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 ...

Meet the Zimbabwean sommeliers breaking barriers, one cork at a time

 

2 minute read
he had never tasted wine.
Volume 0%
 
The Zimbabwean sommelier who took on 'Olympics of wine'

JOHANNESBURG, July 1 (Reuters) - When Zimbabwean Tinashe Nyamudoka left his homeland to work as a waiter in a restaurant in neighbouring South Africa he had never tasted wine. Now, 11 years later, he is a renowned sommelier with his own brand.

Nyamudoka, 36, stars in a new documentary "Blind Ambition", which follows the journey of Zimbabwe's first sommeliers to take part in the Blind Wine Tasting Championships in France in 2017 and 2018.

The four men left Zimbabwe at the height of the country's economic crisis more than a decade ago in search of work and have become some of Africa's top wine experts.

Since the end of 2017, Nyamudoka has owned his own wine brand Kumusha, which means home or origin in Shona.

"I am going for something which is accessible, which is quality and most of the time which is easy on the pocket," he told Reuters inside a Johannesburg restaurant while opening a bottle of Kumusha Cabernet Sauvignon & Cinsault 2020.

1/3

Zimbabwean Tinashe Nyamudoka, a famed sommelier with his own wine brand, gestures as he speaks during an interview with Reuters in Johannesburg, South Africa, June 25, 2021. REUTERS/Siphiwe Sibeko.

Nyamudoka said his wines were selling out in the United States, Kenya, Holland and Zimbabwe and would soon start exporting to Britain and Nigeria.

Robert Coe and Warwick Ross, the Australian producers of "Blind Ambition", said they were drawn to the story of the four Black Zimbabweans because they came from a background with no history and culture of wine.

"That these guys are out to disrupt in a major way the prevailing wisdom which is that wine drinkers are white, that people with wine knowledge are predominantly white, that fascinated us," Ross, who is also a winemaker, said.

The film, which had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York three weeks ago, clinched the audience award for best documentary.

During his first live wine pouring event at a Johannesburg eatery, Nyamudoka said he sometimes missed working in restaurants: "It's more like a fix so you want to have more and more of it."

Writing by MacDonald Dzirutwe; Editing by Janet Lawrence

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Which countries have the world’s largest coal reserves?

MOTORS MARINE MAY 7, 2021 Boat of the Week: This 171-Foot Super-Luxe Sportfishing Yacht Is the Largest in the World

This New Ultralight Aircraft May Be World’s Fastest Single-Engine Business Jet