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 ...

Eviction of black farmers raises questions about readiness for land reform

 

The eviction of farmers from their profitable farming enterprises by “rogue officials” of the department of agriculture, rural development & land reform has resulted in claims of more than R2bn being instituted against the department, according to the 2019/2020 report of the auditor-general.

Farmers who have lost hundreds of thousands of rand as a result of the evictions told Business Day the “dubious eviction orders” go against the government’s plans to release 700,000ha of state land on 30-year leaseholds to black farmers. The 700,000ha is land acquired by the former SA government for the consolidation of the homelands and which, after 1994, remained in the hands of the central government...

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