For more than a year, I have been saying to anyone that will listen that long-term evolution and video will be a game changer in Africa. The logic for arguing this case was based on the fact that YouTube was in the top five of every country measured by
I often wonder if certain captains of industries are entirely disconnected from reality. It’s the only thing that can explain the breathtaking gall of Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub, who complained publicly that new regulations would cost his company R1bn in 2015, threatening to sue as a result
So, there’s more trouble at Fawlty Towers in Auckland Park. Just two years into her five-year term, SABC group CEO Lulama Mokhobo is stepping down, citing “exhaustion”. It’s a fresh setback for the public broadcaster, which has lurched from one crisis to another for the best part of a decade
Spare a thought for Shameel Joosub and Zunaid Bulbulia. The Vodacom and MTN chief executives must feel like they’re being unfairly picked on for running successful, profitable businesses. This week, telecommunications industry regulator Icasa published final regulations that will
A decade ago, fierce battles were fought to get a number of Africa’s state-owned telecommunications operators into private hands and to strip them of their monopoly privileges. This happened in all but two of what are now sub-Saharan Africa’s most successful economies. The real laggards are
Self-tracking, body hacking, life-logging, wearables, the quantified self — you may have heard these terms being thrown around a lot in the past year thanks to companies such as Fitbit, Nike+ and Jawbone. It was these three companies that were largely
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. It’s the phrase that’s launched a thousand editorials, most of them decrying the manifest evils of the insatiable 1%. But a large part of this increased inequality is driven not by greed or manipulation, but by technology
There’s an online land grab of the sort not seen since the dot-com bubble taking place in the global instant messaging (IM) market. WhatsApp Messenger, WeChat (partly owned by South Africa’s Naspers), Hangouts, Skype and BlackBerry Messenger, along with several smaller
Cameroon’s government is hanging on to its monopoly state telecommunications provider, Camtel, and the result is that the country now has some of the highest international and national wholesale fibre rates on the continent. The country refused World Bank funding because it
The year has not started well for advocates of net neutrality, the idea that all data on the Internet should be treated equally, without discrimination. A US federal court struck down a key part of the Open Internet Order, a set of Federal Communications Commission regulations
