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 ...

Here’s how much the average taxpayer earns in Joburg, Cape Town and Durban

 

The South African Revenue Service (SARS) has published its tax statistics for the 2020 financial year, providing a breakdown of what the average taxpayer looks like in South Africa.

The report shows that most assessed taxpayers are based in Gauteng, and that the province also has the highest average taxable income at R435,239.

This is followed by Western Cape at R363,758, Limpopo at R346,517, Mpumalanga at R342,393, KwaZulu-Natal at R329,141 and Northern Cape at R320,289.

Meanwhile, the Eastern Cape and Free State Province have the next lowest average taxable income at R307,202 and R291,409 respectively.

SARS’ data also shows a clear difference between female and male taxpayers.

When looking at the number of individuals with taxable income between zero and R500,000, males on average were 8.5% higher than females.

However, as taxable income increased the proportion of females declined significantly. Only 32% of taxpayers with taxable income between R750,000 and R1 million in 2019 were females.

This proportion declines further to only 14.1% of those with taxable income of more than R5 million.

The proportion of females as a percentage of the total number of taxpayers assessed increased from 43.8% in 2016 to 45.8% in 2019. This was mainly due to more females than males becoming liable for submitting tax returns.

Distribution by source of income

The report shows that nearly 4.3 million individual taxpayers received income in 2019 from remuneration, pensions or annuities.

More than 2.8 million of these taxpayers also received annual payments in the form of bonuses or leave pay.

In 2019 almost 339,000 individual taxpayers earned local interest income that exceeded the exemption limit applicable for interest.

Interest from a South African source earned by any natural person under 65 years of age, up to R23,800 per annum, and persons 65 years and older, up to R34.500 per annum, is exempt from taxation.

The taxable portion of local interest increased from R18.9 billion in 2016 to R28.9 billion in 2019.

The number of taxpayers with taxable foreign interest increased from 216,706 in 2016 to 236,386 in 2019.


Read: South Africa’s middle class is running out of money – here’s how many will struggle to survive a financial emergency

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