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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 ...

The United Arab Emirates has released its first Mars photo, taken by the Hope Probe

 Kevin Shalvey , Business Insider US

 Feb 15, 2021, 10:32 AM
A photo of Mars taken by the United Arab Emirates Space Agency.
  • The United Arab Emirates Space Agency released its first image of Mars on Sunday.
  • The photo was taken by its Hope Probe, which reached the red planet on Tuesday. 
  • NASA's Perseverance rover is scheduled to land next Thursday. 
  • Visit Business Insider for more stories.

The United Arab Emirates Space Agency on Sunday released its first photo of Mars, taken by its Hope Probe. 

"The transmission of the Hope Probe's first image of Mars is a defining moment in our history and marks the UAE joining advanced nations involved in space exploration," Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan said on Twitter

He added: "We hope this mission will lead to new discoveries about Mars which will benefit humanity."

On Tuesday, the UAE mission became the first from an Arab country to reach the red planet, Earth's neighbor. Space experts put the chance of entering Mars orbit at about 50%, CNBC reported. 

The Hope Probe took about seven months to reach Mars. The UAE agency planned for it to orbit the red planet for a full Martian year, about two Earth years, studying the planet's atmosphere, according to the agency

The first image transmitted from the UAE probe was captured from 25,000 km above the planet's surface, according to the agency. 

The UAE Hope Probe was one of three spacecraft due to reach the red planet this month. China's Tianwen-1 craft, which shared its first photo of Mars on February 5, arrived a day after the UAE probe. NASA's Perseverance rover is scheduled to land on the planet next Thursday. 

In a video posted on Friday, an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory described the period of entry, descent, and landing on the planet as "seven minutes of terror."

After breaking the Martian atmosphere, Perseverance will take about seven minutes to reach the ground, said Swati Mohan, Mars 2020 Guidance, Navigation & Control Operations lead. 

"If there's one thing we know, it's that landing on Mars is never easy," said Marc Etkind, NASA associate administrator for communications, in a statement posted on NASA's website.

When Perseverance lands on Thursday, it'll have a solar-powered helicopter called Ingenuity in its belly. NASA plans to launch one or more flights within 30 days, according to its website

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