Within 18 months, SA will experience a broadband and communications boom not witnessed since the Internet growth years of the late 1990s. That’s the view of Vodacom Business managing executive Ermano Quartero, who says that by then 400Mbit/s and higher connections into businesses will be commonplace and 10Mbit/s into the home will become the new standard.
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Apple’s iPad could go on sale in SA within a matter of weeks. Core Group, Apple’s sole local distributor, has confirmed it is in talks with the US company about bringing the tablet computer to the country.
Core Group executive director Rutger-Jan van Spaandonk says the company has held “lengthy discussions” with Apple and that Core will distribute both versions of the iPad – the cellular-ready product and the Wi-Fi-only configuration – exclusively to the SA market.
It’s long been government’s desire to bridge the digital divide, to get communications technology in the hands of the rural poor. But its every attempt to address the problem has failed. Now commercial operators may achieve what government couldn’t. The late Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, the former communications minister, had her heart in the right place. She genuinely wanted people in underserviced areas to get access to the latest communications technology.
Telkom has resumed its high-profile anti-Neotel taunts on Gauteng billboards, this time erecting a giant sign just metres in front of its rival’s new head office in Midrand, north of Johannesburg. In a clear reference to Neotel’s orange corporate branding, the Telkom hoarding says: “Remember, exercise caution when you see orange.”
The seventh episode of SA’s business technology podcast, TalkCentral, is now available for download. This week, your hosts Duncan McLeod and Candice Jones talk about the significant flow of news around MTN’s interim financial results presentation, including plans by its SA subsidiary to build a rural broadband network. We also talk about Cell C’s problems trying to trademark its new logo, communications minister Siphiwe Nyanda’s press conference on digital terrestrial television, Vodacom in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Super 5 Media’s letter to Icasa.
MTN SA plans to build a third-generation (3G) mobile network to offer wireless broadband to consumers in outlying areas. It will build the 3G network at 900MHz. TechCentral has learnt that MTN expects significant growth in demand for broadband services outside SA’s cities over the next few years and so is keen to boost its 3G coverage in these areas.
A plan by the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) to cut wholesale call termination rates may be delayed until next year, parties close to the process say. The rates, which were supposed to be cut last month as a first step on a two-year glide path down, are the fees the operators charge each other to carry calls onto their networks.
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) president Joseph Kabila has intervened in the ongoing dispute between Vodacom and Congolese Wireless Network (CWN), the junior partner in the JSE-listed cellular group’s operation in the troubled central African nation, to try to find a solution to a protracted dispute between the parties. Earlier this year Vodacom and CWN agreed to international arbitration proceedings in Brussels after relations between the two groups appeared to break down completely.
Cellphone group Vodacom and its partner, financial services firm Nedbank, will launch M-Pesa, Kenya’s wildly popular money transfer service, in SA at the end of August. The two companies have set 31 August as the date for the product’s official SA launch.
SA’s cellular communications market is about to get a big shake-up as two players, one new, Telkom Mobile, and one reinvigorated, Cell C, get ready to go toe to toe with each other and incumbents MTN and Vodacom. SA’s smallest mobile operator, Cell C, has never had an easy time of it. Launched a decade ago after a particularly troubled birth, the operator has faced an uphill battle against dominant incumbents MTN and Vodacom.