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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Melinda French Gates to try working with ex-husband for two years

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 Questions about the future of the Gates Foundation have swirled since Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates announced they were divorcing after 27 years of marriage. 

Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates will continue to work together as co-chairs of their foundation after their planned divorce, but if after two years they cannot continue in their roles, French Gates will resign from her positions as co-chair and trustee [File: Kamil Zihnioglu/AP Photo]
Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates will continue to work together as co-chairs of their foundation after their planned divorce, but if after two years they cannot continue in their roles, French Gates will resign from her positions as co-chair and trustee [File: Kamil Zihnioglu/AP Photo]
By Al Jazeera Staff
7 Jul 2021

Melinda French Gates and Bill Gates set a two-year trial period for working together at their namesake philanthropic foundation after their divorce, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced Wednesday, stipulating that should the arrangement fail, French Gates would resign from her position as co-chair and trustee and focus on her own philanthropic efforts with funding from Bill.

In a statement announcing an additional $15bn in funding from the couple, the Gates Foundation said it would be adding new trustees to “bring new perspectives, help guide resource allocation and strategic direction, and ensure the stability and sustainability of the foundation”.

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The announcement also laid out a plan if the ex-spouses choose not to work together.

Should French Gates choose to depart from the foundation, she “would receive personal resources from [Bill] Gates for her philanthropic work. These resources would be completely separate from the foundation’s endowment, which would not be affected.”

Questions about the future of the Gates Foundation, which has contributed $55bn to causes worldwide since its founding in 2000, have swirled since Bill and Melinda French Gates announced they were divorcing after 27 years of marriage in May.

Bill, the billionaire founder of Microsoft, and Melinda, an author and businesswoman, announced their decision to end their marriage in a joint statement posted to their individual Twitter accounts on May 3.

In it, they wrote that they would “continue our work together at the foundation”, but no longer believed they could “grow together as a couple in this next phase of our lives”.

Both have continued their work with the foundation since the announcement, as well as with the other philanthropic endeavours they contribute to separately.

Last week, the foundation pledged $2.1bn over the next five years to help advance gender equality worldwide during the UN Women Generation Equality Forum in Paris, where Melinda was a keynote speaker.

The Gates Foundation said its chief executive officer Mark Suzman and chief operating officer Connie Collingsworth will spend the next months developing recommendations with internal and external experts for the number of new trustees and the process to select them.

Then, the foundation, said, “as trustees, Gates and French Gates will approve changes to the foundation’s governance documents by the end of 2021, and the new trustees will be announced in January 2022.”

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA

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