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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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Zimbabwe to allow miners to export portion of their gold

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 As the bank gradually eases its control of gold trading in the country.

Image: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg

Zimbabwe’s central bank will allow large-scale gold mining companies to directly export a portion of their bullion, an official said, as the bank gradually eases its control of gold trading in the country.

The central bank-owned Fidelity Printers and Refiners (FPR) is the sole buyer, refiner and exporter of gold in the southern African nation but has at times struggled to pay producers.

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Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe’s director of exchange control Farai Masendu said in a circular that miners who increased gold production above their average monthly output would be allowed to directly export that portion.

This would “enable them (gold miners) to secure funding in form of gold loans, to enhance their gold production,” said Masendu.

The central bank plans to unbundle FPR into two separate companies and sell a majority stake in the new gold refinery business to miners.

The government says gold worth $1.2 billion is illegally exported from Zimbabwe annually. Small-scale miners, which extract most of the precious metal in Zimbabwe, blame low prices and late payments by FPR for the leakages.

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