Browsing: Neotel

$650m Wacs lights up Africa’s west coast

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The West African Cable System (Wacs), the latest submarine cable to land on African shores, has arrived, offering SA operators 500Gbit/s of capacity at launch. The system, which has a design capacity of 5,1Tbit/s, makes use of both 10Gbit/s and 40Gbit/s technology on different segments and will

Knott-Craig makes his first move at Cell C

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Alan Knott-Craig has played his first card since being appointed as CEO of Cell C on 1 April. The operator has released a new least-cost routing (LCR) product, called LCRAnyNet, that Knott-Craig says will “reduce the cost of telecommunications for business and will bring down the barrier for small

Icasa in preemptive strike over spectrum fees

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The Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) is seeking court protection in the wake of news that an unnamed telecommunications operator wants to pay the revised radio frequency spectrum fees that were meant to come into effect on 1 April 2011 but which were instead deferred until this year. Until April 2012, Icasa was

SA’s giant new sub-sea cable is here

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The 14 000km West African Cable System (Wacs), the first new sub-sea telecommunications cable along Africa’s west coast since Sat-3 was launched 11 years ago, will be launched officially in about a month’s time. Angus Hay, co-chair of the Wacs management committee and chief technology officer at Neotel, says

Neotel grows consumer base, but still lags

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Neotel has doubled the number of retail subscribers on its network in the past 11 months, growing this customer segment from 50 000 to 100 000, according to CEO Sunil Joshi. However, the company, licensed in the mid-2000s as the first competitor to incumbent Telkom, is still struggling to make much on an impact in the consumer market, with less

Africa coming into focus for Neotel parent

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India’s Tata Communications, which owns a controlling interest in local telecommunications operator Neotel, says SA is crucial to the company’s strategy of expanding into Southern Africa and into the continent more broadly. To do this, Tata Communications CEO Vinod Kumar says the company needs to deepen existing partnerships in the region and forge new ones. He won’t be drawn into acquisition

Rural broadband: why it’s so hard to do

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The lack of fibre-optic transmission networks outside SA’s main urban centres could prove a huge stumbling block to rolling out next-generation long-term evolution (LTE) networks in rural areas and add significant costs for operators wanting to meet roll-out obligations for these networks. Richard Morse, group technology executive

LTE spectrum: MTN wants ‘interim relief’

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MTN SA urgently requires access to spectrum bands that will allow it to build a commercial network using next-generation long-term evolution (LTE) technology and MD Karel Pienaar believes the operator should be given early access ahead of a formal spectrum licensing process by the Independent Communications

Pay TV gears up for battle royal

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MultiChoice flexed its legal muscle this week to keep the National Consumer ­Commission at bay, using a technicality in an attempt to squash the commission’s case against it. The pay-TV broadcaster was before the Consumer Tribunal this week because the commission believes that its subscriber contract violates the

MTN warns of ‘regulatory failure’

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Cellular operator MTN has warned that the Independent Communications Authority of SA’s (Icasa’s) draft proposals for licensing of spectrum in high-demand spectrum bands have the “high risk” of leading to “regulatory failure”. Efficient licensing of spectrum in the two bands in question