Could state meddling rescue SA telecoms?
Normally everybody highlights Telkom’s failure to provide affordable services, the disaster of Sentech’s internet services and the fiasco of having state-owned entities form the basis of Neotel as reasons why the government should leave telecoms alone.
Yet licensing state-owned Infraco to sell access to its broadband infrastructure suddenly makes sense. Infraco is sitting with fibre optic lines built for Transnet and Eskom that are apparently sitting fairly idle, at a time when businesses are clamouring for faster, cheaper bandwidth.
Telkom’s bandwidth is expensive, Neotel has yet to reach much of the country, and the cellular networks’ supply is costly and patchy. So give Infraco a licence to sell its bandwidth to any voice or data carrier that needs extra capacity and let it supply tons of the stuff to universities, schools and hospitals too.
A sensible restriction would be to ban Infraco from selling bandwidth to the large companies that form the bread and butter business for the private sector. But if it sells wholesale capacity only to other operators, then the private sector seems to endorse its activities.
Since voice and data carriers buy most of their bandwidth from Telkom, Neotel or the cellular carriers, a price war triggered by Infraco would benefit the industry and every company or consumer beneath them.
Could state intervention finally do the telecoms industry some good? It would seem so.
State meddling in telecoms – give your views
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