Duncan McLeod is founder and managing editor of TechCentral. With more than 30 years of experience in technology journalism, he has worked for and contributed to a range of publications, including the Financial Mail, the Sunday Times and the Financial Times.
MultiChoice’s open letter to Yunus Carrim, in which it criticised government’s policy on the use of encryption in free-to-air digital terrestrial television, was “not anti-government” and was written because the pay-TV broadcaster, which owns M-Net and DStv, has
Communications minister Yunus Carrim has accused MultiChoice and its partners of trotting out the “same old, tired issues” over digital terrestrial television and labelled the pay-television broadcaster a bullying “monopoly”. He was responding to full-page Sunday newspaper advertisements in which MultiChoice
The controversial issue of “network neutrality” looks set to become the subject of intense debate in South Africa in coming months after communications regulator Icasa this week raised the idea of introducing regulations that could stop operators from discriminating against traffic carried across their networks
MTN South Africa has hit back at Cell C’s recent cheeky radio advertising campaign, which was slapped down this month by the Advertising Standards Authority, telling its smaller rival in a double-page Sunday newspaper advertisement that it, MTN, is, in fact, “guilty” as charged. Well, not really. The ad, which is
Communications regulator Icasa this week kicked off a high-level formal inquiry into the state of competition in South Africa’s information and communications technology sector. In the coming months, the authority, which regulates the telecommunications, broadcasting and postal services sectors, has promised
Politically connected businessman and executive chairman of JSE-listed technology services company Gijima Robert Gumede has threatened to sue the Sunday Independent for R1bn, according to a report in sister newspaper the Saturday Star at the weekend. According to the Saturday Star, the threatened claim
Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a blog post on Thursday that he had held a telephone conversation this week with US president Barack Obama in which the Facebook CEO expressed his “frustration over the damage” the US government is “creating for all our future”. Zuckerberg, 29, has become increasingly vocal about the fallout
Shares in JSE-listed technology and media group Naspers took a battering on Friday as investors turned sour on Tencent, the fast-growing Chinese communications and e-commerce company that owns chat programs WeChat and QQ. Reuters reported that Naspers’s shares were off by their biggest one-day
South Africa’s highly concentrated television broadcasting industry, which has one dominant subscription operator in MultiChoice, will be a key focus area of Icasa’s high-level inquiry into the state of competition in the information and communications technology sector
The Internet Service Providers’ Association (Ispa) wants communications regulator Icasa to focus on more than just voice call termination rates, and believes there needs to be a greater emphasis on dealing with the cost of mobile data services in South Africa. “Voice remains a significant issue for the average consumer. At the
