The Internet Service Providers’ Association (Ispa) on Monday called on South Africa’s mobile operators to “embrace the open-access spirit” of government’s national integrated ICT policy white paper by launching “genuine wholesale service offerings”.
This, the association said, will enable greater mobile broadband competition on terms more acceptable to the mobile operators.
“The operators have a window of opportunity to open their networks by introducing real competition in their downstream markets. A competitive wholesale mobile data model will help them avoid more unpalatable consequences,” said Ispa regulatory adviser Dominic Cull in a statement.
“Radical proposals [in the white paper] around mobile broadband spectrum mean there is a clear timeframe for incumbent mobile networks to embrace greater sharing and transparency,” Cull added.
The white paper has drawn fire from Vodacom, MTN and Telkom, all of which have criticised government’s plan to allocate all unassigned mobile spectrum to a single national wholesale wireless open-access network operator. The white paper has even raised the possibility of forcing mobile operators to return the spectrum they’ve used to build their 2G, 3G and 4G networks, a move that critics say could be unconstitutional.
Cull said the operators should “look to the precedent established by Telkom, which has embraced findings against it by the competition authorities for anticompetitive conduct by hardening the separation between its wholesale (now Openserve) and retail divisions”.
“This separation — which is not evident among the mobile networks — ensures that Openserve does not unfairly discriminate between Telkom Retail and third-party Internet service providers in terms of price or quality of service,” he said. “Wholesale is a profitable business area for telecoms operators, with solid margins, and merits proper and separate attention”.
It’s not the first time the association has called for this. It recently raised the idea at the parliamentary hearings into the cost to communication in South Africa.
“Ispa argued then that the absence of a wholesale mobile data offering constitutes a lost business opportunity for mobile operators and an obstacle to deepening broadband penetration,” Cull said.
“Enabling competition downstream from Telkom has borne fruit, with strong competition between Internet service providers driving innovation and reduced pricing, leading to better packages for consumers. As a result, uncapped ADSL or large, unshaped capped ADSL accounts have become the standard in the fixed-line broadband market. New fixed fibre offerings offered on an open-access basis are driving the price of fixed data even further.
“This reduction in prices in the fixed broadband space — available only to a small percentage of South Africans — through service-level competition must be replicated in the mobile broadband market.” — © 2016 NewsCentral Media
