Skip to main content

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 ...

2 SHARES Africa 3Zimbabwe gets $961m in IMF Special Drawing Rights – govt

 Part of $650bn the IMF is distributing to its members.

Image: AdobeStock

Zimbabwe’s government said on Tuesday it has received the equivalent of $961 million in Special Drawing Rights (SDR) from the International Monetary Fund, part of $650 billion the IMF is distributing to its members.

The IMF’s largest-ever distribution of monetary reserves will provide additional liquidity for the global economy, supplementing member countries’ foreign exchange reserves and reducing their reliance on more expensive domestic or external debt.

Moneyweb Insider INSIDERGOLD

Subscribe for full access to all our share and unit trust data tools, our award-winning articles, and support quality journalism in the process.

Click here for more information.

SDRs are reserve assets issued by the IMF, backed by dollars, euros, yen, sterling and yuan.

“The immediate effect of this support from the IMF is to increase the foreign exchange reserves position of the country by $961 million,” Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube and central bank governor John Mangudya said in a joint statement.

“This will go a long way in buttressing the stability of the domestic economy.”

Zimbabwe reintroduced its currency, the Zimbabwe dollar, in 2019 after a decade of dollarisation. However, the local unit has struggled for stability amid deep foreign currency shortages in the economy.

The Zimbabwe dollar is officially trading at 86 against the US dollar, but is significantly weaker, at 150 to the greenback, on a thriving black market.

COMMENTS   3

Sort by:

You must be signed in to comment.

SIGN IN SIGN UP

LOL — how deep into debt trap can a country be plunged into??/

Well done Zimbabwe, the IMF will not likely see the money again.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

If everyone on Earth sat in the ocean at once, how much would sea level rise?

Andrew Watson: The 'most influential' black footballer for decades lost to history

Which countries have the world’s largest coal reserves?