South Africa’s biggest telecommunications operators want municipalities to face financial consequences – including damages claims – when they sit on wayleave applications, the Association of Comms & Technology (ACT) told Icasa’s public hearings on the draft rapid deployment regulations in Midrand on Monday.

ACT, which represents the country’s six largest network operators, proposed that the regulations expressly allow a licensee to seek a damages award from Icasa’s complaints and compliance committee where demonstrable loss results from a municipality’s delay, alongside penalties for municipal non-compliance with binding processing timelines.

The proposal accompanied a five-point reform package the industry body tabled at the hearings, which are being held at the Protea Hotel Marriott in Midrand on Monday and Tuesday.

The hearings follow written submissions on the draft regulations, gazetted on 10 April, which revealed near-unanimous industry criticism: the rules regulate licensees – who want to build – while leaving untouched the municipal wayleave bottleneck that actually throttles deployment.

The draft regulations are meant to give effect to chapter 4 of the Electronic Communications Act, creating a uniform national framework for network deployment covering permits, access to land, compensation, dispute resolution and a national GIS database of infrastructure.

But ACT told the hearings that without binding obligations on municipalities, the regulations fail to discharge Icasa’s express mandate under the ECA to prescribe the procedures and processes for obtaining permits, authorisations and approvals and the objective of rapid deployment cannot be achieved.

Deemed-approval mechanism

At the heart of ACT’s proposal is a deemed-approval mechanism. Municipalities would have to acknowledge a wayleave application within five days and process it within a binding 30 working days, providing written reasons for any refusal. If no decision is made in time, approval would be deemed granted. Wayleave fees would be capped at the reasonable direct administrative cost of processing an application, ending what the association describes as municipalities treating fees as a revenue source.

ACT’s written submission says operators wait six to 12 months for wayleaves in some metros, with costs ranging from R8 000 to “hundreds of thousands of rand” per application, including arbitrary annual “maintenance” fees for which no service is provided. Icasa’s own explanatory memorandum identifies inconsistent municipal wayleave processes as the number one recurring barrier to deployment.

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None of this would be regulatory innovation, ACT argued: the EU’s Gigabit Infrastructure Act already provides for binding permit deadlines, tacit approval when authorities miss them, compensation for operators harmed by delays and permit fees capped at administrative cost. South Africa would be adopting established international practice, not inventing it.

ACT also flagged a structural gap in the draft’s flagship GIS database: much of South Africa’s most significant passive infrastructure – masts, towers, ducts and poles – is owned by tower companies and passive infrastructure providers that are not necessarily licensees, and so fall outside the regulations entirely. The database would map an incomplete picture of what exists, ACT said, and the co-build and infrastructure sharing provisions would be undermined because the entities owning the most shareable infrastructure sit outside the framework.

On the database itself, ACT repeated the security concerns that dominated the written submissions: centralising geo-referenced data on all fibre routes, ducts, towers and base stations creates a material national security risk in a country where infrastructure theft and sabotage are well documented. It wants tiered access controls, Icasa as custodian under a formal data security policy, and the six-month implementation window extended to 12 months with phased roll-out.

Other proposals include a single national digitised platform for submitting and tracking wayleave applications across South Africa’s 257 municipalities; a minor-works exemption so that aerial fibre drops and short duct extensions need only five to seven business days’ notice; a requirement that all new dwelling developments and substantially renovated buildings include passive fibre-ready infrastructure; and a graduated penalty regime in place of the draft’s flat R1-million maximum, which ACT said fails to distinguish between a licensee that wilfully refuses to submit GIS data and one with a technical formatting error.

ACT also repeated its warning of “regulatory misalignment”, noting that the draft appears to have been developed against the 2023 rapid deployment policy direction alone, without reference to communications minister Solly Malatsi’s 2026 draft policy direction – which directs standardised municipal by-laws and is still going through its own consultation process in parallel.

Hearings continue

Also due to present on Monday were Telkom, Huawei, CAP, Rain and the City of Cape Town – the only municipality on the schedule, and thus the only voice from the sphere of government at the centre of the industry’s complaints.

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The hearings continue on Tuesday with presentations from Digital Council Africa and the Internet Service Providers’ Association, MTN, the Wireless Access Providers’ Association, Vodacom, and DigiV8. Notably absent from the schedule is Maziv, parent of fibre operators Vumatel and Dark Fibre Africa, despite having made a written submission on the draft regulations. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media