My company handles live video streaming, so slow speeds and high latency tends to result in a lot of buffering. You're looking at about 200ms latency minimum from Europe to South Africa, and when you need to download a ~2MB video chunk in 2000ms, it's pretty hard to get a reliable stream, especially when you add in generally slower/less reliable connections along the route.
It can be mitigated somewhat by reducing the quality of the video and using CDNs, but even edge nodes are scarce in that are of the world.
I imagine it would be fine for normal applications, aside from being a little slower, but video is a challenge.
Thanks. We do not serve video, so it is indeed not that comparable. But we do have hosted web applications (SAP CRM), and syncing of offline applications for field staff (technicians) (and that can be quite a lot of data). It seems that our use cases mean either low latency and low bandwidth (non-technical users and their web apps, where "stuff is broken" if it is slow, but they might be already used to that from other areas of their online lifes) OR any latency and high bandwidth (sync doesn't really care if the packages come in with ultra low latency, as long as it syncs). Might work out indeed.
It can be mitigated somewhat by reducing the quality of the video and using CDNs, but even edge nodes are scarce in that are of the world.
I imagine it would be fine for normal applications, aside from being a little slower, but video is a challenge.