The History of Internet services in South Africa

Over the last decade, many new broadband services were launched, and today South Africans can enjoy fixed and wireless broadband speeds exceeding 100Mbps.

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Good article. I'll have to dig through my archives though. MTN upgraded its circuit-switched to 57.6kpbs, well before GPRS, and was then first to go live with GPRS (and commercial) and was first to activate EDGE (at 384kbps). We pretty much dominated wireless data until 3G.
 
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Wish I had fibre to the home. Only fibre I have here atm is Weet-Bix.
 
loved the read, wonder where Ticsa is today

Those involved would have to comment. When I met Chris Pinkham he was at Internet Africa, then they became UUNet Africa, sold the home-user base to MWeb, had a varied relationship with UUNet (during its bankruptcy days) and ended up, together with CITEC in MTN Business.
 
Modems!. We used to dream of Modems.

We had to make do with an Acoustic Coupler linked to our Spectrum.
 
The Internet in South Africa can be tracked back to Rhodes University in 1988, when three pioneers – Francois Jacot Guilarmod, Dave Wilson and Mike Lawrie – established an email link to the Internet.

Mike Lawrie?

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:D
 
This piece totally ignores the early BBS scene and the contribution of Worknet, which was very much a part and parcel of the struggle. I used worknet to access usenet groups, we had email in 1991 and before WWW, there was gopher, lynx and pinemail. It also ignores the Beltel Network which was the regimes response to a French digital system. It also appears to ignore early ISPs such as Internet Africa, and of course there is a history of Apple Computers in SA which is totally missed, alongiside Aztec Information Technologies.
 
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