{"id":79,"date":"2007-05-22T12:15:00","date_gmt":"2007-05-22T10:15:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2012-11-14T14:48:56","modified_gmt":"2012-11-14T12:48:56","slug":"didata-lashes-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/telecoms\/79-didata-lashes-out.html","title":{"rendered":"Didata lashes out"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his testimony at the hearing yesterday Dimension Data services director Derek Wilcocks said that as consequence of their domination of the telecoms market Telkom had acted as a monopoly and set prices at a \u201cfloor\u201d that could not be breached by potential competitors.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Dimension Data alone has spent between R150-million and R200m so far in legal costs. \u201cTelkom has been and is involved in uncompetitive behaviour,\u201d said Wilcocks. \u201cPrices could be reduced by as much as 30% with a more level playing field.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

A R2,43-billion deal by Telkom to acquire BCX was halted last week when South Africa\u2019s Internet service providers filed a complaint that the acquisition would give Telkom too much control over the IT and communications market in the country.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In March this year BCX executives quit from their positions following a proposal by Telkom to buy the company. BCX chief executive officer Peter Watt stepped down amid claims that the deal would result in significant losses in revenue and a severe knock to the share price of BCX.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The Competition Commission has already voiced its views that the BCX deal should not be permitted to go through, but the final decision will be made by the Competition Tribunal.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Telkom senior counsel Mike van der Nest grilled Wilcocks about a licence application for bandwidth spectrum made by Internet Solutions, a subsidiary of Dimension Data, for the roll-out of a wi-max network that was aimed as competition to Telkom. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cInternet Solutions has already made substantial capital investment in their wi-max project and is not going to stop now,\u201d van der Nest said. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

He said that this was the motivation for the complaint by Dimension Data. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

He also said the company was doing everything in its power to create a network that was separate from Telkom. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The hearing will continue until Friday.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Comments<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dimension Data struck a damaging blow to Telkom’s mission to dominate the South African telecommunications industry on the first day of a week long Competition Commission enquiry into Telkom’s monopolistic acquisition of Business Connection (BCX).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":41,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-telecoms"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/41"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}