Dark cloud over South African communications industry

For three and a half years, regulations that would compel all network and Internet service providers to have 30% black ownership have been suspended with no indication of whether they will be implemented.

To understand how this happened, it is necessary to go back twenty years — before the Electronic Communications Act of 2005 came into effect. This was to facilitate the so-called “managed liberalisation” of South Africa’s telecommunications sector, hopefully ending Telkom’s decade-long monopoly. These can be issued as either “individual” or “class” licences. An individual licensee can operate nationally, whereas class licences are regional.

The minister’s capitulation meant Altech and about 300 other voice and data carriers could all build their own network infrastructure. While a few small private fibre network operators were active at the time, these were predominantly rolling out in more affluent estates and gated communities. At the same time this industry boom was taking off, Icasa instituted an inquiry in 2014 regarding the industry’s low levels of ownership by historically disadvantaged groups.

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