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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 ...
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Blue Origin’s latest launch brings it close to sending humans to space Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2274834-blue-origins-latest-launch-brings-it-close-to-sending-humans-to-space/#ixzz6sqYvIQ59

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 SPACE 15 April 2021

By Leah Crane

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The New Shepard booster after returning to the landing pad on 14 April

Blue Origin

Blue Origin, the space flight company founded by Jeff Bezos, has completed what may be its last test flight before attempting to put astronauts aboard its New Shepard rocket. On 14 April, the US-based company launched the spacecraft – without a crew – to just past the edge of space and then returned it to the ground.

This marked the second successful Blue Origin test flight in 2021. Before the launch, four of the company’s executives acted as “stand-in astronauts”, doing everything that actual passengers would do before flying aboard New Shepard.

They climbed to the top of the launch tower, got into the capsule, buckled in and checked the communications systems. Then they closed the hatch briefly before reopening it and getting out before the launch. For the flight, a test dummy nicknamed Mannequin Skywalker sat in the capsule.

Read more: Blue Origin assembles space industry dream team to build moon lander

The rocket flew about 100 kilometres up before releasing the crew capsule and returning to a landing pad near the launch site in Texas. The capsule spent about 3 minutes in microgravity before coming back down, its descent slowed by a set of parachutes.

Blue Origin hasn’t announced when the first crewed New Shepard flight will be, only saying that it will bring passengers to space “soon” during an online livestream of the launch. “Even if it’s not the next flight, it seems like they will have people onboard in the next few,” says space analyst Laura Forczyk. “We’ve all been wondering what’s been holding them up with their crewed flights, and maybe nothing is now.”

Those first passengers will probably be Blue Origin employees rather than paying customers until the company establishes a track record of safety with crewed flights, she says. “Eventually the crew will be tourists and researchers, and astronauts may be able to train for missions in lower gravity in one of these suborbital vehicles.”

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Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2274834-blue-origins-latest-launch-brings-it-close-to-sending-humans-to-space/#ixzz6sqZ0oGem

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