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.
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President Jacob Zuma’s cabinet reshuffle announced over the weekend has brought some good news to a communications industry that has been a bit short of it lately. The highly respected Roy Padayachie has replaced Siphiwe Nyanda as communications minister
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.
“Where’s the business model?” echoes the cry of that most thick-skinned of beasts, the greater suited market analyst (Homo economicus). Part war cry, part mating call, we’ve grown accustomed to hearing this phrase every time a website with no obvious revenue stream starts to attract attention. For years, each mention of Facebook brought out a squawking chorus of them. But Homo economicus is now deathly silent.
We’ve all heard the big numbers: there are more than 4,6bn mobile phones in the world, many countries have more cellphones than people, and there will be more smartphones than PCs in most countries by 2013.
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.
One of the most curious and unintended side effects of rapid innovation is on language. Rather than making words up, we prefer to frame things in analogy and reference. That’s why we still talk about “opening a window” on a computer, and why we “cut and paste” text and save “bookmarks”
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?
SA’s telecommunications industry has assembled on the battlefield with two players, one new, Telkom’s mobile business 8ta, and one reinvigorated, Cell C, getting ready to take on the giants of industry. Some smaller players are gathering on the flanks and others may yet make an entrance.
We human beings are an irrational bunch. When anything new comes along we tend to take one of three basic positions: deify, deny or demonise. It takes time for us to recognise the nuances that allow us to integrate this new force into our world view — be it a pop star, a politician, an idea or a