Two weeks ago, Icasa provisionally awarded licences to five new subscription television broadcasters. It hopes the move will help crack open what has become a highly concentrated market that is now thoroughly dominated by one operator, MultiChoice. The communications regulator will be hoping that it is more successful in this
Before I moved house earlier this year, I used to drive along a road to the office that snakes through the northern suburbs of Johannesburg. As with most suburban roads in this part of the world, traffic can get a little out of hand during peak hours. Although I certainly don’t mind spending some time stuck in a jam, I used to get
Cameroon has offered mobile operator Viettel a year’s monopoly on the operation of the country’s first 3G network. But Viettel is no ordinary operator. It’s owned by the Vietnamese government and operated by its ministry of defence. Readers will recall I wrote about the wholesale network and landing station monopoly enjoyed
As Internet access spread across the globe, a handful of giant American corporations ended up dominating industries. Google in search, Amazon in online shopping and Facebook in social networking. The one market that has proved consistently immune to these titans is China. Now, one of China’s homegrown Internet giants
In the days following this week’s general election – the most interesting since 1994 – the focus will shift to who president Jacob Zuma will name to his new cabinet. Whatever shuffling he decides to do, he should leave the communications portfolio in the hands
I have such a complicated relationship with Google and Facebook that I sometimes find it hard to write about them. I don’t mean complicated in the sense of conflict of interest, although it is true that one of the organisations I do work for now receives funding from Google, so there is that, but what I am really talking about is
Most people outside of technology circles have never heard of Vic Gundotra. The charming, bespectacled 45-year-old with the flawless Californian accent might be mistaken for a professor or a paediatrician. Yet many of us have used one or more of the products he championed during his eight years at Google. On 24 April, Gundotra
Should we be worried about Cell C? Despite a recent high court ruling that was at least partly in the mobile operator’s favour, noises coming out of the company aren’t exactly painting a rosy picture. There are several reasons for concern, chief among them the ability of the company to engage in a protracted price war while ensuring it
One day, everything will be data. Voice will not exist as a separate service needing different technology. The transition in developed countries has been relatively slow. However, at the international level, large amounts of calls now move through Internet protocol and multiprotocol label switching-based networks. Every year, consumer software
The soon-to-be-promulgated changes to the laws that govern South Africa’s information and communications technology sector, found in the Electronic Communications Amendment Act and the Icasa Amendment Act, are still being digested by the sector. Of course, there are many problems with the changed laws, but they provide
