Regulations dash low-cost hopes

Horribility

With changes going through in the ICT this should have been long long ago...! uncompetitive! manner I say
 
siphiwe should really buy him self another bmw because he fought valiantly.
 
when I read about all the corruption in this government, just finished this weeks' M&G, I am not surprised ICASA isn't doing anything. Someone has to foot the corruption bill, and guess what? It is us Joe Public
 
Musiclover08 said:
I really hope that when Vodafone comes in it slashes all the current prices so low that ICASA becomes obsolete.
Click to expand...
You're hoping that a company that exists with the sole purpose of generating a profit for it's shareholders is going to slash it's profit margins.
You have very high hopes indeed.
 
The Vodacom sale fiasco has already proven that ICASA are grossly corrupt and can be paid off. (Probably for a few bottles of Johnny Walker Red.)

This should come as no surprise.
 
Musiclover08 said:
I really hope that when Vodafone comes in it slashes all the current prices so low that ICASA becomes obsolete.
Click to expand...

Vodacom and MTN are the 2 guilty parties here. They are the prime cause for the high interconnect charges.
 
"Why Am I not surprised? I think I am going to die of not surprised" - Diago (the parrot in Disney's Alladin)

Just another round of the tail wagging the dog...

What actions can Joe Public take (that we are not already doing), that are effective to defend ourselves from this behaviour.

Is there a flavour of vigilanti-ism that we can take part in or support that will begin to shift the balance of power to the consumer... In telecomms, in the retail food industry, motor industry... What can we do?
 
"While there are 50-million active SIM cards in SA, the number of individual users is closer to 34-million. That means up to 16-million people have SIM cards with different operators to avoid interconnection fees."

Has the writer ever heard of mobile data connections? I have four sim cards, and only one is is used for voice...
 
ICASA is a COMPLETE waste of the Taxpayers money. Let the Minister of Communications have his BMW's, but then please cut the fat (GET RID OF ICASA) and let the competition commission do ICASA's job. At least they have teeth!!!
 
I agree and have often stated that interconnect rates are the most important single driver of high costs in SA for both voice and broadband.

ICASA has done some important work in creating the correct interconnect framework which forces the larger operators to connect with the smaller one's in the first place. This requires the correct regulations to be put in place for fairness all around.

The next difficult step for ICASA is to ensure they have an objective basis for lowering the rates, and proving what the actual tariffs should be. This is a tough exercise because they need operator information and they need a basis for the calculation. Initially they used an older method for calculation using historic costs, which operators can easily manipulate for their own purposes. However Europe and other leading regulators have used LRIC (long range incremental costs) which calculates how much operators should charge based on future costs.

The other complication which would take time is to be able to maybe force the bigger two operators to charge less, but smaller operators to be able to charge more. This type of strategy will take time to finalise.

Since we know these calculations are going to take time, the only other way to bring down costs in the short term is to use social pressure (public outcries, maybe boycotts) to force one of the big networks to voluntarily bring down costs. We need to find a way to persuade a big operator that it IS IN THEIR OWN INTERESTS to bring down these costs first - maybe as a branding exercise.

That's where the MyBB forum can be useful - for generating innovative ways to force this to happen and mobilising the MyBB community to effect this.
 
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