Australia’s government is trying to push the idea of a national broadband network, or NBN, through that country’s parliament. It wants Australian taxpayers to build a A$43bn fibre network that connects 90% of homes with broadband access of up to 100Mbit/s. To put that in context, in SA most households with Internet access are lucky to get an effective 1Mbit/s into the home.
SA will soon be awash in cheap international bandwidth. The challenge is getting that bandwidth into the hands of consumers and companies. So, news this week of the launch of a new fibre operator is encouraging. Eassy. Wacs. Ace. Main One. These are the names of new cable systems that are either in the works or already under construction. Together with the Seacom cable in the east and the Sat-3 system in the west, they promise a flood of cheap international bandwidth.
I’m sometimes asked by investors whether the growth story has gone out of SA telecommunications stocks. A series of regulations, coupled with growing competition and a weak economy, is putting pressure on operators’ margins. Is it time for investors to abandon the sector? Before I attempt to answer that question, it’s worth looking back at how the telecoms sector in SA has developed over the past decade
We are heading into the last four games of the Fifa World Cup 2010, and if there is one thing that we can take away from the games played so far, it’s that Fifa president Sepp Blatter’s vehement resistance to the use of technology has become untenable. Sports such as rugby and tennis have shot past football in their use of technology, but thanks to the tight grip of the Fifa board
The elements of the future of the desktop are slowly falling into place. No one company has a comprehensive set of products and services that will deliver the future of computing, but the shape of things to come is getting clearer. The key driver behind it all is convergence — convergence onto a single productivity device, and convergence in the “cloud”. In hardware, desktops are losing market share to notebooks, which in turn are being
Telkom has sent its customers a newsletter with their bills this month in which it tries to rubbish the uncapped broadband offerings introduced by MWeb and other service providers. Instead, it shows how Telkom is still stuck in the past. The newsletter article — headlined “Broadband: put a cap on it!” — doesn’t once
For some reason there seems to be a “Symbian is dead” meme floating around at the moment. Discussions with some of the infected victims suggest that it’s related to a misunderstanding of Nokia’s Symbian roadmap and the respective roles of Symbian and Maemo in Nokia’s strategy. Firstly, Nokia isn’t dumping Symbian. Despite all its weaknesses Symbian had over 40% smartphone market share in the first quarter of 2010. It’s the dominant platform with more than twice
Telkom is a fixed-line operator with ambitions to get into mobile telecommunications. Analysts aren’t sure it should be investing in a mature cellphone market. Do they have a point? Should Telkom be sticking to its knitting in fixed lines? Pity whoever is appointed to replace Reuben September
The department of communications has thrown SA’s migration from analogue to digital terrestrial television into disarray. It’s time to end all the nonsense around different standards and for the industry to move ahead. Business leaders in SA have always shown a reluctance to criticise government. Where they
One of the questions I’m most often asked by readers is what high-definition (HD) television set they should buy. With a bewildering array of choice in flat-panel TVs, it’s not an easy question to answer. I thought I’d put it to an expert. Gerdus van Eeden knows more about broadcasting technology than just about anyone in SA. The MultiChoice chief technology officer is a veritable font of knowledge on all things TV-rela
