Despite giant strides in the right direction in the past few years in opening up SA’s telecommunications market — making it more competitive and transparent — there are still pockets of monopolistic behaviour. One of these is the application-to-person (A2P) SMS market in SA, which is worth more than R1bn/year in revenue for the mobile network
There’s been plenty of talk about the need for greater mobile data coverage in rural areas but it’s easy to become blasé about it when you’re ensconced in a coverage-rich metropolis for 350 days of the year. Hit the road and the plight of those who live with abysmal or nonexistent data coverage becomes clear
Super 5 Media, formerly known as Telkom Media, still wants to offer pay-TV services to South Africans, more than three years after first being licensed, and has requested yet another extension from the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) to launch its products. In a notice published in the Government Gazette
It is a perversion of SA’s broadband sector that wireless players punch above their weight. More than 21m South Africans use a wireless connection to access the Internet — with a tablet, smartphone or dongle — whereas fewer than 800 000 subscribe to an ADSL broadband connection. This is according to the Organisation for Economic
Your hosts Duncan McLeod and Craig Wilson bring you a bumper end-of-year edition of TalkCentral, clocking in at more than an hour, in which we reveal our favourite gadgets of 2011, from tablets to smartphones and from ultrabooks to TVs. We also do a live demonstration of Siri, for those who are keen to see how
A reading of a detailed draft plan by the telecommunications regulator to license radio frequency spectrum for next-generation wireless broadband networks shows it wants to entice new entrants, maximise competition and encourage infrastructure sharing. It could change SA’s telecoms
In its framework for the licensing of high demand spectrum, published last week, the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) says it intends to reserve a portion of the 2,6GHz band for a “managed spectrum park”. The idea, it seems, is to make spectrum
The Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) hopes SA operators will emulate the Russian model of infrastructure sharing for next-generation mobile broadband networks based on long-term evolution (LTE) technology, TechCentral has learnt. LTE, which will pave the way to
After a series of false starts, humbly acknowledged, the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) yesterday came out with a new proposal to allocate the sought-after spectrum in the 2,6GHz band and, rather progressively, spectrum in the 800MHz band, too. Previous
The Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) has begun the process of opening up so-called “high-demand spectrum bands” that will eventually pave the way to the introduction of fourth-generation (4G) mobile broadband networks in SA. The authority has decided to tie
