South Africa’s telecommunications industry is facing a barrage of threats, from crime and vandalism to power cuts and even overreach by politicians.
This is the word from Nomvuyiso Batyi, CEO of telecommunications industry lobby group the Association of Comms & Technology (ACT) and an industry stalwart who served as a councillor at communications regulator Icasa for eight years and as a special adviser to the minister of communications. She was speaking to TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (watch or listen to the interview below).
ACT, which represents the six main telecoms operators in South Africa – MTN, Vodacom, Rain, Liquid Intelligent Technologies, Telkom and Cell C – was founded two years ago as an interface between the industry and policymakers and regulators.
In the interview, Batyi unpacks a range of issues affecting ACT members. She discusses:
- Her first engagement with newly appointed communications minister Solly Malatsi, and her views on him;
- What her day-to-day work involves;
- Why government shouldn’t be setting deadlines for 2G and 3G switch-off in South Africa;
- Import taxes on cellphones, and why luxury taxes on 4G devices should be scrapped;
- How the load shedding problem has been replaced with the load reduction problem, and what the impact has been on operators;
- The scourge of theft and vandalism, and why urgent action is needed to address the problem; and
- South Africa’s upcoming spectrum auction, and why telecoms operators should get access to spectrum below 694MHz that has traditionally been reserved for broadcasting.
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