The headline on a street pole last week read: "Lights stay on." SA is so entrapped by Eskom’s broken power supply that it’s now newsworthy when there isn’t any load-shedding. I thought of that street pole headline when news broke that the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) had convinced Telkom, MTN and Vodacom to drop their impending lawsuits over spectrum allocation.
So unusual is it for the telecommunications industry not to be litigious that I wrote my own imaginary four-liner on a street pole: telecom industry sees common sense. This is the second time in a year that Icasa has convinced angry mobile operators to back down from their legal high horses — it attempted to auction spectrum this March, but foolishly made the process unnecessarily complicated.
Last week’s nifty appeal to common sense seems to have been achieved with the judicious use of just one word: "provisional" as opposed to "temporary". This relates to the frequencies the spectrum-starved operators were able to use during lockdown — an arrangement Icasa signalled it would stop this month.
When the temporary spectrum was initially offered as lockdown hit last year, some operators asked for a lot, some for a little, some for nothing. With this unexpected windfall, operators have been justifiably wary of giving it up. The last time SA licensed spectrum for mobile operators was 15 years ago, when 3G was just beginning to take off. When the temporary allocation expires at the end of this month, Icasa will issue new licences for this "provisional" spectrum from December 1.
Tens of millions of rands in legal fees have just been saved. The disrupted auction will finally happen next year, and hopefully the rollout of 5G networks will provide the much-heralded ultrafast download speeds the technology can deliver.
Icasa CEO Willington Ngwepe deserves an Ardbeg (never mind a Bell’s) for pulling this off. It’s such a man-bites-dog story, isn’t it? Instead of the usual time-wasting legal fandango, common sense has prevailed. We will have provisional spectrum for Christmas, and hopefully the long-awaited 5G auction by Easter.
Fixated on mining, especially coal, and the enormous rent that can be extracted, the ANC government and its rich benefactors haven’t noticed the sea changes in the world. Even The Economist’s front-page headline that "data is the new oil" hasn’t updated the enmeshed political and business elite’s understanding of where future business opportunities are. Only Patrice Motsepe seems to have noticed renewable potential and has hired former Eskom CEO Brian Dames to run that business stream for his empire.
The same huge potential for SA’s future economic activity needs telecoms, wireless broadband and internet access. If only the cabinet understood the shifting sands of commerce and the future of a knowledge economy.
Shapshak is editor-in-chief of Stuff Studios and publisher of Scrolla.Africa
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