I am surprised that competitors have not taken Telkom to the competition commission. Removing ADSL exchanges will pretty much monopolise Telkom's offering in that area without any other option (except mobile data through SPs). If I was Telkom, I would actually do the same since the majority of ADSL/VDSL users are actually only using Telkom for the access to the line.
So it is a quick win to shut down exchanges and move users over to 3G/LTE and immediately profit from this. There is hardly any other option. If this was happening in my area, I would challenge Telkom for anti-competitive behaviour. Just a pity that neither ISPA, ICASA or any other consumer body will do anything about it.
Actually it isn't surprising at all and reflects the real problem here. There is really no reason beyond cost factors why an iECNS licence holder hasn't rolled out massive infrastructure to form a national network. Telkom's retail endeavours have generally been a failure but never underestimate how critical Telkom is to the overall ecosystem and how heavily they fall to bizarre and paralysing scrutiny due to the greed and incompetence of certain market participants.
Certain iECNS licence holders have invested considerably in a broader ecosystem and have laid out considerable fibre resources for the business community and so on (think about JINX by way of example), but in the main it has only been the MNOs and Telkom that have really gone the route of building a full national network from access point in the last mile. There are a few providers that provide alternate last mile access but not of a national reach and invariably these providers either depend on Telkom or on those iECNS licence holders who have invested in the broader ecosystem. The MNOs do not benefit from the highly competitive landscape that exists in the ADSL space and while there is some dabbling from WISPs and the like (and recently the arising of some FTTH players) it really is a case that outside of fibre of DSL there isn't competitive forces at play. The result is good for the guys in Telkom who are in retail (but not for the company as a whole) and really good for the MNOs but bad for SA and the ecosystem.
What really happens here is that by Telkom rendering DSL - which really is the only national reach, continuous connectivity, tolerable price wholesale service - unavailable what Telkom are doing is giving the MNOs (including themself) an opportunity to cannabilise further against the non-MNO players. Considering who Telkoms more well stocked competitors are there is no surprise that there aren't complaints.
Also remember Telkom generate revenue from the DSL service offerings in two streams - the charge for the DSL circuit and analogue voice line (which doesn't equal the cost installing and maintaining circuits and MSAN infrastructure) and the IPConnect product offering (which is the biggest cost component to any ISP in the DSL space - at one stage Telkom Internet was straddled with paying for the mistakes of earlier Telkom executives through excessive international connectivity costs but I suspect that has passed by now). So if a particular exchange has high volume data customers it certainly won't be in the bottom 287 and I believe many of the Top 403 exchanges are in "rural" areas. Voice revenues have been diminishing for years and my pub engineering maths tells me that an exchange with 200 odd subscribers on 4Mbps uncapped connectivity would make an exchange viable absent other factors such as copper theft. In this particular instances Randfontein isn't making sense and I wonder if there isn't another big factor at play - one of the mining operations shutting down, Sentech doing something funky in the area, Telkom having installed considerable LTE resources (which would be anticompetitive until Telkom make an open access model available for LTE services). So lets take the idea of Telkom shutting down ADSL in the knowledge that their only customer attrition is to the other MNOs. Telkom spends a considerable amount of money on their roaming agreement with MTN so even on that front the wins of moderate data usage over 3G or LTE or smaller than the wins to Telkom on FTTH
Telkom have a considerable "copper mine" of infrastructure that takes the form of hundreds of facilities that can be leased, but ICASA persist in failing to enforce the facilities leasing regulations. Moreover Neotel have already secured a ruling from the CCC of ICASA on it being wrongful for Telkom not to provide access to the facilities which were within the LLU space to Neotel. Sadly the CCC also ruled that because ICASA were at the time promulgating LLU regulations that no imposed penalty was lobbed onto Telkom - this was a few years ago.
The reality is that Telkom cannot capitalize these assets to the sorts of valuation that they have been given (in some instances the install cost far exceeds the value but in others you had Telkom grossly over-valuing their asset base by using monopoly profit projections). I have at least twice witnessed Telkom earnestly say "we will gladly lease out underperforming exchanges" and back in early 2014 there was supposed to be a task team devised under ICASAs ageis that would have involved CellC trialing out taking over a Telkom exchange. Sadly nothing emerged of it and to this day I have no idea why that is - no tech publication bothered to follow up. However in order to capitalize Telkom need to have buy in from other ECNS players and thus far this hasn't happened. Telkom have for a few years had a facilities leasing policy relating to their exchange buildings (many of which have more space now because of tech changes causing Telkom equipment to occupy less space) but the uptake has been negligible.
Dealing with Telkom is a ballache for anybody and there is so much wrong within the company, but the failure of other deep pocketed entities to transform things positively is an indictment on those firms and peddling the FUD that some executives have been spewing rather than interogating issues and digging past the culture of corporate stupidity at Telkom is a massive part of the reason SAs Internet landscape remains backwards.
I obviously cannot speak for ISPA or ICASA - or for that matter the tech press who proclaim to have consumer interests at heart - but it isn't entirely the case that there aren't enterprises in the market who aren't challenging Telkom to embrace competitiveness and who aren't in small incremental steps pushing the dominant enterprises in the various chains that make up the market towards being accountable for anti-competitive behaviour by making it more viable to behave competitively than anti-competitively.
What is needed though is the tech press to actually do their job, the continuous publishing of sensationalist click bait bull**** articles which solicit comment from a limited number of "usual gang" players in the industry that resonate the same tired message of "prices are too high" needs to stop. Take a look at how often the same narratives are echoed and how infrequently comment is sourced from enterprises that are actually making a difference.
The reality though is a quick glance at MyBB will show you why the battle is right now pretty much lost, but in time alternative places of discussion may arise.
Returning to the idea of LTE as being soley for the MNOs: the reality that a wholsale national LTE network that is open to ECS player is pivotal to the future of the Internet in South Africa has long been known and understood - and was argued to ICASA during Vodacom's now collapsed attempts to acquire Neotel and are included in dozen volume record of proceedings.Sadly the appetite for competition is one which the MNOs still need to acquire.
However on it being established -and there are processes under way to lay the paper trail - that no operator operating a national LTE network are prepared to provide a capacity access network to ECS licence holders on a wholesale basis ... well lets just say watch this space (well watch those spaces that would actually bother to report on real developments in the industry rather than publishing click bait)
