{"id":8534,"date":"2009-06-25T01:20:00","date_gmt":"2009-06-24T23:20:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2009-06-25T01:20:00","modified_gmt":"2009-06-24T23:20:00","slug":"nyanda-vows-to-slash-broadband-costs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/telecoms\/8534-nyanda-vows-to-slash-broadband-costs.html","title":{"rendered":"Nyanda vows to slash broadband costs"},"content":{"rendered":"

SIMPHIWE Nyanda<\/a>, the minister of communications, promised yesterday to drive down broadband and telephone costs.<\/p>\n

Speaking to reporters after his budget vote speech to Parliament, Nyanda said South Africa might yet need a third fixed-line telephone operator to boost competition.<\/p>\n

“The cost of telephony is still high, which means that we have not made effective interventions and that perhaps we need even more competition than we have.<\/p>\n

“You know what difficulty we had introducing the second network operator and the question is whether that is enough,” he said.<\/p>\n

Nyanda confirmed that he planned to appoint an independent technical panel to determine why prices were not falling in response to previous interventions.<\/p>\n

Development policies over the past 10 years have routinely cited communications costs as a barrier to growth, but the policies have failed to make a significant impact.<\/p>\n

Nyanda said he was concerned that operators had not and would not pass on reductions in their input costs to consumers.<\/p>\n

“Obviously the competition authorities will have to see to it that there is no collusion in terms of price,” Nyanda said.<\/p>\n

He said his first move would be to speak to private sector operators and look for ways to engineer lower prices, but he said he would take tougher steps if necessary.<\/p>\n

“The natural instinct of any private business and of shareholders is to increase their margins, but we have a role to play through legislation and through regulatory authorities to ensure that people bring down their prices.<\/p>\n

“If we have to do that, if we have to use regulations, if we have to use the authorities, then we will do it,” he said.<\/p>\n

Nyanda promises to slash costs<\/strong><\/a> – give your views<\/p>\n

The Times<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The minister of communications promised yesterday to drive down broadband and telephone costs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"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-8534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-telecoms"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8534"}],"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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8534\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}