The National Planning Commission’s National Development Plan, published on Friday, makes a number of sensible, market-friendly proposals to grow SA’s information and communications technology industry. One of the most important is the idea of spectrum trading
The level of competition between smartphone manufacturers and the companies that make the software that powers these devices is awe-inspiring to watch. It is fuelling innovation not seen in the technology industry since the early days of the personal
Years after complaints were first lodged, Telkom is finally being called to answer to charges that it abused its monopoly in the telecommunications industry. It could face a huge fine. But the foreign shareholders responsible for the excesses are gone. When SBC
Though he’s been widely praised for firing two of his ministers this week, President Jacob Zuma’s cabinet reshuffle has ruffled the technology industry. There are fears that redeploying communications minister Roy Padayachie will delay crucial projects. Padayachie, in the job
Attention was focused on the telecommunications regulator last week as it held three days of public hearings on local-loop unbundling, a process to open up Telkom’s copper-cable access network. But the intervention may be coming too late to matter. Local-loop unbundling is a
A Sandton hotel played host to a conference last week on “white-spaces spectrum”. For nontechnical people, it was a fairly arcane discussion. But what was being talked about could usher in the biggest revolution in telecoms since the mobile phone
Shortly after 2000, when the dot-com bubble burst, a pall was cast over the technology industry. Internet companies ran out of funding and hit the wall, the Nasdaq crashed and is still valued at a fraction of what it was at the height of the
Telkom did something last week no one thought it ever would: its Internet service provider, TelkomInternet, jumped onto the uncapped broadband bandwagon, adopting a market trend started 18 months ago by its rival, MWeb. The news came as a
More than 17 years after SA’s first democratic elections, politicians are still indecisive over how to extend connectivity into rural areas and bridge the so-called “digital divide”. Government continues to concoct ideologically confused plans. Instead, it should just get
The technology industry has never been as volatile as it is now. For two giants of the sector, Microsoft and Nokia, it’s do-or-die time. They’re either going to beat back the new behemoths of mobile computing, Apple and Google, or fail trying. Microsoft has a habit of coming from
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