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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 ...

Where to invest in Africa: Report reveals top 10 economies

 

Where to invest in Africa: Report reveals top 10 economies

Dar es Salaam, the commercial hub of Tanzania which is ranked in 10th position.

Rand Merchant Bank’s (RMB) Where to Invest in Africa 2021 report assesses each African economy’s investment potential.

According to the author, RMB Africa Economist Daniel Kavishe, a new world called for a new approach to the publication. Where previous reports positively projected Africa’s prospects – discerned through reliable and readily available data – COVID-19 has muddied the analytical waters and compelled the team to adapt their methodology.

The approach required an extra layer of sophistication. Says Kavishe: “We created a new set of rankings that incorporated some of the unavoidable COVID-19-induced challenges, of which the operating environment score was one.”

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* The business lessons they’ve learnt on their journeys so far
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