Moneyweb Power Hour: Ajay Pandey: MD, Neotel

in another eight weeks or ten weeks you will see CDMA getting deployed in Pretoria and Jo'burg to start with, as a part of our pilot.

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Just to put things into perspective, any international connectivity is made of two half circuits. Today, if the price of London to Cape Town connectivity is x, the price from Cape Town to London is about 4x to 5x - and that's what is killing the growth of Internet as well as the other industries.

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I think the regulator and the players around now need to act on it, and the next action is expected from the Regulator's side.

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We would like to, if I may use the word, positively exploit the presence of VSNL as principal shareholder in our company to our advantage and to the advantage of the people of South Africa.

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And I think the price should be defined and should be conveyed or communicated on the day of your launch, and I guess we'll wait for that.

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AJAY PANDEY: Let me just place some facts on the table to clarify what I'm trying to say. A licence was given in December 2005, which is about a year and a half ago - that's number one. Thereafter we've had submissions to ICASA for allowing us to use a particular spectrum, which is useful for deploying the CDMA technology. To put facts on the table, we got that frequency only three months ago, and that whole process took more than a year in terms of hearing and in terms of giving in our submissions. And it's been three months since we got the spectrum, and in another eight weeks or ten weeks you will see CDMA getting deployed in Pretoria and Jo'burg to start with, as a part of our pilot. And, God willing, if that goes well, if it's acceptable, then we go into high gear and take it across the nation.

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AJAY PANDEY: Well, OK let me just go back to the basics. There is a VET [?] component of the undersea cable. And that is a consortium-led initiative, and we, along with one of its associate companies, has larger ownership in the VET [?] portion of that undersea cable. So you're right in an extent to say that capacity is available and the SNO should play a role. The bottleneck comes in when you bring the cable from the undersea side to what is called the dry land, which is the physical land. And that's where you have landing rights. As we speak, at this very moment, there is only one landing right available in this country - and that is to the incumbent.

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