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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 ...

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 ...

Earth’s rotation is getting slower—and it might be the reason we can breathe

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  Aldo Durán Published on June 12, 2025 0 Trends Earth’s rotation is getting slower—and it might be the reason we can breathe Imagine a planet spinning so fast that its days last just 18 hours, racing against time to catch a breath. Over billions of years,  Earth’s rotation  has been slowing down little by little, stretching our days to a full 24 hours. But this slow and steady deceleration isn’t just a cosmic curiosity, it may hold the key to why we have breathable  oxygen  in the atmosphere today. A groundbreaking study reveals a surprising connection between the  length of Earth’s day  and the rise of oxygen, an element that transformed our planet and made complex life possible. How Earth’s slowing spin changed oxygen production When  Earth  first formed nearly 4.5 billion years ago, days were significantly shorter. Thanks to the gravitational pull of the Moon, the planet’s rotation has gradually slowed down over time. Today, a full day is...

All the undersea cables connecting South Africa to the rest of the world

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  By   Daniel Puchert An extensive network of undersea cables connects South Africa to the rest of the world, with multinational tech giants like Meta Platforms and Google helping to roll out this infrastructure. While the first fibre optic cable landed in South Africa in 1993, the country has used undersea connectivity for over 145 years. The first cable that connected the country to the rest of the world was a single-channel electrical cable rolled out by the South African Telegraph Company, completed in December 1879. This ran along the east coast of Africa from Durban and Zanzibar to Aden in Yemen. It then extended to Europe through terrestrial networks. In 1889, another telegraph cable was run along Africa’s west coast, connecting Cape Town to Europe via St Helena and the Ascension Islands. It took another 69 years for South Africa to have an undersea cable capable of telephonic communication with the rest of the world. This was SAT-1, which ran from Melkbosstrand, near C...

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