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 ...

South Africa’s new debit order system in full effect from May

 

The South African Reserve Bank (SARB) says it will implement the AC/DebiCheck payment system from 1 May as part of its modernisation efforts.

The SARB said this project aims to address the increasing levels of abuse in the debit order payment system, known commercially as the early debit order (EDO) payment system.

“From 1 May 2021, all new and renegotiated EDO mandates will be originated in the AC/DebiCheck payment system and not in the current EDO payment system,” it said.

“Early debit orders will only be processed through the AC/DebiCheck payment system, while normal debit orders will still be processed later in the day as per current arrangements.”

How it works

Under the EDO system, consumers provide a mandate to a company or user to collect money from their bank account.

In the new AC/DebiCheck payment system, this mandate is now given to the banks – where consumers provide authorisation to their bank to release the funds from their account when a debit order is submitted by a company or user from whom they bought goods or contracted for a service.

The AC/DebiCheck payment system was first implemented on 1 August 2018, and has been going through various stages and processes of testing and integration.

Companies or users of the EDO system had until 1 November 2019 to fully implement the AC/DebiCheck payment system. Since the implementation date, companies or users have been requested to begin using the system for all EDO collections.

“Owing to the complex nature of the AC/DebiCheck system, a lengthy ramp-up period was required to ensure that all stakeholders in the EDO collections ecosystem had implemented and tested their internal processes and interfaces to the AC/DebiCheck payment system,” the SARB said.

The central bank added said that the AC/DebiCheck project is an initiative of the collections industry that ensures the safety and efficiency of the NPS, and the mitigation of rogue and fraudulent behavior in the collections system.


Read: Absa launches QR payments

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