Parliament’s joint committee on ethics and members’ interests has launched a formal probe into allegations of a conflict of interest involving communications minister Dina Pule and last May’s ICT Indaba in Cape Town. The committee, which is chaired
When major corporate brands start bashing each other over the head in public, you know that commercial rivalry between them has reached an intense level. This is exactly what’s happening in South Africa’s mobile industry, where Vodacom, MTN and Cell C have taken to sniping at each other at every
It reads like a bad spy novel: a secret unit of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is accused of spending the last seven years covertly infiltrating – or hacking – over a hundred large US corporations and stealing terabytes of sensitive data from their computer systems. Unit 61398 of the
The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) has hinted that on-network calling plans such as the one recently launched by Vodacom could be anticompetitive and may require regulatory intervention. Big operators often take advantage of their
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and MeerKAT radio telescope projects have been allocated R1,9bn over the next three years, according to the 2013 national budget tabled by finance minister Pravin Gordhan on Wednesday. A large portion of the international SKA project
The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) said on Wednesday that it sees “no reason” why mobile termination rates, the wholesale fees operators charge to carry calls between their networks, should not fall to between 15c and 25c/minute from the 40c they will
After repeated delays, communications minister Dina Pule says the options for Telkom’s future are being finalised in consultation with the telecommunications operator’s board. Pule put options to cabinet last year but these were returned following recent board changes that saw Jabu
The Independent Communications Authority South Africa (Icasa) has turned down a request from mobile operator Cell C to postpone this Friday’s planned reduction in mobile termination rates, saying the cuts are part of a regulatory process that can’t be suspended. Cell C wanted
Consumers who have been looking forward to Telkom’s new 20Mbit/s and 40Mbit/s digital subscriber line (DSL) broadband products are going to have to dig deep for access to the ultra-high-speed network. Prices from the country’s
MTN will implement a 200MB/month “fair-usage” cap on the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) from next month in a move designed to reduce load on its network. MTN and other operators have complained in the past about a small percentage of BlackBerry customers who download well