The local loop noose

South Africa on the verge of a glut of international bandwidth still has one more obstacle to overcome

South Africa is well on its way to being spoilt with international and national bandwidth infrastructure. On the national level, Vodacom, MTN, Neotel and Dark Fibre Africa have been steadily rolling out metro fibre networks, which will eventually link the three major metro’s of Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. Broadband Infraco has also been granted a license to provide access to telecoms providers through their national network.

Internationally, the SEACOM cable has arrived, with 1.28Tb/s of bandwidth capacity while Telkom has upgraded their existing SAT3/SAFE undersea cable, which now provides 340Gb/s into Europe, and 440Gb/s into Asia.

EASSy will be joining the SEACOM cable on the east coast of Africa, with 1.4Tb/s to be completed by Q2 2010. Finally, WACS should arrive along the West coast in Q2 2011, bringing a whopping 5.12Tb/s to bear. Combined, these cables will supply over 8Tb/s of data into South Africa.

So, in light of all these developments, some might assume that fast, affordable, and abundantly accessible internet connectivity is just around the corner. However, there is still one final and crucial bottleneck in the system – ‘last mile’ access. The local copper loop is firmly in hands of Telkom, while MTN and Vodacom both have a firm grip on their extensive network of 3G base stations.

Speaking on the issue at a recent public seminar, ECN Telecoms CEO John Holdsworth said: “The incumbent operators are using their networks as an enduring bottleneck. We need to have services competition, and regulations that force these operators to share their networks at competitive rates.”

Holdsworth explained that it is not viable for new entrants to build systems comparable to the Telkom copper loop, or MTN and Vodacom’s wireless infrastructure. The only way to achieve true competition on the access networks is through local loop unbundling (LLU) regulations, but none of the necessary regulations are even drafted by ICASA at this point, Holdsworth continued.

Despite the critical failings of ICASA, there is optimism that the regulator will finally have some serious effect in the telecoms market, thanks to the political will that is now being vested in the reform of the telecoms sector. “For the first time we are seeing politicians really getting behind the liberation of telecoms,” concluded Holdsworth.

Local Loop Unbundling - discussion