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 ...

Tharisa plans a platinum metals smelter in SA and new Zimbabwe mines

 

Chrome and platinum group metals (PGMs) miner Tharisa is set to join a rarefied club as it builds a smelter to produce finished metals and expands into Zimbabwe as well as potentially other minerals in SA.

With an unusually strong interim period behind it in which its earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (ebitda) of $124m, or R1.7bn, outstripped full-year ebitda for the previous four years, Tharisa is moving away from its single asset near Brits, North West...

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