Telkom has abandoned talks with Dubai-based Oger Telecoms to buy cellphone company Cell C. Telkom's share price rose on the news."Shareholders are now advised that Telkom and Oger Telecoms have mutually agreed to terminate these discussions," Telkom said yesterday, without providing further detail. Oger owns 75% of Cell C.Telkom, 40% owned by the government, was in talks to buy the closely-held Cell C as it sought to expand its cellphone footprint to offset a decline in landline usage in South Africa. It is believed that Telkom wanted to pay less than the R20-billion that Cell C valued itself at.Telkom CEO Sipho Maseko said as recently as Monday that due diligence was "going reasonably well" and that the process would probably be finished by early next year.Telkom shares gained as much as 7% and traded 4.9% higher at R64.45 in afternoon trade on the JSE.Buying Cell C, the country's third-largest cellphone company, would have given Telkom 22 million cellphone users, but also a company facing a consumer backlash due to slow network speeds.Cell C also labours under debts of more than R2.4-billion and last year agreed to a restructuring with bondholders, involving a three-year maturity extension to July 2018.Telkom is near the end of the first phase of a turnaround strategy that included cutting jobs, outsourcing services such as telephone directory printing and selling some properties in a portfolio whose size Maseko has described as slightly larger than Luxembourg.In an interview in August, Maseko said Cell C was an interesting proposition and "at the right price, I'm a buyer". - Bloomberg, Reuters..