While all the focus in the telecommunications industry is on the fight over call termination rates, an even more important battle is looming large, this time over access to radio frequency spectrum. Billions of rand are at stake as South Africa’s big telecommunications operators
South Africa’s telecommunications industry has never been in such a heightened state of flux as it is today. The regulator, Icasa, has managed to enrage the two biggest operators, MTN and Vodacom, which have both now lodged voluminous applications at the high court in an effort to get new call
Nineteen billion dollars. Two hundred and ten billion rand. Nearly R500/user. That’s how much Facebook has agreed to pony up for WhatsApp, the fast-growing but still very much loss-making cross-platform mobile instant messaging platform. It’s a daring – perhaps insane – bet by Facebook’s
Microsoft is at a crossroads. Its new CEO, Satya Nadella – only the third person to lead the company in its 39-year history, after Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer – has to decide if the software maker’s future lies exclusively in the business market, where it remains
So, there’s more trouble at Fawlty Towers in Auckland Park. Just two years into her five-year term, SABC group CEO Lulama Mokhobo is stepping down, citing “exhaustion”. It’s a fresh setback for the public broadcaster, which has lurched from one crisis to another for the best part of a decade
Spare a thought for Shameel Joosub and Zunaid Bulbulia. The Vodacom and MTN chief executives must feel like they’re being unfairly picked on for running successful, profitable businesses. This week, telecommunications industry regulator Icasa published final regulations that will
There’s an online land grab of the sort not seen since the dot-com bubble taking place in the global instant messaging (IM) market. WhatsApp Messenger, WeChat (partly owned by South Africa’s Naspers), Hangouts, Skype and BlackBerry Messenger, along with several smaller
In recent weeks, I’ve been fortunate to meet a range of really smart South African entrepreneurs who are doing incredibly exciting stuff in the technology space, often with relatively few resources. Despite all the doom and gloom that is our politics, and despite the poor state of
Last year proved to be a little quiet on the technology front. Internationally, there were few major developments, at least in consumer electronics. Manufacturers continued to refine their televisions, smartphones, notebooks and tablets rather than cracking
The scene is set for a bruising showdown between Telkom and its regulator, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa), over local-loop unbundling. This is after the authority this week said it would disregard the fixed-line operator’s arguments about how much money it’s losing for each
