In this episode of TalkCentral, your hosts Duncan McLeod and Craig Wilson chat about last week’s big department of communications’ policy colloquium. We discuss whether anything will flow out of the event and the likely impact that communications minister Dina Pule and her director-general Rosey Sekese will have on the technology
The reaction of various interest groups to a year-long study by Research ICT Africa into prepaid mobile prices across the continent and SA’s relatively poor showing in it are perhaps not surprising. They nevertheless prompt clarification and hopefully further debate before the issue of the high price of communications in SA is again swept
Just days after MWeb announced it was cutting the price of its uncapped digital subscriber line products to R199/month for both 384kbit/s and 1Mbit/s clients, Afrihost has effectively cut its capped broadband pricing and promised uncapped product pricing will soon be cut, too. Afrihost says some capped users will receive double their bandwidth
With the abundance of cables landing on SA’s shores, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s one the most connected countries in the world. In a sense, it soon will be: there’s no shortage of international capacity on the way. What’s lacking is widespread local access to take advantage of it. The problem isn’t without solutions, but
Two weeks after Telkom cut the cost to Internet service providers of accessing its fixed-line digital subscriber line (DSL) network by 30%, MWeb has slashed the prices of two of its uncapped data products. The price of its 384kbit/s and 1Mbit/s products have both been cut to R199/month, from R219/month and R299/month respectively. However, the
Chinese networking equipment manufacturer ZTE is taking ZTE Mzanzi, an SA company in which it has a minority equity stake, to the high court in Pretoria in an effort to have an interdict the latter company won against Telkom overturned. ZTE Mzanzi, led by Tumi Magasa, won the interim court interdict at the end of March, preventing
The Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) has hit back at a recent report by Research ICT Africa, which criticised the authority over higher retail and wholesale mobile call rates, saying the report fails to consider various costs that affect SA operators. “SA’s prices are comparatively high; the authority has no
A new research study has found that SA has some of the least affordable prepaid mobile tariffs on the continent and is falling behind many of its neighbours because of high wholesale call rates between operators. The findings are contained in a Research ICT Africa policy brief, with research conducted over the past year
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
The department of communications’ policy summit next week has generally been welcomed by analysts and industry players, who say the event is long overdue, especially in light of Africa slipping down world connectedness rankings. Communications minister Dina Pule said on Tuesday that the colloquium had been
