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 ...

GOVT MOVING AHEAD WITH PLAN TO SCRAP SOME BENEFITS FOR PUBLIC SERVANTS - COSATU

 Government’s proposal to labour during the latest round of wage negotiations, which deadlocked, proposes a holistic redesign of the remuneration framework among others as it turned down most of the money-related demands by public servants.

FILE: Thousands of public servants march in the Pretoria CBD as they make their way to Union Buildings on 10 August 2010. Picture: EWN

JOHANNESBURG - Government appears to be pushing ahead with its plan to explore scrapping some allowances and benefits afforded to public servants, including pay progression and the occupational specific dispensation.

Government’s proposal to labour during the latest round of wage negotiations, which deadlocked, proposes a holistic redesign of the remuneration framework among others as it turned down most of the money-related demands by public servants.

Friday’s tense talks deadlocked after organised labour raised its discontent with what they said was government’s attempts to erode workers’ hard-fought gains.

Although the government does not outright do away with the allowances in its counter-proposal that was seen by Eyewitness News, it states that according to the budget tabled in Parliament, only 1.4% has been budgeted for the wage bill to address employment growth and all other allowances and subsidies.

When this did not pass in negotiations, labour said that the employer instead suggested that all increases due for pay progressions and the other allowances be redirected to the cost-of-living adjustment which only addressed the salary increase demand.

Chairperson of the Cosatu public sector unions’ joint mandating committee, Mugwena Maluleke: "They are moving forward with the abolition of those benefits under the pretext that they want a new remuneration framework."

Labour has further rejected the 0% increase offered by government.

Following the deadlock, unions said that they will declare a dispute at the public sector coordinating bargaining council.

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