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 ...

State must subdue 'mining mafia', says RBM’s Werner Duvenhage

 


Werner Duvenhage, MD of Richards Bay Minerals (RBM), which has stopped all operations because of violent disruptions, says until the government uses the tools at its disposal to identify, arrest and prosecute those behind the violence it will spiral out of control and wreak havoc with the local economy.

In 2020, RBM contributed R8bn in salaries for its employees and taxes and royalties, and injected R5.5bn more into the economy by buying goods and services...

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