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19
Sept 2008 |
Oldest woman in Government loses all her marbles, now has to borrow.
The telecommunication industry's joy was short-lived, as it emerged that communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri today lodged an appeal against a recent High Court judgment, allowing value-added network services (VANS) to self-provide. Following an application by Altech Autopage Cellular, the High Court ruled, on 29 August, that VANS licensees could obtain individual... |
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19
Sept 2008 |
Customers paying for unused bandwidth reportedly not on CEO's complaint list.
Why does unused data bought by non-contract customers revert to the sellers - the cellphone companies - after 30 days? The answer from two main data providers, MTN and Vodacom, is essentially: because it does. I submitted these to cellphone operators last week: why do data bundles expire in 30 days? What technical or other reasons prevent the bundles being rolled over from month... |
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19
Sept 2008 |
Telkom's bestest buddy extends very round hands and helps out again, in the nick of time.
Communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri will appeal the recent high court judgment which found that Internet service providers and other communications companies had the right to build their own networks under the old Telecommunications Act. The minister’s decision is set to be met with dismay and anger in the telecommunications sector. The judgment had paved the way for the... |
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19
Sept 2008 |
1 - Lay charge at cop shop, 2 - Receive address from Telkom, 3 - Arrive at address front door, deliver five-knuckle sandwich to door opener.
Has your monthly bandwidth of 3GB suddenly dwindled overnight? You may be a victim of bandwidth theft, an easily investigated crime that the public aren't reporting enough, police say. Stealing a person's bandwidth or internet time by fraudulently using their login and password has been a crime since the inception of the Electronic Communications & Transactions Act in 2002, Saps ... |
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19
Sept 2008 |
Minister rolling in protection money, makes Tony Soprano look like total amateur.
The Shuttleworth Foundation, a nongovernmental organisation focused on education and funded by billionaire Mark Shuttleworth, has slammed communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri’s decision to appeal the recent high court judgment which opens SA’s telecommunications industry to more robust competition. The court found in favour of telecom group Altech, allowing value-added... |
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19
Sept 2008 |
Change you can believe in.
Next time you’re cursing the trenches and gaping holes in SA’s roads — being dug by telecommunications companies to pull new ducting for fibre-optic cables — consider this: all the electronic communications traffic carried by all the operators in SA today would use less than 3% of the potential fibre capacity in one of those new ducts. Such is the expected growth in demand for... |
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19
Sept 2008 |
Looking for a job not nearly as cool as stealing phone lines.
Police have arrested four men believed to be involved in a syndicate targeting Telkom telephone cables in Nelson Mandela Bay. Captain Rassie Erasmus, of the rapid response unit, said thieves were now throwing weighted ropes over the cables in order to pull them to the ground, before cutting them with a hacksaw. Tampering with the wires triggers an alarm which sends a signal to a ... |
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18
Sept 2008 |
Operator ruins everyone's Thursday with confusing news.
MTN SA has fired a salvo at Vodacom and Cell C, signalling its intention to grab market share from its rivals in the contract market by overhauling its tariff plans, simplifying the range of options available, and doing away with peak and off-peak tariffs. “We are expecting some good growth in one of the last opportunities that the operators have in a market that is almost fully... |
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18
Sept 2008 |
Profit-pulling SMSs not as innocent as they seem.
A recent article on ZDNet questioned the pricing of SMSs considering the very small amount of data an SMS uses. According to the article, AT&T charges 20c US$ per message, amounting to roughly $1 310.72 per megabyte of data used in SMS traffic. A single SMS message consists of 160 characters where a single character equates to 1 byte. According to Gthing Science Project a ... |
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18
Sept 2008 |
Aviation Authority plays reruns of LOST to check for evidence of iPhone bringing down Oceanic flight 815.
Don't bother upgrading to the iPhone so you can use it as an mp3/video player or to respond to e-mails on flights operated by SAA, or any other local carriers it seems. You'll be better off carrying an iPod as well as a mobile phone if you want to engage in some sort of entertainment that isn't offered by the pre-programmed in-flight service. Even devices with a "flight mode" have ... |
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18
Sept 2008 |
MyWireless dropped in trashcan, along with taxpayers' money, gotta love it.
Sentech's retail product, MyWireless, will fall away entirely over the next year, following a long, controversial history. According to the state-owned enterprise's 2007/8 annual report, government made a strategic decision this year to phase out MyWireless from Sentech's arsenal of products. “In line with the 2008 to 2011 corporate plan, Sentech will phase out retail products in... |
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18
Sept 2008 |
Black people can buy shares AND hotcakes, white people can only buy hotcakes.
Participation in Vodacom's public share offer, which closed last week Thursday, has “proven to be very popular”. Vodacom chief communications officer Dot Field says the offer of 14.4 million shares in the telecommunications giant has been oversubscribed. However, the total tally of applications made to the company has not yet been finalised. “We are currently processing the... |
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18
Sept 2008 |
City now has highest 'warm feeling in tummy' per capita than rest of country.
Cape Town's economic development directorate wants the council to allocate additional funds to accelerate the expansion of its fibre-optic network to Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain, saying if it did not do so it would affect the growth of business in these areas. Phase 1 of the project entails the laying of 202km of cable and connection to about 50 key municipal buildings, mostly... |
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18
Sept 2008 |
Inbox abusers outed, deserve one fat smack for each unsolicited email sent.
SA's top spammers have been “named and shamed” by the Internet Service Providers' Association of SA (ISPA) in a bid to “fight the growing deluge of spam across members' networks”. This week, ISPA released its first “Hall of Shame” at its iWeek conference, in Bryanston, Johannesburg, naming five top spammers, as identified by ISPA members. The list of spammers can be found on the ... |
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18
Sept 2008 |
Phone provider sits in corner stuck in rut, friendless, aimless.
Tokyo Sexwale’s Mvelaphanda Holdings has quit talks with Telkom. The diversified company had been in talks with the telecommunications operator about a potential acquisition of its fixed-line assets. In a statement released to the JSE on Thursday evening, Telkom said that it has ended talks with a consortium comprises Mvela, affiliated funds of US private equity group Och-Ziff... |
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