Crime is threatening to tear apart South Africa’s fledgling fibre-optic telecommunications industry as naked corruption by local government officials, deliberate damage to infrastructure by criminal syndicates and repeated threats of physical violence force sector players to stop building networks in parts of the country that desperately need
South Africa’s largest mobile operator, Vodacom, has begun charging an 11c interconnection fee to carry short message service (SMS) text onto its network. The move comes after Cell C allegedly began offering wireless application service providers owned by Blue Label Telecoms the ability to send and receive messages to and from any
Parliament’s joint committee on ethics and members’ interests has more than 2 000 pages of evidence against communications minister Dina Pule, The Star Africa Edition reported on Wednesday. Pule and her alleged boyfriend, Phosane Mngqibisa, are accused of appointing
Six months after Sprint announced it was in talks to sell 70% of its equity to Japan’s SoftBank for US$20bn, Dish Network Corp, a US direct-to-home satellite pay-TV operator with 14m subscribers, has put in a bid of $25,5bn to buy the wireless communications firm. It’s a move
Two gigabits per second! That’s more than 50 times faster than the very fastest digital subscriber line service available from Telkom, which tops out at 40Mbit/s. Yet a Sony-backed Internet service provider in Japan, So-net Entertainment, is offering 2Gbit/s access in around Tokyo. Upload speeds
The Independent Communication Authority of South Africa (Icasa) should be pursuing iBurst parent Wireless Business Solutions (WBS) for using spectrum unlawfully rather than simply trying to get the company to settle its outstanding fees. This is the view of Icasa
The competition appeal court has agreed to allow Telkom and the Competition Commission to withdraw their separate appeals in the long-running case involving anticompetitive abuses by the telecommunications operator between 1999 and 2004
Turn-by-turn navigation from Google has come to more African markets. Android and iPhone users in Kenya, Ghana, Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire can now get the service through the Google Maps application. Users can search for popular locations by name rather than
Financially distressed pay-TV operator TopTV, owned by On Digital Media and which is under “business rescue” in terms of the Companies Act, is discontinuing two of its channels this week. “As TopTV continues to operate under the business rescue plan … it has become necessary
JSE-listed technology solutions company Datacentrix has lifted revenue by 9% to R1,9bn in its financial year ended February 2013, but sharp downward pressure on margins led to a 16% decline in headline earnings per share. “The past few years, though profitable, have been
