Faulty neon lighting on the Telkom Tower in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, is believed to be the cause of a fire that damaged to the structure’s giant soccer ball on Friday morning. The telecommunications company erected the ball earlier this year to mark the 2010 World Cup.

With thousands of users from around the world and around 70PB (that’s petabytes) of data handled on a daily basis, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) has a surprisingly simple technology requirement.

Government will use the development of communications infrastructure to boost employment in the country. Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan delivered the country’s medium-term budget on Wednesday, reining in public spending and promising that infrastructure development would be used to meet government’s employment targets.

Cell C has made a pit stop in Polokwane in its race to hook up the country’s main towns and cities to its third-generation mobile network. Polokwane, the capital of Limpopo province, will have 67% network coverage for now, slightly lower

The pressures of SA’s Sim card registration law appear to have eased for mobile operator MTN, which released its subscriber numbers for its third financial quarter on Thursday. The group’s figures for SA show an increase of 3,9% to 17,7m

Triple-play services, consisting of television, telephony and broadband Internet access, delivered over the same physical cable infrastructure, are not something one typically associates with African telecommunications. Now, however, a Kenyan company, Wananchi, is planning to bring fibre connectivity to hundreds of thousands of homes in East Africa, in the process remaking how a continent thinks about what can be done with high-speed connectivity.

A consortium of IT professionals representing global big business have formed an alliance to find a way of bringing cloud computing into the business environment in a more structured way that prevents lock-in to any one computing supplier.

“Where’s the business model?” echoes the cry of that most thick-skinned of beasts, the greater suited market analyst (Homo economicus). Part war cry, part mating call, we’ve grown accustomed to hearing this phrase every time a website with no obvious revenue stream starts to attract attention. For years, each mention of Facebook brought out a squawking chorus of them. But Homo economicus is now deathly silent.

We’ve all heard the big numbers: there are more than 4,6bn mobile phones in the world, many countries have more cellphones than people, and there will be more smartphones than PCs in most countries by 2013.

The Internet Service Providers’ Association of SA (Ispa) has teamed up with the SA Police Service and the Film and Publications Board to combat child pornography in SA. Ispa regulatory advisor Dominic Cull says