All the latest technology news from South Africa and around the world.
Residents of the Johannesburg suburb of Parkhurst have asked for proposals from telecommunications service providers to wire up homes and businesses in the upmarket area to high-speed fibre-optic broadband infrastructure. The Parkhurst Residents and Business Owners Association (Praboa) has put out a request for proposal for fibre-to-the-home
Johannesburg-headquartered global technology services group Dimension Data has announced it is opening three new data centres as demand from businesses for cloud computing services expands. The new data centres are based in Toronto in Canada, Auckland, in New Zealand and São Paulo in Brazil. Dimension Data, which
Online video behemoth YouTube, owned by Google, is said to have reached a deal to buy Twitch, a company that streams video of people playing videogames, for more than US$1bn. But why? According to a report by Variety, in which it quotes unnamed sources close to the deal, the purchase will be an “all-cash offer” and will be announced
Profits at Nashua Mobile plunged by 41% year on year in the six months to 31 March 2014, falling from R101,8m to R60,4m, parent Reunert disclosed in its interim results on Tuesday. This was on the back of a 2% decline in revenue, from R1,85bn to R1,81bn, at the independent cellular service provider, whose customer base Reunert has
Is Samsung Electronics planning to pour billions of rand into a new manufacturing facility north of Durban? The company’s Africa vice-president and chief operating officer, George Ferreira, let slip at Sentech’s Connected TV Summit in Sandton last week that the company intends opening a television
In a move clearly designed to get people using their television sets to access video-on-demand and other services, Samsung has reached a deal with Vox Telecom to give buyers of its Smart TVs almost 1TB of free bandwidth. The ADSL bandwidth on offer — a total of a million megabytes, or 977GB — is unthrottled and unshaped. “The million megabytes
Vodacom has revealed that the Competition Commission has decided to investigate a complaint lodged by Cell C, in which the smaller mobile operator has accused its larger rival of abusing its dominance in contravention of the law. “The group received a complaint from the Competition Commission in which it is alleged that Vodacom
South African smartphone users on Vodacom’s network use an average of 253MB/month each, while tablet users consume an average 743MB/month each, the mobile operator has revealed. In the financial year ended 31 March 2014, Vodacom increased the number of smartphones and tablets on its network by 23,5% to 7,8m. “Demand for
Vodacom intends increasing group capital expenditure by 20% in the financial year ended March 2015. It proposes increasing its capex investment from R10,8bn in 2014 to R13bn this year. However, it has warned that the planned investment could be affected negatively. “This will be informed by the final outcome of the mobile termination rate
After many months of negotiation, Vodacom and Neotel are finally getting into bed with each other. Vodacom has reached an agreement with Neotel’s shareholders to buy 100% of the company, including shareholder loans against it, for a total cash consideration equivalent to an enterprise value of R7bn. The deal, if it gets the necessary regulatory
