The Skype is the limit

The Gartner Symposium, held in Cape Town this week, sparked some interesting debates, perhaps the most heated of which was Gartner research VP Neil Rickard`s bold statement that Skype should not be used by business.

He said VOIP calling is sometimes more expensive than rates that could be achieved through negotiation of bulk tariffs with telecoms providers. This seems absurd, since Skype-to-Skype (for instance) is completely free. Added to this, Rickard bemoaned what he termed the "bandwidth-intensive" nature of VOIP applications, and the heightened security risks.

Little-known Archisman Mozumder was the unfortunate member of the SNO whose confidential e-mail fell into the wrong hands (those of an ITWeb journalist) on Monday morning. "The SNO has targeted the roll-out of its initial wholesale services to select customers (other telecom operators) by the end of 2006," said Mozumder.

And now everybody knows...

Also on Monday, we brought the good news that Digital Links (a UK-based NGO) plans to deploy 300 000 PCs in Africa`s education systems by 2010. CEO and founder David Sogan notes that in the past four years, the company, in collaboration with its African partners, arranged more than 45 000 PCs for schools in a number of nations on the continent.

However, ITWeb readers wondered whether this was another case of the First World dumping old computers in Africa without providing support.

It was revealed this week that the State IT Agency (SITA) has awarded 23 ICT companies a three-year transversal contract for local and wide area networks. One of the tender winners says it should be a project with about half-a-billion rand capex.

Little-known Archisman Mozumder was the unfortunate member of the SNO whose confidential e-mail fell into the wrong hands (those of an ITWeb journalist) on Monday morning.

Dave Glazier, journalist, ITWeb

High Internet banking traffic volumes caused First National Bank`s online portal to crash for most of Monday`s business hours. Although the bank can`t reveal how many people were unable to do their banking, on the positive side one must wonder how huge these traffic volumes are, to bring the site of a large bank down for many hours.

At the Moto4Africa conference in Zambia this week, ITWeb caught up with BMI-TechKnowledge telecoms analyst Richard Hurst, who said SA`s over-regulated telecoms environment does not bode well for the second national operator (SNO) or the future of new technology, such as WiMax. Due to all the delays in its arrival, the SNO has almost "missed the boat", and will probably be ineffectual as a competitor to Telkom, he said.

IBM emphasised this week that its move to introduce five new servers based on Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices does not indicate the end of its partnership with Intel.

"IBM is not pushing AMD over Intel, but merely introducing a new range of servers specifically aimed at delivering more energy-smart high performance computing solutions for business," said systems executive at IBM SA, Werner Lindemann.