Johannesburg - Four major South African cellphone service providers are under investigation for proposing call and data rate increases to consumers already on contracts.
This, if found to be true, would constitute a contravening the Consumer Protection Act, said Trevor Hattingh, spokesman for the National Consumer Commission.
The 12-month investigation will target Vodacom, MTN, Cell C and Neotel, and followed at least 32 complaints that had been received from customers.
The four networks are being investigated by virtue of being the biggest cellphone service providers in the country. Operators not being investigated are Virgin Mobile and Telkom Mobile.
The cellphone network providers should within the year expect the findings and recommendations from the NCC based on complaints received from consumers, said Hattingh.
“When we looked at the individual complaints, we found that these mobile network providers contravened the Consumer Protection Act. This will form the basis of our investigation,” said Hattingh.
The NCC said it received 32 complaints from consumers, saying the mobile networks were proposing call and data increases to consumers.
The increases were also going to affect those consumers who were already in existing contracts and had fixed term agreements with the networks.
Of the 32 complaints received by the NCC, 31 were against Vodacom, and the other levelled at Cell C.
The NCC has also informed Vodacom and Cell C of the formal investigation and has requested their co-operation in the investigation. Further to this, it has also requested the contract terms and conditions of all investigated parties.
Most of the complaints are from Gauteng followed by the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.
Hattingh explained that even though the commission did not receive complaints about MTN and Neotel, a lot of the contracts were similar. It would therefore be best to investigate all the networks.
Before a full-scale investigation was done, the NCC requested information from the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) about the network providers. This informed the decision to institute the investigation.
“We needed that information from Icasa to find out their (mobile network) business practices and understand them as well as their standard operating procedures and their rules,” Hattingh stated.
The NCC will partner with Icasa, which has jurisdiction over the networks by virtue of being the authority that issued licences to telecommunications and broadcasting service providers.
The NCC aims to conclude its investigation within a year and will then issue recommendations based on their findings.
“Our sole purpose is to seek compliance, and if we find that they were in the wrong then they will have to reverse what they did,” the NCC said.
In the 2014/2015 financial year, cellphone-related complaints ranked third highest among the complaints the NCC received, with a combined total of 946.
An analysis of these complaints indicate that 25 percent related to contract cancellation, followed by poor service delivery at 24 percent and defective handsets at 21 percent. – Additional reporting by SAnews.gov.za
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