New legislation meant to fight crime is having a deleterious effect on mobile operators. Vodacom, MTN and Cell C saw new connections to their networks fall off a cliff at the beginning of August. It’s hard to see how the gain is worth the pain. “I told you so!” That’s what Alan Knott- Craig, the former CEO of Vodacom Group, is probably muttering under his breath
Browsing: Opinion
As a regulator, there is need to pause and take stock, determining to what extent the socioeconomic policy objectives have been advanced. In this regard one has to take into cognisance the regulatory toolkit, which includes the licensing process, ensuring competition, enforcing universal service obligations and facilitating the equitable and meritocratic allocation of scarce frequency resources
Telkom faces the possibility of potentially crippling fines for alleged anticompetitive abuses in the Internet market. If the company is forced to cough up, creative uses that benefit consumers should be found for that money
Windows 7 has landed. After months of hype, Microsoft has finally delivered its newest PC operating system. Reviewers are raving…
In the world of telecommunications, you get awful regulators and you get bloody awful regulators. Fortunately, SA has only had awful regulators. The US, Europe and other unfortunates have had bloody awful regulators. In the US, they destroyed one of the greatest companies in the world and issued hundreds of wireless licences with too little spectrum. In Europe, they managed almost to bankrupt credible telecoms operators with horrendously
One of the things I love about the IT industry is the constant hype. There is always some new idea or silver bullet that will fix everything. The hype can provide endless hours of amusement and it can be great fun to watch the clash of the old with the new, the believers versus the Luddites. And of course it provides great mental exercise — deconstructing the hype, trying to understand it, trying to debunk it and trying to see where the hype is real.
South Africans are known for taking unnatural risks every day, they are resourceful and have a healthy can-do attitude. The country has shown a remarkable propensity for innovation on a grand scale in the past – the world’s first heart transplant in Cape Town in 1967, the development (and dismantling) of a nuclear weapons programme in the 1980s and Sasol’s commercialisation of oil-from-coal technologies are a few notable examples. But these are not likely to inspire young entrepreneurs to go out and change the world
This week, Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book reader went on sale in SA and around the world. E-books are finally coming of age. Here’s why you’re going to want to buy one and why you may be better off delaying your purchase for a short while. If anyone has any doubts that the future of book publishing is electronic, consider this: where Amazon stocks both
Cellular operators were set to receive a grilling in parliament this week. Politicians want mobile interconnection fees to come down. But it’s far from clear if the basic cost of calls will also fall. Can politicians avoid the temptation of interfering further?
When I was renting a piano for my daughter recently, I found an obvious spelling mistake in the lease agreement. This provided great amusement for the rental agent — he had been using the same contract for 20 years and I was the first person to point it out. Unfortunately for me, it was a bitter reminder about one of the key problems of documentation — nobody ever reads it