South African nukes redux

(this from Green Clippings)
(cf. prior post South Africa leads the way)

The pendulum starts the long swing back...

[Professor] Christie warned of possible future wars in Africa, and suggested that that South Africa needed to quickly be able to revert to a nuclear weapons state if it became vital to the country's interests.

and, interestingly

The professor noted that South Africa still retained a stockpile of weapons grade highly enriched uranium derived from the country's former nuclear weapons programme. He also reminded everyone that technical knowledge of South Africa's former atomic bombs was still contained on CD's held by the current government.

Vaalputs [possibly] I could understand, but CDs? Heh.

Free.fr announces FTTH build

Free.fr has announced an FTTH build to start 1H2007.

They will be investing 1 billion € and covering up to 4 million connections by 2012.

They're keeping the current unlimited calls to national and various international destinations.

The current connection (the Freebox) will be upgraded to a 'Freebox Optique', it will support HD TV via an appropriate STB.

The connection speed will be 50 Mbps!

And all of this for only 29.99 € per month!

More on LLU in South Africa

Another snippet from Prof Marwala.

I asked about municipalities owning or using or managing the local loop (thinking especially of UTOPIA), and received:

We are actually looking very seriously on how municipalities can get involved in the local loop after unbundling. We have done a study on this regard.

Consider that many municipalities in the Cape Town area have been successfully involved in many different utilities infrastructure ownership and management (electricity, water, sewage).

LLU in South Africa

I've reproduced below a reply from Professor Tshilidza Marwala to my questions on the status of the LLUC (Local Loop Unbundling Committee) which was instituted by the Department of Communications:

So far we have conducted a comprehensive and deep investigation on how Local Loop Unbundling was conducted in the UK, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Netherlands, Italy, Canada, USA, India etc. We looked at the following aspects: Pricing Models; Regulation Models; Management of the Local Loop etc

We then have studied the South African market structure and based on all these we came to some optimal models that are evolutionary in nature and factor in parameters such as service provision, infrastructure investment, policy trajectories, locking out tendencies, etc.

Our mandate is on the wired local loop and we believe that after our work and based on competitive pricing and reliability of service issues, the SNO and future entrants will find the the wired loop more advantageous.

Not much meat, but at least the skeleton is starting to take shape...

Corporate social networking

(thanks Coloribus)

Burger King takes off Marlboro