Author: Gugu Lourie

Vodacom announced today that it has achieved mobile speeds in excess of 1Gbps by aggregating both licensed and unlicensed bands for indoor coverage in its laboratory on 16 and 17 May 2016. “Breaking 1Gbps represents an important milestone for LTE network speeds in South Africa as it shows what can be achieved by combining adequate spectrum with the latest technology. Lack of spectrum has become one of the biggest hurdles in deploying high-speed broadband services to consumers,” Andries Delport, Vodacom’s Chief Technology Officer, said. “Vodacom believes that the trial demonstrates it is at the forefront of introducing cutting edge small…

The NBN has become an election issue in Australia with claims being made that the Australian public doesn’t want to pay for the the higher speed options of the National Broadband Network (NBN). By David Glance The Australian claims that only 15% of consumers have so far opted for speeds of 100 Mbps (Mega bits per second), with the bulk (47%) using the 25 Mbps service and the remaining 33% on the slowest speed of 12 Mbps. This purchase profile is being used as an argument against the need to change the Fiber To The Node approach of the current government,…

Cell C, in conjunction with Huawei, achieved speeds of over 600Mbps download on its LTE-U test site. Using a pre-commercial device, Cell C used 15MHz of its licensed spectrum in 2100MHz and 2 x 20MHz of spectrum in the 5GHz Wi-Fi band to conduct the test. Using this configuration with high modulation scheme technologies (256QAM) and carrier aggregation of the three frequency bands, Cell C achieved a top download speed of 630.13Mbps download and 46.27Mbps upload. Technically the company managed to complete a test of 900Mbps, however, this was through direct connection and is not a real world scenario. Cell…

MTN SA, on Wedneday announced that it has achieved the fastest indoor mobile data service in South Africa using LTE-Advanced technology. The service is able to provide customers with data speeds up to an incredible 1 Gbps, which is the first Gigabit per second speed ever recorded in South Africa using a mobile broadband connection. MTN’s LTE-Advanced solution uses Huawei’s latest small cell Lampsite product, which aggregates two unlicensed LTE 5GHz carriers (40MHz) with one licensed LTE 2100MHz carrier (15MHz), and combines this with next generation MIMO and modulation schemes. LTE-Unlicensed technology operates in the 5GHz unlicensed band, and is…

Local business telecoms provider BitCo will be introducing Fibre to the Cloud (FTTC) for the first time at the 2016 Cloud & Hosting Conference. The conference will be held at Gallagher Estate on 25 May and will be attended by South Africa’s top cloud and hosting executives and IT professionals. Offering convenient business connectivity, BitCo will be driving its fibre connectivity with special promotions for delegates. Speakers will share information about hosting services, data centres, cloud computing, virtualisation, hosting infrastructure and connectivity. BitCo’s managing director Jarryd Chatz points to the convenience that BitCo can offer. “Businesses that rely on cloud…

Payments platform provider Nomanini has achieved 1 500% growth in transactions over 20 months as the company successfully scales its mobile point-of-sale (PoS) platform for informal markets. Founded in 2010, Nomanini has designed a payments platform, which provides merchant aggregators with sophisticated business insights via a cloud-based platform, and merchants and micro-entrepreneurs in informal markets with the means to sell different types of services electronically and create a sustainable income. Having hit one million transactions in August 2014, the company has seen growth of 1 500 percent since then, and recently saw the 16 millionth transaction take place on its platform. Much of…

Unlike typically available cloud products, which are offered on an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) model, Vox Telecom is offering a turnkey solution that includes the network layer, virtual hosting, security, operating system and database, and applications. Vox Telecom’s new Microsoft Private Cloud Services portfolio combines the best of Microsoft’s applications with the power of cloud to offer medium-to-large companies a single supplier for all their communication, collaboration, CRM, and business intelligence needs – all as part of a fully managed service. “While Microsoft’s applications form a core part of how many companies operate,…

The Wi-Fi Forum SA has re-elected ICT industry veteran Andile Ngcaba as chairman and assigned portfolios to the other management committee members who will lead the body this year and into 2017. By Staff Writer With two-thirds of South Africans out in the cold when it comes to Internet access, the Wi-Fi Forum SA (WFFSA) will redouble its advocacy for public access Wi-Fi across South Africa. This commitment to universal service was made by the WFFSA’s “top three” who were again installed at the helm of the collaborative, self-regulating body this week. The WFFSA’s recently-elected Management Committee for 2016/2017 met…

South Africa’s telephone group Telkom is collaborating with Avaya, a global leader in business communications, software, systems and services, to offer Communications-as-a-Service to businesses across the country. Telkom will host Avaya’s innovative communications solutions and make them available to businesses in a cloud services model for the countries it operates in across Africa. Telkom will focus on Contact Centre-as-a-Service (CCaaS) solutions, enabling organisations to purchase the capacity and services they require as needed, without large upfront costs. Telkom will also provide Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) offerings. “As Africa looks to play a greater role in the global economy, African businesses are…

The unemployment rate in South Africa is at an 11-year high, with 5.7 million people finding themselves without a job. The technological boom in the financial sector is not only making waves in innovation, but it’s also creating jobs and redefining employment roles within existing, traditional businesses. By Glen Jordan, director of startup fintech firm, IMB, based in Cape Town. Technology can create employment opportunities Confidence in South Africa from a financial and investor point of view, is the lowest it has been in 5 years, according to Rand Merchant Bank’s Bureau for Economic Research. Because of the somber outlook…