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Showing posts from July, 2021

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 ...

Super Heavy Booster 3 fires up for the first time

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written by  Chris Bergin   July 19, 2021 Following a rigorous test campaign with the Starship prototype vehicles, SpaceX has turned its immediate attention to the booster that will loft its interplanetary spacecraft to new heights. Booster 3, the first prototype Super Heavy to roll to the launch site, conducted a three-engine Static Fire test on Monday. The testing at the suborbital site will clear the path for Booster 4 – already being stacked in the High Bay – to take up residence at the Orbital Launch Site (OLS), an area that continues to undergo preparations, including the installation of the final section of the Launch Integration Tower. Booster 3: Following a July 1 rollout down Highway 4 for installation on suborbital Pad A , Super Heavy’s pad flow has already included all the preparations required ahead of a Static Fire test. This ranged from an ambient proof test with nitrogen gas on July 8 ahead of cryoproofing with LN2 on July 12. The latter provided  some stun...

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