Alan Knott-Craig, CEO of mobile services provider Cell-C and father to Mxit CEO Alan Knott-Craig Jnr, was awarded the 2012 IT Personality of the Year award at the MyBroadband Awards held on October 10 during the MyBroadband Conference in Johannesburg, South Africa.
The awards are aimed at rewarding the top performers in South Africa’s broadband and telecommunications market over the last 12 months.
The awards, which attracted over 20,000 responses from South African consumers and ICT industry players, are given based on two surveys.
Data from the MyBroadband speed test server and pricing data were also used to select the winners in the broadband categories.
Below is a full list of the winners:
Honorary awards
This year MyBroadband replaced the customary “broadband maverick of the year” with two honorary awards to pay respect to individuals who had a significant impact on the South African broadband environment.
Rudi Jansen – MWEB CEO: The first honorary award went to former MWEB CEO Rudi Jansen for launching affordable uncapped ADSL services, and through this initiative changing the South African broadband landscape forever.
Pieter Uys: The second honorary award went to former Vodacom CEO Pieter Uys for his role in driving innovation in the mobile broadband space, and for making South Africa one of the leaders in the mobile broadband space.
IT person of the year
Alan Knott-Craig: The 2012 MyBroadband IT person of the year is Alan Knott-Craig. He was a runaway winner in this category, notching up well above half of all the votes. Knott-Craig is busy transforming Cell C, and as part of this process he slashed the prices of mobile calls and mobile data.
Fixed broadband service of the year
Telkom’s 10Mbps ADSL service won the best fixed broadband award, comfortably beating competing fixed wireless services from Neotel and iBurst.
Mobile broadband service of the year
In one of the closest contests ever, Cell C beat 8ta by less than one percent to win the award for best mobile broadband service of the year.
ADSL ISP of the year
In another very close contest, Afrihost won the 2012 ISP of the year award ahead of rivals MWEB and Web Africa.
Mampara of the year
ICASA is not the most efficient regulator around, and government is continuing to hamstring Telkom with their shenanigans.
However, the eventual loser – partly because of dragging its feet with handing out LTE spectrum, its dubious finances at the ICT Indaba, and for not doing enough to assist the telecoms industry – is the Department of Communications.
Now in its eighth year, The MyBroadband Conference attracts IT executives, delegates and speakers from all the major telecoms from across South Africa.
