Telkom will take the wraps off its new mobile telecommunications network in just three weeks from now, on 14 October, and in the process launch SA’s fourth cellular operator. That’s the obvious conclusion to be drawn from an invitation that the JSE-listed telecoms group issued on Tuesday, in which it has invited media and VIPs to an event at Lanseria airport, north of Johannesburg.
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The Mobile TV Consortium has been granted a licence to test the Korean standard for mobile television, digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB), in SA. The consortium, controlled by businessman Richard Moloko’s Moloko Investment Group and backed by high-profile shareholders including former Telkom chairman Shirley Lue Arnold, says it expects to have a service ready for pilot in about a month.
Falling mobile termination rates and slow recovery of the economy are dampening the growth of SA’s telecommunications market. That’s according to a new report from BMI-TechKnowledge (BMI-T). The report forecasts that the industry will grow only 5% over the next five years, with most of that growth coming from data services.
Events conspired against us and we missed last week’s TalkCentral recording. But we’re back with a bumper episode 9 of SA’s business technology podcast, and there’s plenty to talk about. Your hosts, Duncan McLeod and Candice Jones, delve in detail into Cell C’s launch of its broadband wireless network and look at how it’s taking the fight to bigger rivals MTN and Vodacom.
Internet service provider MWeb is expanding its capacity by adding extra last-mile access on Telkom’s network. MWeb CEO Rudi Jansen says since the launch of uncapped broadband earlier this year, customers are flooding to the service. “The uptake on our uncapped product has been incredible,” he says.
MTN and Telkom, which recently signed a cellular roaming agreement, are facing off in a dispute over wholesale mobile termination rates. Telkom, which is due to launch its own mobile network within the next couple of months, wants to charge MTN — and presumably other operators — 93c/minute to carry calls onto its new network.
Telkom and MTN are set to face off at the Independent Communications Authority of SA’s complaints and compliance committee on Thursday over a dispute of interconnection fees, the money they charge each other to carry calls between their networks. Authority spokesman Paseka Maleka Telkom lodged a complaint against MTN at the end of June. It appears the two companies are having trouble negotiating the terms of an interconnection agreement.
Telkom will focus its energies on training new communications technology skills to keep pace with industry demands, says acting CEO Jeffrey Hedberg. Hedberg, speaking at Telkom’s annual Satnac conference, says Africa is a technology opportunity waiting to happen. However, he says the greatest challenge the continent faces is a lack of skills.
In a surprising move, MWeb is lobbying government to give Telkom the more than R1bn in cash stashed away in the universal service fund so that it can plough that money into upgrading its network. CEO Rudi Jansen is especially keen for the money to be used to upgrade the so-called last mile of copper cables that connect customers to Telkom’s network.
With more than half a dozen SA operators rolling out their own national networks, consolidation in SA’s telecommunications industry looks inevitable. There’s a chance Cell C and Dimension Data could be the ones to kick it off. Didata division Internet Solutions looks a bit like the odd man out these days. The converged service provider, which remains a powerful force in the corporate market, is the only big player in its space that doesn’t have its own significant investment in telecoms infrastructure.