Davids versus Goliaths

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Davids versus Goliaths

LATER THIS MONTH the Independent Communications Authority (Icasa) will conduct hearings on the first major decision based on South Africa's new Electronic Communications Act (ECA). The regulations being proposed by the regulatory authority will enable carrier pre-select (CPS) for SA's telecommunications networks, including mobile operators Vodacom and MTN, forcing them to carry network traffic on behalf of smaller third parties.
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we all know mtn and vodacom fix their prices, and to a lesser degree so does those other two
 
I'm with the mobile operators on this one... There is no such thing as a free lunch :rolleyes: and if ECN had enough tom backing them then i'm sure they could be a VMNO like Virgin Mobile. It really feels like they trying to beat the price down with regulatory structures and then making a few bucks.

Up until recently many of the input costs of the mobile operators have been controlled by our friends at our favourite monopoly. No amount of divvying up the customer base between hundreds of virtual operators is going to fix that.

We already have a one virtual operator and one semi-virtual operator and they are having a marginal impact on the market. We really need to see more than just a few hand waving arguments before I and hopefully ICASA are convinced that this will be beneficial.

Worst case scenario... ICASA enforces this and our mobile costs actually go up because of all the additional effort required to maintain all the virtual operators. :sick:
 
In simple lay man terms, what is carrier pre-select and how does it work?

Regarding costs, perhaps we should be given a breakdown of the true inter connectivity costs, including Telkom's cost to the mobile operators. R1.25 seems high to me, but is it?
 
Carrier Pre-Select without cost-based interconnect fees means absolutely nothing. It feels like weird arse-about-face prioritisation...

Juice
 
TimTDP said:
Regarding costs, perhaps we should be given a breakdown of the true inter connectivity costs, including Telkom's cost to the mobile operators. R1.25 seems high to me, but is it?
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If you consider that the operators could make a fair profit when they were only charging something like 25c in the beginning, and also considering that in the beginning they had huge capital expenditure to recoup, R1.25 is at best price-gouging and at worst collusion and punishable anti-competitive price-fixing...

Juice
 
Juice said:
Carrier Pre-Select without cost-based interconnect fees means absolutely nothing. It feels like weird arse-about-face prioritisation...

Juice
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Yes. Perhaps not so weird given that price regulation is the difficult bit (& in the context of CPS you can get screwed on call origination and termination).
 
Can anyone explain me . . . . . . .

Can anyone explain me why MTN & VodaCom are Classifying themselves as mobile Operators, under the ECA you are a Network Operator.

Why is MTN & VodaCom spending billions on fibre 2 the Business-Customers.

They want to compete in the Fixed Line space but dont want to follow the rules.

To hell with them.

ICASA lay down the rules and if the dont comply then kill them with fines.


DxL - Team
 
We're being confronted with a remedy to a problem that hasn't been identified.

However, in principle De Vries says MTN would support any decision by Icasa backed with market analysis clearly identifying a problem and offering CPS regulations as the most efficient solution.

Vodacom echoes MTN's view about the lack of analysis. "CPS has generally been imposed almost exclusively on incumbent monopoly fixed line operators. Vodacom doesn't know of any examples worldwide where CPS has been imposed and implemented in competitive markets, such as is the case with mobile telephone networks and services in SA," says Dot Field, chief communications officer at the Vodacom Group.

Well let see, what is this action in reaction to? Could be the artificial high interconnect fees - that neither of the two major networks want to have a relook at, and which Icasa does not want address - dammit they have to grow balls and get the stomach to take on these guys.

Vodacom has always been one for world firsts - so how about CPS for mobile networks, that keep telecommunication artificially high.
 
Vodacom doesn't know of any examples worldwide where CPS has been imposed and implemented in competitive markets, such as is the case with mobile telephone networks and services in SA
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What? I would definitely not call R3/min call rate the result of a competitive market
 
Competitive market my @ss! We have a duopoly with price fixing on the interconnects and incredibly similar rates for calls.
Bring on the CPS for mobile operators ICASA! Finally be a world first in something other than screwing up.
 
ICASA could not fix a one horse race, in a one horse town, were they were having a road show
 
Tweak said:
Research what the word Oligopily means.
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The cellphone market is pretty close to saturated and everyone agrees about that - thus there is no scope for growth. The only thing that we are going to get by having more VMNO's is market churn.

Churn costs money. It costs the recipient network marketing and admin overheads and often additional migration costs (eg porting fees). It costs the loosing network administrative and other costs to deprovision the user from their network. And it costs the user time, money and effort to go through the porting process. These cost often take a long time to recover.

Since the new operators are going to be virtual they are going to be paying the same high input costs for their network infrastructure and they will no doubt want to have profitable businesses. I would be very surprised to see more than a few percent difference in costs for the man on the street - is it really worth it?

We have case studies showing both third mobile operators (Cell-C) and virtual operators (Virgin Mobile) failing to have significant impact on the market. I would be interested to see you present a case study where this has been successful. :)
 
ambo said:
We have case studies showing both third mobile operators (Cell-C) and virtual operators (Virgin Mobile) failing to have significant impact on the market. I would be interested to see you present a case study where this has been successful. :)
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Who are the "We" that you are referring to? Lol..

Virgin would've made a lot bigger impact if they didn't have CellC's weak signal to operate from.

More people are starting to use their cellphones to go online.. I hope they eventually realise that Vodacom is not the only provider out there -.-
 
DXL said:
Can anyone explain me why MTN & VodaCom are Classifying themselves as mobile Operators, under the ECA you are a Network Operator.
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technology neutrality only takes you so far in practice: so while they all have the same licence and have the same rights to roll out fixed / mobile / whatever going forward we will deal with the historical realities of the silo'd licensing structure under the Telecoms Act for some time

so yes they are network operators but, importantly they are MNOs when they are providing a mobile cellular service
 
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