ADSL on its last legs in South Africa

-
Image
  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 ...
Post a Comment

RUSSIAN DRONE PILOT UNCOVERS RARE VIEW OF SOVIET UNION AIRCRAFT ‘BONEYARDS’

-

 Cold War Cool.

When the pandemic first started to majorly impact international air travel, many airlines decided to park their unused planes in desert storage. For example, many Asian airlines like Cathay Pacific and Singapore Airlines are storing their jumbos in Alice Springs.

Many planes end up in desert ‘boneyards’ at the end of their career, too. But despite Russia’s enormous size, the country has few genuine deserts where you’d store decommissioned aircraft – indeed, many aircraft end up in urban environments, quietly decaying out in the suburbs.

@_klary, a Russian journalist and drone pilot, has shared some remarkable drone shots of Eastern European boneyards filled with all sorts of obscure aircraft from the former Soviet Union – planes that many Westerners may have never had the chance to fly in or even see (other than maybe in some Reagan-era fearmongering news bulletin).

Take this bird’s eye view he shared of an urban boneyard in the village of Grushino in eastern Ukraine. Soviet-era fighter jets like Sukhoi Su-34s and Mikoyan MiG-29s can be seen parked haphazardly in an abandoned lot, alongside smaller ‘trainer’ aircraft and a passenger jet that has ‘CCCP’ (i.e. ‘USSR’) emblazoned on its wings.

It serves as a poignant reminder of the perils of the Cold War when the USA and the USSR were locked in an ever-escalating arms race for world domination – as well as how drastically the collapse of the Soviet Union continues to shape daily life and politics in the former Eastern Bloc.

RELATED: Unlikely New Country Keeping Cuba’s Tourism Industry Alive

In a world where air travel is largely dominated by Boeing and Airbus’ planes, it’s easy to forget that the USSR (and later Russia) had its own ecosystem of passenger jets: like these Tupolev and Ilyushin planes @_klary captured in Moscow.

Perhaps the most striking photo he’s ever taken is of this abandoned Antonov An-24 turboprop that’s literally had a hotel built around it, just off the M4 “Don” highway. Our intrepid drone pilot explains that “the owners of the hotel for truckers decided to make it different from the others.”

Different is indeed the operative term…

RELATED: The Weirdest Communist Cars You Never Knew Existed

If you thought Russian fighter planes was the scariest thing you could see with a drone, check out this Australian photographer who specialises in capturing footage of sharks near your favourite beaches…

Read Next

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

If everyone on Earth sat in the ocean at once, how much would sea level rise?

-
Image
  There are a lot of people, but the oceans are very big.   Rosley Majid/EyeEm via Getty Images If everyone on Earth sat in the ocean at once, how much would sea level rise? March 29, 2021 2.07pm SAST Author Tony E. Wong Assistant Professor of Mathematical Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology Disclosure statement Tony E. Wong does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. Partners Rochester Institute of Technology  provides funding as a member of The Conversation US. The Conversation is funded by the National Research Foundation, eight universities, including the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Rhodes University, Stellenbosch University and the Universities of Cape Town, Johannesburg, Kwa-Zulu Natal, Pretoria, and South Africa. It is hosted by the Universities of the Witwatersrand and Wester...
Read more

Andrew Watson: The 'most influential' black footballer for decades lost to history

-
Image
  By Andrew Aloia BBC Sport Last updated on 11 October 2021 11 October 2021 . From the section Football Watson was a trailblazer who helped transform how football was played There are two murals of black footballers facing one another across an alleyway in Glasgow. One helped shape football as we know it, the other is Pele. Andrew Watson captained Scotland to a 6-1 win over England on his debut in 1881. He was a pioneer, the world's first black international, but for more than a century the significance of his achievements went unrecognised. Research conducted over the past three decades has left us with some biographical details: a man descended of slaves and of those who enslaved them, born in Guyana, raised to become an English gentleman and famed as one of Scottish football's first icons. And yet today, 100 years on from his death aged 64, Watson remains something of an enigma, the picture built around him a fractured one. His grainy, faded, sepia image evokes many differen...
Read more

Which countries have the world’s largest coal reserves?

-
Image
  Visual Capitalist Elements   | September 15, 2021 | 8:58 am   Intelligence   Australia   USA   Coal   The Countries With the Largest Coal Reserves Cheap and abundant coal remains one of the largest sources of energy worldwide, even as governments set out goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While jurisdictions in Europe and North America have been phasing out coal use in power generation, it has been on the rise in Asia. China and India are scrambling to provide electricity to a growing population and relying on coal power plants to meet demands despite the environmental costs. SIGN UP FOR THE ENERGY DIGEST Sign Up This infographic takes a look into the  BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2021 , and the 11 countries that make up  89%  of the coal reserves globally. Coal Reserves, by Country While countries need to phase out coal by 2040 to achieve the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5ºC, consumption in key ...
Read more