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Réan van Niekerk

Metacom has spent 25 years designing its own routers and running private networks for some of Africa's biggest retailers, without a cent of venture capital.

In this episode of the TechCentral Show, founder Réan van Niekerk tells Fanie van Rooyen how the Cape Town company came to connect more than 6 000 ATMs, every Pep store in Africa and, by his account, well over half the communications Eskom uses to monitor and control electricity distribution.

He explains why Metacom designs its hardware in-house instead of buying white-label Asian routers, and why one box per store works better than equipment from four suppliers. He also says satellite services such as Starlink would be a "wonderful supplier", not a threat.

Van Niekerk also discusses enterprise technology spending in 2026, the AI-driven memory shortages that now force Metacom to order some components a year ahead, the company's cautious approach to AI, which keeps humans on its support lines, and why Africa is not one market. TechCentral

In this episode of TCS+, brought to you by Arctic Wolf, Jason Oehley, the company's country sales manager, and Andre Den Hond, senior systems engineer, talk about why South Africa is bearing the brunt of ransomware in Africa and what businesses can do about it.

The pair unpack an Interpol report that found 92% of ransomware detections on the continent are in South Africa. Oehley explains that the country's high connectivity, big financial services sector and large mid-market are part of the reason, along with a tactical rather than proactive approach to security.

Den Hond explains how agentic AI systems can automate the attack chain, adapt when an exploit fails and never tire, putting small and medium-sized enterprises squarely in the crosshairs.

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The pair also explain why the time between a vulnerability being identified and exploited has collapsed, why attackers are increasingly stealing data rather than encrypting it and why cyber insurance often doesn't cover the costs that hurt most.

Other points discussed include:

Why SMEs that supply bigger companies are a back door for attackers, including the recent breach of a group of South African insurers;

The hidden costs of a breach, including downtime averaging 22 days, lost income, idle payroll and reputational damage;

A customer that put off a security purchase because of the cost and was hit months later for much more;

How to measure the financial impact of cyber risk, and why the return-on-investment argument matters at board level;

Proactive versus reactive security, and why there is no silver bullet;

Whether South Africa's regulators are keeping up, and the prospect of directors' liability; and

Why building a 24/7 security operations centre in-house rarely makes financial sense

Don't miss this practical conversation about turning cyber risk into terms that decision-makers understand. TechCentral

Milkor’s advanced 380 drone is flying for a customer in the Middle East, but South Africa’s own defence force has yet to buy one. In this episode of TCS, Milkor vice-president for Africa Daniel du Plessis talks to deputy editor Fanie van Rooyen about why, and about where drones, AI and autonomy are taking modern warfare.

Fresh from the Africa Aerospace and Defence (AAD) expo at Air Force Base Waterkloof, Du Plessis explains what buyers were asking about most: drones of all sizes, data fusion and artificial intelligence. He sets out where a 1.5-tonne surveillance aircraft that can fly for more than 30 hours fits in a world of cheap, expendable drones like those used in Ukraine.

He also tackles the harder questions. Who decides who Milkor can sell to, and how do South Africa’s arms export controls work? Where does a human stay in control as drones carry guided missiles and become more autonomous? Are fears about “killer robots” overblown? And how does the 380 keep flying when GPS signals are jammed or spoofed?

Closer to home, Du Plessis says the SANDF is severely underfunded and that money, not interest, is what stands between the 380 and South Africa’s defence force and Border Management Authority. He warns that South Africa and the rest of the continent are not ready for cheap attack drones, but says the local defence industry has the capability to respond if government acts now.

The conversation also covers Milkor’s larger 780, its new agreement with European missile maker MBDA and how much of the 380 is built in Cape Town. TechCentral

Frogfoot plans to keep buying smaller fibre network operators in South Africa’s suburbs as the market consolidates, but CEO Shane Chorley stopped short of ruling out a sale of the business.

“I’d be ignorant to say that we would ignore any offer,” Chorley said on the latest episode of the TechCentral Show – watch or listen below. “I would hope to say that we will be the acquirer rather than being sold.”

Frogfoot has already bought a couple of small suburban operators and wants to acquire “as many of those smaller operators as possible”, he told show host Duncan McLeod. He expects somewhat larger networks, of more than 30 000 homes, to come up for sale in the next few years, followed in time by “a much bigger consolidation of one or two of the bigger ones”.

The mooted merger of Octotel and MetroFibre had been “going on for a while”, Chorley said, and he expected consolidation among suburban operators to continue.

Abraham van der Merwe, who leads Frogfoot, Vox and Hypa, said consolidation was inevitable because “infrastructure requires scale”. But he said Frogfoot was unlikely to be consolidated any time soon because its “long-term and patient” investors, among them the founders, intend to own the business for a very long time.

The two spoke after a DNI-led consortium invested in the businesses in a deal valuing them at R14.4-billion. Most of the money will go into townships, where Van der Merwe said fewer than two million of 12 million to 15 million homes have fibre. Frogfoot wants to lift its build rate from about 80 000 connections a year to 360 000.

That untapped market is also why Van der Merwe is not worried about operators overbuilding each other. Overbuilding splits market share and wrecks the economics, he said, and there is little reason to do it when so many homes have no fibre at all. It took about a decade to connect the 4.5 million homes in the suburbs; the township market is three times that size. TechCentral

Mohamed Sami, group chief information officer at Vodacom, says autonomous AI agents that resolve customer problems without handing them to a human are the next big shift in customer experience – and that it is closer than many think.

Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, brought to you by NTT DATA, Sami said Vodacom’s chatbots and voice bots already handle a considerable share of customer calls, while AI tools help its human agents find information without jumping between systems.

“When I say it is the next big thing, it is not something that is happening in years. It’s something that is happening very soon,” he said. How autonomous those agents become, he added, depends on how much intelligence and orchestration sits behind them.

Watch the episode

Sami also discusses:

• Where the line falls between his role and that of the group CTO as network and IT converge;

• Why Vodacom is using small language models to help large models handle isiZulu, Swahili, Amharic and Egypt’s Arabic dialects;

• How a standard set of AI agents across the software development life cycle is lifting developer productivity, and why it hasn’t cost software engineers their jobs;

• How Vodacom is trying to stop AI token bills running away, including orchestrators that route work between expensive, cheap and self-hosted models;

• Why he told the board that cybersecurity is one of the company’s biggest risks, and the programme to rebuild core platforms designed before the generative AI era; and

• What it takes to be a modern CIO, and his advice for a graduate who wants his job in 20 years.

Don’t miss a great discussion on technology in telecoms. TechCentral