing companies has little control over it. While some Cloud computing services may not require large amounts bandwidth, other may and in the limited broadband/bandwidth environment of the “digital divide” this may be a serious problem to overcome. The "skinny straw” concept (trying to suck an extra-thick milkshake through a common beverage straw), effectively illustrates the problem of moving large amounts of data over a limited bandwidth network. Moreover, while available bandwidth may be technically sufficient for some applications and some users, it may not be economically viable due to high bandwidth prices. Since the “digital divide” now largely refers to the gap that exists between people with effective (fast) access to the information highway and those with limited or no access to it, the problem facing the development and delivery of cloud computing services to the developing world is not difficult to understand. These obstacles were clearly spelled out by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) in April 2009, when it released a draft framework for a Comprehensive National Broadband Strategy in which it stated that a “ South African broadband network should provide South Africans with the network performance, capacity, and connections they need to contribute to the country’s social, cultural and economic development and to compete successfully in the global economy.“  Broadband was defined as a minimum of 4 Mbps capacity for the end-user. The document was released to the South African government in April 2009.  The paper briefly examines the impact that the affordability of high speed broadband internet access in South Africa may have on the development of cloud computing services in the country and consequently whether Cloud Computing can have a positive impact on breaching the digital divide. 

Keywords: Cloud Computing, broadband, digital divide, web services, South Africa. ]