A Gentle Plea to Telkom’s CEO

We recently sent a request to Telkom to send us a map of their terrestrial fibre network in South Africa.  This request was in the context of the AfTerFibre Project, which is attempting to crowdsource a comprehensive map of terrestrial fibre optic cables in Africa.  After some informal back and forth with Telkom staff it seemed [...] [...]

AfTerFibre UpdateOctober 2011

This is a short summary of progress and learning from the first couple of months since launching AfTerFibre, a project to map terrestrial fibre projects in Africa. From the beginning AfTerFibre has been designed as an open project both from the point of view of transparency and from the point of view of participation. So [...] [...]

Municipal Broadband Investment in South Africa

There’s an interesting AFP article on the city of Johannesburg’s 1 billion Rand (~105 million USD) contract with Ericsson to deliver municipal broadband infrastructure.  In it they quote an anonymous “telecoms expert” who says: …that municipalities were already stretched to provide basic utility services, and that the provisioning of telecoms services would simply put additional [...] [...]