Browsing: Duncan McLeod

Things have gone awry at Telkom. It’s already facing a growing barrage of lawsuits and competition complaints, and anonymous dossiers leaked to the media in recent weeks suggest a deeper malaise. Can the group be fixed?

Last week’s WikiLeaks disclosure of US diplomatic cables is arguably the biggest international news story of 2010. But it could end up being a defining theme of 21st-century politics: the communications

A Southern African task team has recommended the adoption of the updated European standard for digital terrestrial television. Our politicians should waste no time in endorsing this and

There was an air of despondency at Telkom’s interim financial results presentation this week. But after several strategic missteps, the group is finally promising to get its house in order. It had better move quickly: rivals are gaining fast.

New communications minister Roy Padayachie brings talent and fresh vigour to a portfolio long in need of both. But his desire to hang on to government control over Telkom makes little sense.

State-owned Broadband Infraco, created by government to bring down national telecommunications costs, is finally launching commercial services next week. But the company’s mandate has already

President Jacob Zuma dropped a bombshell on SA’s communications technology industry on Sunday when he sacked his controversial communications minister, Siphiwe Nyanda. In Roy Padayachie, the sector finally has the minister it wanted all along.

Triple-play services, consisting of television, telephony and broadband Internet access, delivered over the same physical cable infrastructure, are not something one typically associates with African telecommunications. Now, however, a Kenyan company, Wananchi, is planning to bring fibre connectivity to hundreds of thousands of homes in East Africa, in the process remaking how a continent thinks about what can be done with high-speed connectivity.

When Apple announced the iPad tablet computer earlier this year, some analysts wondered if that spelt the end for Amazon.com’s Kindle e-reader. On the contrary, the next-generation Kindle is flying out of Amazon’s warehouses.

Telkom has revealed the first phase of its strategy to take on the incumbents in the mobile sector. With 8ta, Telkom has slashed the cost of mobile-to-landline calls and cut out-of-bundle data rates in half. Now what?