Telkom spectrum give-back
Telkom has confirmed that it will return spectrum to the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) as it migrates its legacy services to next generation technologies.
This follows a change to Icasa’s spectrum license fee system which would have caused Telkom’s spectrum bill to increase to over R922-million from just under R37.5-million.
When Icasa held a workshop for its new spectrum license fee regime, it was clear that Telkom’s representatives were not happy with the changes.
At the time, some commentators suggested that Icasa was implementing a system to financially motivate licensees to return spectrum they were not using.
These predictions seemed to be proved true when Sentech returned its highly sought-after spectrum in the 2,600MHz band.
When Sentech announced in April 2013 that it would return its spectrum, the CEO of the state-owned signal distributor Setumo Mohapi said that the tenfold cost increase was a big consideration in returning the spectrum to Icasa.
To mitigate the increase in license fees it was expected that Telkom would return some of its spectrum and convert some of its point-to-multipoint licenses to cheaper point-to-point ones.
When asked for comment about its plans to return spectrum to Icasa, a Telkom spokesperson said, “Of course, if Telkom does not intend to use a particular frequency band in the future, it will be returned to Icasa to enable uses.”
According to Telkom they are “continuously assessing the viability of legacy technologies which have reached their estimated useful life.”
In the case of wireless technologies, Telkom said, decisions regarding the future use, or disposition of, the frequency bands which they utilise is part of this process.
“We will be migrating services provided by these technologies to our new, state-of-the-art Next Generation Technologies to ensure that we continue to serve our customers – our utmost priority,” Telkom said.
Telkom explained that it is licensed to use the 2.4GHz band (i.e. 2.3–2.5GHz) and is using it to provide fixed wireless access (FWA) services, particularly in rural areas.
“Whereas Telkom has identified these technologies for migration (due also to the negative effect of harmful interference in the ISM band, i.e. 2.4–2.5GHz), such migration is complex due to, amongst others, lack of suitable sub–1 GHz spectrum to be used in the rural areas,” Telkom said.
“A portion of the 2.4 GHz band has been refarmed for Telkom’s 2.3 GHz LTE network. Some parts of the 2.4 GHz band could eventually be returned to ICASA once migration has been completed,” Telkom said.
Telkom said that it had to emphasise that it will not return spectrum in the 1.8GHz band.
“Migrating WiMAX from the 3.5 GHz band was a business decision and these services will be replaced with 3G/LTE or satellite,” Telkom said.
Telkom did not provide a timeline as to when this spectrum would be handed back to Icasa.
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