Cape Town - The government has been cautioned to be circumspect in the allocation of the wireless open access network - if it wants to achieve economic benefit and improve access to telecommunications.
This comes as the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) said it was deliberating on the newly released policy directive on high-density spectrum and wireless open access network
allocation.
Although it’s widely believed that the release of the unused spectrum could help stimulate the economy and innovation, analysts have
cautioned that it could also yield disastrous consequences if the government insisted on creating its own such network and allocating most of the available unassigned spectrum to it.
Vodacom and MTN have been the first network operators to be granted licences, giving them mutual exclusivity for years before other operators such as Telkom, Rain and Cell C were also later given licences.
The government now wants to break the monopoly of companies, Vodacom and MTN to give smaller players entry into the industry.
Researchers said the objectives were noble at face value, but it still
remained to be seen what the approach would be.
Researcher Mothobi Onkokame said some of the recommendations from the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, which was commissioned by the government, were aimed at improving connectivity reach and increasing participation by women and black people in general.
But whether the envisaged network was the best solution still remained to be seen. The Free Market Foundation warned that it would be a tight balancing act. “South Africa has had a success story with the introduction of the cellphone network, and now we have 90% coverage, with over 80% of the population having access to
cellphones.
“And this has been achieved largely due to the billions of rand worth of investment in
infrastructure by the private
companies,” said the foundations executive director Leon Louw.
Louw said government was also responsible for restricting competition by not allowing other players to piggy-back on the existing infrastructure.
He also pointed out that data costs would only come down when the SABC was forced to migrate from
analogue to digital, a move which was anticipated several years ago, but has yet to happen.
Economist Dawie Roodt says the auction-based model should still be used when allocating the spectrum.
“It’s a bit of a dilemma, but I would say auction it to the highest bidder with some time frames attached so that it can be re-auctioned. The
government will then be able to get an inflow of money.”
Another researcher, Enrico
Calandro, believed the allocation should take into consideration social and public value.
The allocation of the spectrum is also expected to accelerate the deployment of fifth-generation (5G) mobile technologies.
But this would require more base stations and all the spectrum they could get, added Louw.