Telkom CEO Sipho Maseko has said that he hopes the company will be offering consumers a triple-play combination of uncapped Internet access, voice services and video on demand (VOD) for one flat-rate fee within the next 12 months.

The JSE-listed telecommunications operator, which is battling to stem a decline in the number of fixed lines in service and to increase broadband digital subscriber line (DSL) penetration rates, hopes that VOD will help it turn around its fortunes.

Telkom is investing billions of rand in its access network — the component of its infrastructure into homes and businesses — to improve broadband speeds. It intends offering bandwidth-hungry services like VOD over this infrastructure and has held talks with Netflix and other content suppliers.

In a column published in the Sunday Times, Maseko says that by January 2014, Telkom hopes to have an “integrated offer for consumers, including uncapped Internet, voice services and VOD under one flat rate”.

He says in the column that the company still has “some way to go” but that “I can say without a shadow of a doubt” that Telkom has made “measurable progress in the past year”.

“We’ve bolstered our executive, and we’ve sought to foster a new spirit of enterprise,” he says.

“If last year was about putting in place the building blocks for our company’s recovery, 2014 will be the year in which we will focus on efficiently executing our plans and modernising our network to make this possible,” Maseko says in the column.

“We also intend to reset our relationships and partnerships with the industry in a fundamental way.”

Telkom will do this, he says, by separating its activities into a wholesale and a retail business.

“To do this in a sustainable way for the entire market, we will institute a transfer-pricing structure that will ensure that our wholesale division sets prices for our Telkom retail arm in a transparent way,” he says.

“In fact, our wholesale business will be retail agnostic, providing connectivity and other services to all of the players in the market in a fair and transparent way.”

In the same piece, Maseko again takes aim at plans by telecoms regulator Icasa to impose local-loop unbundling (LLU), in terms of which Telkom’s rivals will be given some sort of access to its infrastructure into homes and businesses.

“The problem is that LLU will discourage investment in the sector – which wouldn’t be desirable in a country where teledensity — the number of fixed lines in service — is only 7%. At best, LLU will only benefit this 7% of largely urbanised people. So what about the other 83%?”

Maseko said that although LLU is meant to promote competition, “the truth is that it is an outdated regulatory remedy which won’t achieve that goal in the era of fourth-generation wireless technology”.