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
Browsing: Duncan McLeod
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
Vodacom provoked an online backlash from consumers this week when it said it would throttle bandwidth for heavy users of the popular BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS). It says it’s protecting its users, but are the limitations it’s imposing too harsh? When Vodacom announced
The rules airlines impose on the use of electronic gadgetry on their aircraft are incoherent and in many cases downright silly. It is time the industry applied consistent guidelines on the use of cellphones, e-readers and tablets on their flights. I’ve been travelling extensively around
Steve Jobs announced last week that he was stepping down as CEO of Apple, the company he co-founded in April 1976. But what was his greatest achievement, if it wasn’t the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone or even the iPad? It was the powerful ecosystem he built around those products
The department of communications is working on a number of long overdue projects that could have a profound impact on the technology sector. If it delivers on its new approach, SA has a good chance of building a more competitive