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6
April 2011 |
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Mobile telecommunications group Vodacom Group on Wednesday reiterated that it will not retrench staff amid changes to the way its call centres are organised. This followed accusations from the Communication Workers Union (CWU) that it intends to retrench about 1 000 workers. "We have also learnt with dismay that Vodacom wants to convert some workers into labour brokers," said the CWU. As part of changes to its call centre structure, Vodacom said it has created the opportunity for more than 700 call centres... |
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5
April 2011 |
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Cell C has lost another battle at the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). The cellular operator lodged a counterclaim against Vodacom and its parent, the UK's Vodafone, after it lost an earlier battle at the ASA when it was told it couldn't use the phrase "power to you" in its advertising campaigns. In the earlier case, the ASA found that Vodafone had been using it in its campaigns worldwide since as early as 2009, and since it was the majority shareholder in Vodacom, it was likely it wanted to use the ... |
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5
April 2011 |
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Vodacom Business says it is committed to doing business with government to aid the provision of service delivery in the ICT space. Speaking at a workshop organised by the Front Foot and Local Government Business Network on Monday, Vodacom Business managing executive Chris Lazarus said the vision was to position the company as the preferred partner for government within the ICT sector and to be recognised as an enabler in promoting efficient and effective government service delivery. It also involved... |
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4
April 2011 |
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If pupils in the Western Cape are connected to their peers and experts around the world, they have the ability to lead in their fields of choice, says IT billionaire Mark Shuttleworth. Shuttleworth has offered broadband access to every school in the Western Cape through a new undersea cable. He said he had an agreement in principle with state-owned enterprise Infraco to acquire a share of the bandwidth on the West Africa Cable System (Wacs) linking South Africa with the UK. On the back of that agreement ... |
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3
April 2011 |
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Vodacom on the weekend heralded its rebranding as the "tip of the iceberg" amid a much bigger change at the group, which includes a more than doubling in the number of Vodacom 3G base stations to deepen connectivity and peak speed across the country. Vodacom changed its corporate colours from blue and green to that of its major shareholder and parent company, Vodafone, which controls 65% of the company, and also adopted the global Vodafone slogan "Power to You". The red was immediately evident in several ... |
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1
April 2011 |
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Phuthuma Nhleko has officially stepped down as group president and CEO of MTN, and from all boards of the cellular network company, as of the end of business yesterday. The board says Nhleko, who has been with the company for nearly 10 years, has stepped down from the directorships of MTN Group Limited, MTN Dubai Limited, MTN SA, MTN Nigeria, Irancell and MTN Syria. Today, therefore, marks the first day in office for new group president and CEO Sifiso Dabengwa. Dabengwa's appointment was announced in... |
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1
April 2011 |
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South African fixed-line operator Telkom has finally sold the CDMA operation of its embattled Nigerian unit Multi-Links for $52 million to a Nigerian CDMA operator. Multi-Links has been a thorn in Telkom's side since the company initially invested in Nigeria about four years ago. The fixed-line operator has written the unit down by more than R5.6 billion since entering the West African country. Telkom bought 75% of the company in May 2007, for R1.96 billion. In January 2009, it bought out the balance of ... |
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29
March 2011 |
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The West African Cable System (Wacs) will land on SA shores early in April, bringing the construction phase of the project to an end. However, its commercial launch has been pushed back by a few months to the first quarter of 2012. Neotel chief technology officer and member of the Wacs management committee Angus Hay says the delay is not unusual, and the cable system is on track to deliver more international capacity to Africa. It was supposed to have been ready for commercial use by the third quarter of... |
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28
March 2011 |
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There is a clear business case for building fibre-to-the-home networks in SA, and more telecommunications companies should be looking at it. That's the view of Independent Communication Authority of SA (Icasa) councillor William Stucke, who was speaking in his personal capacity at a broadband summit in Johannesburg on Monday. Operators such as Telkom and Neotel have long insisted that the business case for large-scale fibre-to-the-home networks in SA is poor given that customers are spread out over large ... |
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27
March 2011 |
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The operator was welcomed by South Africans almost as voraciously as democracy itself. Five years later, its ability to continue as a going concern is being questioned by its auditors. Neotel, the country's eagerly awaited second network operator (SNO), has disappointed regulators, shareholders, employees, businesses and consumers alike. Did Neotel lose its way? Or was its path too potholed to allow progress? Certainly the road to its ultimate licensing was beset with disputes and setbacks. The early year... |
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26
March 2011 |
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With the appointment of Pinky Moholi as CEO of Telkom, the government has shown touching faith, to put it kindly, in the ability of someone closely associated with its abject performance down the years to transform it into something competitive. One has to ask how completely the government, which owns 39.8% of the shares, giving it a special right - until this month - to appoint five of its 12 directors, including the chairman, understands the full extent of Telkom's challenge. New chairman Lazarus Zim... |
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26
March 2011 |
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Vodacom is mum about its plans, but the new corporate colours are expected to be similar to the red, white and grey of parent company Vodafone, which bought a controlling stake in Vodacom in 2009. Vodacom, which also has operations in Mozambique, Tanzania, Lesotho and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), has been co-branding its products and advertisements with the Vodafone logo for several years. Vodacom is expected to retain its name, despite Vodafone's global strategy to rebrand operations in... |
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25
March 2011 |
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After ten years of leading one of South Africa's most successful companies, MTN CEO Phuthuma Nhleko will step down at the end of March, when Sifiso Dabengwa will take over the helm at what was recently rated the most valuable brand in Africa by Brandirectory. "It is good that we have had a black CEO who has performed so well in the new South Africa and has grown a company like MTN, which today has become a continental brand," enthused MTN chairperson Cyril Ramaphosa when he spoke at the final year-end... |
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25
March 2011 |
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The design capacity of the East Africa Submarine System (Eassy), a submarine cable that connects countries along Africa's east coast, has been bumped up to nearly 5Tbit/s. It's the second time the capacity has been upped. According to Eassy investor, the West Indian Ocean Cable Company (Wiocc), says the increase in the system's capacity, to 4,72Tbit/s, has been made possible by using the latest 40Gbit/s wavelength technology from supplier Alcatel-Lucent. The upgrade means Eassy is able to configure 59... |
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24
March 2011 |
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MTN Group has partnered with Hollard Insurance to pilot mi-Life, a Mobile Money life insurance service, in Ghana. Through this partnership, the companies hope to dramatically reduce the cost of insurance . MTN said yesterday that MTN Mobile Money customers would be able to buy life insurance via their handsets. Customers would be able to submit claims, queries and make premium payments using handsets, said Bruno Akpaka, GM for Mobile Money in Ghana. The new service was designed to meet the growing... |
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