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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What can you buy with Zimbabwe's new 50 dollar banknote?

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50 dollar banknote?

What can you buy with Zimbabwe's new 50 dollar banknote?
FILE - A man counts a wad of the new Zimbabwean ten-dollar notes received from an ATM outside a bank in Harare on May 20, 2020.  -  
Copyright © africanews
JEKESAI NJIKIZANA/AFP or licensors
By Rédaction Africanews 

with AFP

ZIMBABWE

Zimbabwe's central bank on Tuesday announced the introduction of a new 50-dollar note, the country's highest denomination, worth only around US$0.60.

Insufficient to pay even for a loaf of bread, the bill's entry into circulation has revived memories of the hyperinflation the southern African nation experienced over a decade ago.

As price growth spiralled out of control, denominations at the time mounted as high as a 100-trillion-dollar note.

Award-winning journalist and government critic Hopewell Chin'ono scoffed at the new banknote, which at the unofficial black market exchange rate will be worth just $0.35 in US dollars.

"It tells you something about inflation in your country if you need 3 notes of your highest currency denomination to buy a premium beer in a supermarket," tweeted Chin'ono.

The new note is the latest and most valuable in a series introduced from February 2019 as Zimbabwe moved back to using local currency.

US dollars had been used since 2009, when the country trashed its own worthless units after hyperinflation reached 500 billion percent.

Now the new denomination is stoking fears of a return of the kind of hyperinflation that wiped out savings and collapsed the economy, with head-spinning daily leaps in the prices of goods and services.

Last year Zimbabwe's inflation rate soared to more than 800 percent, but it has begun easing with the June year-on-year rate officially at 106.64 percent, according to the National Statistical Agency.

The central bank had forecast inflation to slow to 55 percent in July.

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