Communications minister Dina Pule hopes government will have a draft policy direction on spectrum ready sometime next month. She says her department has not rushed the process because “whatever process we undertake must benefit all South Africans”. “We don’t want to rush things.” Telecommunications operators
Conduct Telecommunications, a “last-mile” fibre-optic telecommunications operator owned by the Birchman Group, plans to extend its high-speed access network to more suburbs in Johannesburg in the next few months, including to Rosebank, Chislehurston and Rivonia. The company, which has raised funding from the Industrial Development Corp
The release last week of Research ICT Africa’s report on mobile phone pricing in Africa has provoked a little controversy. The facts are quite damning. SA has some of the highest mobile costs on the continent. This is odd given the country’s comparative wealth and infrastructural advantages. By rights, SA ought to have the cheapest phone
The tough times continue for Finnish phone giant Nokia, which has struggled to keep up with Apple and Android in the smartphone era. On Thursday, the company announced its results for the first quarter of 2012. Net sales fell sharply year over year, from US$13,6bn to $9,7bn. The company took a $1,7bn loss on those sales, and Colin
New Cell C CEO Alan Knott-Craig has told the department of communications’ policy colloquium in Midrand, which is taking place on Thursday and Friday this week, that the cost of accessing the Internet in SA needs to be cut in half. He lamented the telecommunications industry’s “failure” to offer the
Communications minister Dina Pule has called for a complete overhaul of government policies governing the country’s broad information and communications (ICT) sector, with new legislation to be gazetted before the end of next year. Pule was speaking at the department of communications’ ICT Colloquium in Midrand on Thursday
Social network giant Facebook is allegedly targeting 17 May as the potential date for its initial public offering, according to a TechCrunch report that cites unnamed sources familiar with the company. The IPO date might be off depending on how much time federal regulators need
After years of rigorous debate, the SA Bureau of Standards (SABS) has finally issued the final draft minimum standard for the set-top box decoders that will be used to receive digital terrestrial television signals in SA. The draft spec outlines a basic receiver that does not include a return path for interactivity. The draft spec, which was published
In the wake of the recent Flashfake Trojan, Kaspersky Lab has uncovered another threat to the Mac OS X environment. The malware, known as Backdoor (Backdoor.OSX.SabPub.a), was detected earlier this month and, like Flashfake, exploits a vulnerability in Java. Kaspersky says the number of users infected with this malware
Between 2010 and 2013, investors will spend more on submarine cable systems in Africa than anywhere else in the world, a new report from TeleGeography shows. Investors are expected to pump almost US$2bn into new undersea cable systems serving Africa in 2012 and 2013, on top of the more than $1bn spent in 2010 and 2011. In the same period, investments
