The Minister of Communications, Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, recently announced policy directives declaring the undersea landing stations essential resources and effectively ending Telkom’s SAT3 exclusivity rights.<\/p>\n
“It is Government policy that the cost of access to international connectivity is affordable and that all arrangements regarding access or use of international cables and\/or facilities do not unfairly exclude others from use of or access to the cables,” the minister said.<\/p>\n
Matsepe-Casaburri further said that she directed ICASA to prioritise and urgently prescribe a list of essential facilities, ensuring that the electronic communications facilities connected to the SAT-3 submarine cable can be accessed soon.<\/p>\n
This paves the way for Neotel to start providing full circuit international fiber connectivity to its customers, something which will most likely result in significant reductions in the price of international bandwidth.<\/p>\n
Neotel CEO Ajay Pandey says that the declaration of access to the SAT3 cable as an essential facility by Government was a huge step forward.<\/p>\n
“A huge step forward was for government to declare access to the SAT3 cable an essential facility, meaning an end to Telkom’s exclusivity to it. The issue is now with Icasa for it to formalise policy so that we can connect into the cable,” said Pandey.<\/p>\n
“Right now we have an agreement with Telkom to put fibre links from our point of presence to the SAT3 landing facility, which are being laid right now. A limitation which we hope will be resolved by Icasa in its policy is that currently Telkom is only giving us access to its connection to the cable, not the cable itself. The “wet” portion, the cable actually under the sea, is still controlled by the SAT3 consortium, which is effectively run by Telkom.”<\/p>\n
Pandey points out that despite the challenges progress is being made, and that Neotel expects to be able to provide end-to-end circuits on SAT3 “within the month”.<\/p>\n
Good news for companies and consumers is that significant price reductions are on the cards when this happens. “There is no question that prices will drop and services will improve,” Pandey concluded.<\/p>\n