Bandwidth on the East Africa Submarine System (Eassy), a new, 10 000km-long submarine fibre-optic cable on Africa’s east coast, is now available from Neotel and MTN, the two telecommunications operators announced at a press conference on Thursday. At the same time, the design capacity of the system has almost been trebled, going from 1,4Tbit/s to 3,8Tbit/s, making it the fastest cable system serving the African continent. However, only 60Gbit/s on that capacity has been “lit up” so far.
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Web search giant Google has pulled the plug on its Wave service, saying it hasn’t gained the traction it needed to be sustained. In a posting on its official blog, Google says it will no longer develop Wave as a standalone system. However, it says some of the technology will be used in other products.
South Africans’ last hope for more competition in the country’s pay-TV market, Walking On Water Television (WowTV), is gearing up to launch a satellite TV service within the next couple of months. TechCentral can reveal that WowTV plans to launch two bouquets of channels, one costing R49/month and the other R99/month. The low prices suggest the company is hoping to appeal to a broad market.
Cell C’s plan to sell its network of base stations should be concluded within the next four weeks, says CEO Lars Reichelt. In March, TechCentral broke the news that SA’s smallest mobile operator was considering selling parts of its base station network, and then leasing that infrastructure back from the winning bidder.
Cell C’s R5bn broadband mobile network will be launched in about three weeks, says its CEO, Lars Reichelt. The third-generation (3G) network, which is capable of theoretical download speeds of up to 21Mbit/s, will be launched in phases across six cities.
Telkom sold its controlling stake in Telkom Media, now Super 5 Media, for just R68m, the JSE-listed telecommunications group’s 2010 annual report has revealed. This means Telkom lost a net R403m from the failed venture. It had loaned the business R471m, which it has now written off, according to the report.
Catching up with the incumbent mobile operators, Cell C will finally begin selling the BlackBerry and its services in a move that will better position SA’s smallest mobile operator in the business market. Until now, the Blackberry devices and the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) have only been available from MTN and Vodacom.
Nearly 85% of all e-mail is spam. That’s one of the findings in a new report published by Internet security specialist Kaspersky Lab. According to Kaspersky’s spam report for the second quarter of 2010, 84,4% of the total volume of e-mail traffic online is unsolicited junk mail.
Paris Mashile, the former chairman of the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa), has been named as chairman of newly created Vunani Technology Ventures, a subsidiary of AltX-listed Vunani Limited. He’s also been appointed as CEO of the company’s consulting arm, Vunani Electronic Communications.
MTN, Africa’s largest mobile operator, has invested R22m to develop a power-generation plant that it says will halve its electricity costs. The new plant, which MTN dubs the “tri-generation plant”, will be driven by methane gas, which is plumbed directly into the plant from a gas pipeline 5km away from its head office in Fairlands, west of Johannesburg.