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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Congo Digs In Over Renewal of Billionaire Gertler’s Oil Permits By Bloomberg• 21 June 2021 Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler

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Democratic Republic of Congo and Dan Gertler are headed for a fight over the Israeli billionaire’s two oil blocks bordering Uganda.

Congo’s oil ministry sent a letter to Gertler’s Oil of DRCongo when the permits expired on June 16 asking for all data and payments related to the project’s 2010 production-sharing agreement.

Gertler’s company still controls the permits because they are under force majeure, a spokesman said by email. “As a result, there is no change to the status of the licenses and Oil of DRCongo has written to the Ministry of Hydrocarbons to confirm this,” he said.

Development of the two blocks on Lake Albert has been complicated by U.S. sanctions against Gertler for alleged corruption in his mining and oil deals in Congo. Gertler denies all wrongdoing and has never been charged.

Congo has discussed transferring the permits to several other oil companies, including Tullow Oil Plc, Total SE and Eni SpA. Total already controls the oil fields on the Ugandan side of the Lake. The French company signed a $5.1 billion deal with Uganda in April to develop a pipeline to ship the oil to a port in Tanzania.

Read More:
Total Signs Agreements with Uganda on East Africa Oil Project
Congo Wants to Sell Gertler’s Oil Blocks on Ugandan Border (1)

Congo has yet to negotiate access to the proposed pipeline or to find an alternative way to ship the oil, which justifies the continuation of force majeure, the Oil of DRCongo spokesman said.

A spokesman for Congo’s President Felix Tshisekedi declined to comment.

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