Author: Duncan McLeod

On Monday, Moody’s, the ratings agency, downgraded Nokia’s debt to near junk status. The share price has been in freefall in the past year, with some analysts painting a bleak future for the Finnish company. Yes, it’s bad. But Nokia is already planting the seeds of its turnaround. There’s no doubt that fortunes are made and lost

The legal battle between Reunert and John Holdsworth, and his new company AppChat, took a dramatic turn in the high court in Pretoria on Tuesday. The court ruled that AppChat and Holdsworth, who is the former CEO of Reunert subsidiary ECN Telecommunications (now Nashua ECN), may not hire current or “erstwhile”

Just when telecommunications industry players and analysts thought SA couldn’t possibly get any more undersea broadband infrastructure, news is emerging of a raft of new cable systems that will serve both SA and the region. On Monday, Brazil, Russia, India, China and SA — the so-called Brics countries — announced plans for a new high-capacity

Two weeks after Telkom cut the cost to Internet service providers of accessing its fixed-line digital subscriber line (DSL) network by 30%, MWeb has slashed the prices of two of its uncapped data products. The price of its 384kbit/s and 1Mbit/s products have both been cut to R199/month, from R219/month and R299/month respectively. However, the

Chinese networking equipment manufacturer ZTE is taking ZTE Mzanzi, an SA company in which it has a minority equity stake, to the high court in Pretoria in an effort to have an interdict the latter company won against Telkom overturned. ZTE Mzanzi, led by Tumi Magasa, won the interim court interdict at the end of March, preventing

The 14 000km West African Cable System (Wacs), the first new sub-sea telecommunications cable along Africa’s west coast since Sat-3 was launched 11 years ago, will be launched officially in about a month’s time. Angus Hay, co-chair of the Wacs management committee and chief technology officer at Neotel, says

It’s like 1999 all over again. On Monday, Facebook announced it was buying photo-sharing company Instagram for US$1bn, netting the start-up’s cofounder, Kevin Systrom, a cool $400m. It’s paying over the odds, but the deal makes sense for Facebook ahead of its flotation on the stock market. At first glance and based on the

Telkom has embarked on a multibillion-rand refresh of its access network into homes and businesses. Investors will probably decry the cost of taking fibre-optic infrastructure closer to and even into homes, but group CEO Nombulelo Moholi is at least leading the fixed-line operator in the right direction

For the first time, the operator is also talking about delivering fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) services, though Bashier Sallie, the company’s MD of wholesale and networks, says it’s important that a “pragmatic” approach is taken to delivering FTTH given challenges such as how spread out SA’s population is compared to some other countries that

Fixed-line operator Telkom plans to launch a fibre-to-the-home trial network in two separate parts of the country soon, Bashier Sallie, MD of wholesale and networks, tells TechCentral. The company hasn’t yet decided where the trials will take place or when exactly they’ll go live.