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The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) has released draft mobile broadband service regulations that aim to ensure that Vodacom and MTN charge fair prices for mobile data in South Africa.
ICASA said that these regulations follow its market research on mobile broadband services.
“The purpose of these regulations is, among others, to impose appropriate pro-competitive license conditions on those licensees who have significant market power to remedy market failure; and to provide monitoring and investigation of anticompetitive conduct ”, affirmed ICASA.
The draft regulations state that MTN and Vodacom are dominant in the South African mobile data retail market and in upstream markets such as infrastructure access and wholesale national roaming.
To address this, the regulations require Vodacom and MTN to do the following regarding infrastructure exchange and wholesale services:
- Keep track of infrastructure sites where another operator requested access and was granted access within 20 business days.
- Keep track of sites where access was not approved within 20 business days.
- A list of all sites and all charges for sharing any macro site infrastructure.
- Provide a quarterly report showing the actual prices paid for wholesale roaming services and the data volumes used per site.
Regarding prices, the regulations require the following quarterly:
- A report on the actual retail prices paid by end users, calculated by dividing the total data revenue by the total volume of data used (in Gigabytes).
- A report on the actual retail prices paid by end users, divided by specific segments:
- Data used between 05:00 and 00:00 (“anytime”)
- Data used between 00:00 and 05:00 (“night owl”)
- By prepaid, hybrid and postpaid customer segments
- By consumer and commercial customer segments
- By province, and within provinces, by urban and rural areas
- Fixed, wireless, wholesale mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) and business traffic are excluded.
- A report showing the effective wholesale prices paid by MVNOs and resellers. When the retail price is lower than these wholesale prices, Vodacom and MTN must provide detailed and fully auditable evidence to ICASA explaining why.
“As such, the Authority will monitor retail prices and wholesale prices, and in particular it will monitor the reduction of margins, which the Competition Commission has indicated that it will process if the wholesale rates are above the retail rates. effective retail ”, said ICASA.
Anyone interested in commenting on the regulations has 30 business days from March 26, 2021 to submit their submissions to ICASA.
The draft regulations are included below.
In a related matter, ICASA’s Mobile Broadband Services Market Inquiry functions in the Legal appeal filed against ICASA by Telkom, which has delayed the auction of the coveted radio frequency spectrum.
Telkom argued that ICASA went ahead with the process to invite operators to request the spectrum without first completing its market research. Telkom maintains that this was illegal and irrational.
Now Read: Good News For Mobile Operators As Time Spectrum Widens
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