TalkCentral is SA’s first business technology podcast. Hosted by TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod and deputy editor Candice Jones, TalkCentral is a weekly wrap-up of the big SA technology stories we’ve covered over the past week. Meant as a complementary podcast to the ever-popular ZA Tech Show, the idea is to provide a succinct overview of what we’ve been covering on TechCentral, and to provide analysis behind and opinion about the news.
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Seacom, the undersea cable, may be offline until 22 July. A Seacom spokesman warned on Friday that repairs may only be finalised much later than initially thought because of various factors, including the depth under the ocean of fault. Seacom went offline on Monday, cutting off broadband users whose service providers buy capacity on exclusively on the Seacom system. The service disruptions have hit MWeb, part of Naspers, and downstream service providers from Dimension Data’s Internet Solutions particularly hard.
Flabby, fatigued, housebroken, over the hill. That description applies as much to the Shrek franchise as it does to its ogre protagonist in Shrek Forever After. The fourth (and supposedly final) film in the animated series picks up with a middle-aged Shrek wrangling with the drudgery of day-to-day family life. Worn down by days of burping babies, the evenings of repetitive dinner table jokes and the nights without sleep, the ogre is in the grips of a mid-life crisis.
Brazil has set aside money and expertise to help SA if it ditches its commitment to the European standard for digital terrestrial television and stumps for the standard used in the South American country instead. Andre Barbosa Filho, special advisor to the presidency of Brazil, says that if SA decides to adopt Brazil’s integrated service digital broadcasting terrestrial (ISDB-Tb) standard, it will bring in people to discuss joint ventures for the manufacturing of television sets, mobile television handsets and digital set-top boxes.
Former Cell C CEO, American national Jeffrey Hedberg, has been appointed to lead Telkom as group CEO in an acting capacity following a decision by Reuben September to end his contract early. September, who has been expected to leave Telkom in November, has elected to leave now. Senior sources at Telkom say developments in recent weeks, in which the board decided not to renew his contract, have taken a toll on September’s health.
Did you know SA is supposed to have a telecommunications museum? Few people do. But according to chapter 13 of the Electronic Communications Act, the department of communications must create and manage a museum that showcases the evolution of the history of communications technology in SA.
Global cellphone connections have reached the 5bn milestone, growing by 1bn in the last 18 months alone. Research by international…
Seacom has secured alternative capacity options for its customers, but Internet service providers will be charged a “small premium” to use them. A fault on the Seacom cable between Mumbai in India and Mombasa in Kenya cut off many Internet users on Monday, with repairs expected to take a week or more.
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.
Telecommunications operator Neotel is in discussions with the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) to have the once-off R100m licence…