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 ...

Trip to Mars? You’ll die on the way, says Elon Musk

 

Trip to Mars? You’ll die on the way, says Elon Musk

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has launched more than 100 rockets in the past decade and plans to establish a human society on Mars
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has launched more than 100 rockets in the past decade and plans to establish a human society on Mars
JIM WATSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Elon Musk has predicted that “a bunch of people will probably die” going to Mars during attempts to populate the red planet.

The billionaire chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, who has predicted a manned Mars landing by 2026, warned that the voyage to the planet would be an “arduous and dangerous journey where you may not come back alive”.

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“You might die, it’s going to be uncomfortable and probably won’t have good food,” he said during an interview with Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize Foundation, which rewards scientific innovation.

Musk is the world’s second-richest man, with a fortune of $151 billion
Musk is the world’s second-richest man, with a fortune of $151 billion
REUTERS

Musk plans to establish a human society on Mars and set up SpaceX in 2002 specifically to build rockets to carry thousands of human settlers to the planet.

“Going to Mars reads like

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