With Seacom down and the World Cup approaching its final weekend, Ben Kelly, Duncan McLeod and Simon Dingle gather to discuss the Seacom outage, the local-loop barrier for bandwidth, Wired magazine and its device strategy, Google Me, and much, much more

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) is up and running after international connectivity troubles delayed its opening on Monday. The opening…

Spam related to the 2010 soccer World Cup was nine times worse than when during the last World Cup, held…

Internet service provider Web Africa has realigned its reseller model, effectively cutting its per-gigabyte fees by R14/GB. The new structure, which it calls “hosting by utilisation”, allows Internet resellers to control up to 20 domains and 20GB of pooled traffic for a monthly fee of R400.

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.

Vincent Raseroka has been appointed as acting CEO of Multi-Links, Telkom’s deeply troubled operation in Nigeria. Raseroka will hold the post while the telecommunications group searches for someone to replace Jeffrey Hedberg, who has been appointed as Telkom CEO, replacing Reuben September. Raseroka, who had been Multi-Links’s chief operating officer, takes over with immediate effect. He was previously CEO of SAA technical and held various executive positions at packaging business Nampak.

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.