Communications regulator Icasa has given notice that it intends to conduct a market inquiry into the affordability of telecommunications services in South Africa, opening a process that will run well into next year and that revisits ground already covered by the Competition Commission, by Icasa itself and, as of last month, by the communications department.

The notice was published in the Government Gazette on Friday under section 4B of the Icasa Act and signed by the regulator’s chairman, Mothibi Ramusi. It says concerns persist about the affordability of voice and broadband services for low-income households, rural communities, young people and informal sector workers, despite what it calls progress in network coverage and mobile broadband penetration.

The stated purpose is an evidence-based assessment identifying structural cost drivers, the impact on household budgets and possible regulatory or market interventions.

The inquiry, it says, is explicitly aligned with the regulator’s previous market inquiries into data services and with its role in monitoring pricing outcomes following spectrum assignment and pro-competitive interventions. In plainer terms, Icasa wants to establish whether the 2022 spectrum auction delivered anything for consumers’ pockets.

That auction raised R14.4-billion for the fiscus, well above the R8-billion the regulator had projected, and was sold to the public for years as the intervention that would bring prices down. The follow-up sale has slipped repeatedly and is now expected in Icasa’s 2027 financial year.

The regulator has already published evidence that the obligations attached to that auction are running behind. Its State of the ICT Sector report in March found that of 21 878 government facilities operators were required to connect under spectrum licence conditions, only 4 377 had been connected by October 2025 — about 20%. The same report put 5G population coverage at 58% nationally but as low as 7% in rural parts of the Eastern Cape, and noted that entry-level smartphones had fallen to R399, removing devices as the main barrier and leaving price.

No shortage of investigations

South Africa has not been short of investigations into what its citizens pay to communicate. The Competition Commission’s data services market inquiry, launched in 2017 and reported in 2019, found mobile data pricing to be structurally anti-poor and produced price cuts on entry-level bundles. Icasa ran its own priority markets inquiry and a mobile broadband services inquiry, publishing a discussion document in 2019 that found retail mobile markets ineffectively competitive in many cases and site access highly concentrated.

In August, the department of communications & digital technologies issued a tender for a market analysis study of its own, asking why previous interventions have not delivered affordable voice and data.

Prices have come down, though unevenly. Prepaid customers paying R100 for a gigabyte in 2020 were paying about R79 by 2025, while a 5GB post-paid bundle fell from R199 to R99 over the same period. National averages flatter that picture: on International Telecommunication Union price brackets, South Africa’s blended average of roughly R20.50/gigabyte sits below the global average but behind 27 other African countries.

Stakeholders have 10 working days from publication of Icasa’s notice to submit questions of clarity on a questionnaire the regulator will post to its website. Icasa then has 10 working days to publish a briefing note in response, after which stakeholders get 45 working days to answer the questionnaire. A discussion document follows, out for public comment for a further 45 working days, and only then may the regulator hold public hearings.

Counting working days from Friday and allowing for the December break, written responses are unlikely to be in before the new year. A discussion document, hearings and any findings are a 2027 matter at the earliest.

The inquiry also opens while Icasa is defending its last consumer intervention in court. MTN and Vodacom have each challenged the amended end-user and subscriber service charter regulations gazetted in January, which force operators to roll over unused data at least once and to stop applying out-of-bundle rates without explicit consent. The rules take effect on 23 January 2027. The operators argue the regulator exceeded its powers, did not properly assess the economic impact and consulted inadequately. It is the second time in a decade that data expiry rules have ended up in front of a judge.

Communications minister Solly Malatsi has pushed cost-to-communicate to the top of his department’s agenda, backing municipal red-tape reform and telling parliament in May that faster and cheaper internet was the central objective of his R2.55-billion budget. — © 2026 NewsCentral Media