Fledgling fibre-to-the-home infrastructure provider LinkAfrica Group, formerly known as i3 Africa, is finally ready to begin its trial network in Umhlanga, north of Durban, and is also gearing up to begin rolling out fibre in Pretoria and Cape Town. In March 2011, TechCentral
Telkom’s share price fell by almost 6% on Monday to R19,11 to close at its low of the day and at a fresh eight-year low as investors continued taking fright over the operator’s poor financial performance and government’s controversial decision not to support a
Having shed its partnership with Ericsson, Japan’s Sony is still trying to find its feet in the Android handset market. Despite marketing capabilities to rival Samsung’s, Sony hasn’t managed to cement itself a place in the smartphone war. The Xperia S looks unlikely to change that. The top-end Xperia is a
Cape Town-based social media payment service ZunguZ has formed a partnership with local online micro-loans company GetBucks to offer Facebook users loans of up to R500 via the popular social network. The companies claim their service is the world’s first social media credit facility. While GetBucks
Telkom could win the race to be the first large telecommunications operator in SA to launch a commercial fourth-generation (4G) mobile network using long-term evolution (LTE) technology. TechCentral has established exclusively that Telkom has been working closely with Korea’s KT Corp on plans to build
Telkom CEO Nombulelo Moholi admitted that the telecommunications group had made a hash of its investments elsewhere in Africa. “A lot of the investments we made we shouldn’t have made,” she told analysts and journalists in Rosebank, Johannesburg
The primary focus of Telkom’s mobile arm, 8ta, will in future be on providing next-generation mobile broadband more than voice services, the acting CEO of the mobile unit, Jacques Schindehütte, said on Friday. Schindehütte, who is also Telkom’s
8ta, has greatly increased its subscriber numbers, but Telkom’s mobile arm continues to cost the operator billions of rand a year. The number of active 8ta mobile subscribers for the financial year ended March 2012 increased by 213,2% to 1,5m, with total subscribers now numbering slightly over 3m, 154,5% up on
In a development that must be exercising the minds of Telkom’s management team, the telecommunications operator’s revenues from data fell by 1,7% in the 2012 financial year to the end of March. Data is the fastest-growing area of the telecoms industry, so the decline in revenues is concerning
As expected, Telkom has turned in a weak set of financial results for the year ended March 2012. Headline earnings per share have slumped by 33% to 324,7c, with the number of fixed lines in service falling below 4m for the first time in decades. As a result, the group’s board has decided not to pay a
