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 ...

Victoria Falls is open for tourism: here's why you should take the plunge

 

The falls are truly magnificent but Victoria Falls, the Zimbabwean tourist town, has much more to offer, with crazy offers right now — both budget and luxe

29 August 2021 - 00:02BY SANET OBERHOLZER

One of the most candid people I've met is Georges C Imbault. "It's just four seconds but it's the longest four seconds of your life," he half-shouts from his perch at the end of the walkway under the Victoria Falls Bridge. Admittedly, this is not the real Imbault, a Frenchman appointed as chief construction engineer of the bridge in 1903, but a modern-day impersonator. (Real name) Kim Adams is a guide with Shearwater Victoria Falls (https://www.shearwatervictoriafalls.com/), and he dons a pair of period spectacles, braces, a fedora and tie to play an Imbault "scorched by the African sun", to tell visitors a most animated tale of how the bridge, completed in 1905, was built.

That was phase one of the bridge tour. But now we are in phase two and "Imbault" has just led us - harnessed and attached to the 116-year-old structure with carabiners - along the length of the walkway...

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