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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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UNIVERSE TODAY Space and astronomy news

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POSTED ON BY NANCY ATKINSON

Fantastic Visualization Shows What Would Happen if you Dropped a Ball Across the Solar System

Summertime means it’s time to play ball! But what would it be like to play ball on various locations across our Solar System? Planetary scientist Dr. James O’Donoghue has put together a fun animation of how quickly an object falls on to the surfaces of places like the Sun, Earth, Ceres, Jupiter, the Moon, and Pluto.

The animation shows a ball dropping from 1 kilometer to the surface of each object, assuming no air resistance. You can compare, for example, that it takes 2.7 seconds for a ball to drop that distance on the Sun, while it takes 14.3 seconds Earth.  

“This should give an idea for the pull you would feel on each object,” O’Donoghue said.

But what about the pull of gravity on the big planets vs. Earth? Interestingly enough, it takes and 13.8 seconds for the ball to drop on Saturn, and 15 seconds on Uranus.

“It might be surprising to see large planets have a pull comparable to smaller ones at the surface,” O’Donoghue said on Twitter. “For example Uranus pulls the ball down slower than at Earth! Why? Because the low average density of Uranus puts the surface far away from the majority of the mass. Similarly, Mars is nearly twice the mass of Mercury, but you can see the surface gravity is actually the same… this indicates that Mercury is much denser than Mars.”

Ceres comes in at the pokiest place to play ball, with a ball dropping 1km in 84.3 seconds.

O’Donoghue, along with input from astronomer Rami Mandow, used a NASA planetary fact sheet for reference to create the video.

O’Donoghue also referenced one of the most famous gravity experiments ever conducted, the one by astronaut Dave Scott on the Moon:

O’Donoghue has a number of great videos on his YouTube channel, including a visualization of the velocities required to escape the pull of gravity from various bodies in the Solar System.

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