Author: Duncan McLeod

Last week’s national policy colloquium, organised by the department of communications, drew a degree of cynicism from the telecoms industry. The view among many industry players is that it’s the same old rhetoric with no action. Will this time be different? The industry can be forgiven for suffering from “colloquium fatigue”. Politicians

JSE-listed technology group Altech is looking internally for a new chief operating officer. This follows the short-lived tenure of former Telkom acting group CEO Jeffrey Hedberg in the role. “We want to make the right appointment and ensure it is the right appointment,” says Altech CEO Craig Venter. “This will probably be an internal

Technology group Altech has reported a 27% decrease in adjusted headline earnings per share, from 529c to 388c, on poor performance from its operations in West Africa and continuing underperformance of its businesses in East Africa. The group eked out a 3,3% increase in revenues to just shy of R10bn

All of SA’s current investment in metropolitan, provincial, national and undersea cable systems will mean “nothing” if the country doesn’t build a comprehensive fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network to deliver the benefits to consumers. That’s the view of Cris Fuentes, CEO at ZTE SA, who says a coordinated national approach

Brazilian-born Pete da Silva spent the first 20 years of his working life at the Southern African subsidiary of German industrial and telecommunications giant Siemens, climbing the corporate ladder from trainee technician when he started to group CEO when he resigned in 2007 to pursue his passion for motorsport. Now, after a nearly

The Internet Service Providers’ Association (Ispa) is launching a new, member-driven programme in an attempt to root out malicious software infecting the computers of SA Internet users. The project, called iCode, is a voluntary system in terms of which Ispa members will notify customers if network traffic patterns suggest their PCs have

The department of communications’ colloquium to discuss a review of policies governing SA’s information and communications technology (ICT) sector saw controversy on Friday after a commission set up to discuss telecommunications at the two-day event appeared to have failed to delve meaningfully into the issues it was

New Cell C CEO Alan Knott-Craig has told the department of communications’ policy colloquium in Midrand, which is taking place on Thursday and Friday this week, that the cost of accessing the Internet in SA needs to be cut in half. He lamented the telecommunications industry’s “failure” to offer the

Communications minister Dina Pule has called for a complete overhaul of government policies governing the country’s broad information and communications (ICT) sector, with new legislation to be gazetted before the end of next year. Pule was speaking at the department of communications’ ICT Colloquium in Midrand on Thursday

After years of rigorous debate, the SA Bureau of Standards (SABS) has finally issued the final draft minimum standard for the set-top box decoders that will be used to receive digital terrestrial television signals in SA. The draft spec outlines a basic receiver that does not include a return path for interactivity. The draft spec, which was published