ADSL on its last legs in South Africa

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  By   Daniel Puchert Partially state-owned telecommunications company Telkom announced in its financial results for the year ending 31 March 2025 that its ADSL subscribers had more than halved to under 30,000. According to the company’s operational data, ADSL lines decreased from 64,959 in March 2024 to 29,770. This 54.2% decline highlights that the legacy broadband technology is slowly approaching the end of the road. Telkom’s ADSL business peaked at the end of March 2016 with 1.01 million subscribers — two years after fibre upstart Vumatel  broke ground in Parkhurst . What followed was a sharp decline in Telkom ADSL subscribers. Customers connected to its copper networks decreased by more than 500,000 over the next four years. This was partly driven by Telkom itself, which began actively switching off its copper network in some neighbourhoods. If it did not have fibre in the area, it would offer a “fixed line lookalike” wireless service that ran over its cellular ...

Nigerian Adekunle Becomes World's Highest Paid Robotics Engineer

Nigeria: Silas Adekunle - the Smartest Gaming Guru in the World

Photo: Reach Robotics
Silas Adekunle.
At a time when Nigeria is trying to catch up with the technological advancement of developed nations, one of her own, 26-year-old Silas Adekunle, is taking over the robotics world with his ingenuity and innovation.
Adekunle was born and had some of his education in Nigeria before relocating to the UK when he was a teenager. Having completed his secondary school education, he proceeded to the University of the West of England where he graduated with a first class graduate in Robotics.
In 2013, he founded Reach Robotics, a company with an aim to infuse gaming and augmented reality to perform functions. Ever ready to learn, he gained experience on robotics within a space of 4 years and also became a team leader of Robotics In Schools programme, a programme which encourages and pays attention to students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). It was during his involvement in the programme that he thought of developing robotics to make education more entertaining for STEM students.
In 2017, Mekamon, the world's first gaming robot was born. A part of its unique feature is the ability to customise the gaming bot to perform personalised functions. Despite being hit by disbelief when he was seeking funds, his initial launch of Mekamon sold 500 bots, generating $7.5 million.
Owing to this milestone success, Adekunle has received support from various organisations including London Venture Partners $10 million (N360 million). In the same year, Reach Robotics signed a deal with Apple securing exclusive sales in Apple stores.
Not only have his works gained recognition, but he was also listed in the 2018 Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe: Technology.
He notes that the secrets to his success are balance, shared ideas, time management and being oneself.
Update: Adekunle has now become the highest paid robotics engineer in the world and has also been described as the smartest robotics engineer in the world.
This article was originally published on the 13th of June, 2018.

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Nigerian Adekunle Becomes World Highest Paid Robotics Engineer
Silas Adekunle, a 26-year-old Nigerian, credited for building the world's first gaming robot, has just become the… Read more »

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