Cellular providers oversubscribed, says ICASA chair

Do you think the cellular service providers are oversubscribed?

  • Yes

    Votes: 71 86.6%

  • No

    Votes: 11 13.4%
  • Total voters
    82
Bit too late now to wake up to reality, eh, Paris old chap?

Had !casa been truly independent, and full of teeth and vim to save the consumers from the monopolistic telkom, then the situation would've been totally different.

But, alas! poison Ivy happened to strangle the growth.
 
I wonder if this is the first volley aimed at allowing Telkom to take on the cell operators with voice services. They've been building an impressive cellular network, supposedly for data only. Now having shed their VC stake, one just wonders...
 
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Gatecrasher said:
I wonder if this is the first volley aimed at allowing Telkom to take on the cell operators with voice services. They've been building an impressive cellular network, supposedly for data only. Now having shed their VC stake, one just wonders...
Click to expand...
Hi Gatecrasher

Telkom launched its mobile voice services some time ago - fairly aggressive pricing: http://mybroadband.co.za/news/index.php?news=7585

Telkom Mobile pricing comparison: http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Cellular/7615.html
 
Who could bare seeing the words 'Telkom SA' on your mobile phone?

It will just feel wrong after all these years. :(
 
bwahahaha! ICASA were the ones who were in the perfect position to do something about this years ago by guiding the Telecomms industry into the right position with adequate backhaul bandwidth and network capacity. If they had allowed competition and not protected Telkom's pathetic position in the market we wouldn't be in this mess today. Thank God that the DoC was defeated and the VANS can now self-provide... but this could have happened years ago but for these bungling idiots.

That the cellular players have been able to achieve what they have despite ICASA is simply amazing. ICASA has done bogger all to help... in fact they are just another useless piece of furniture to bump into in the dim light that is the South African Telecomms field.
 
Is icasa not supposed to ensure that we get good service from the cellphone providers...fear and talk is not goin to help
 
I saw this coming from a mile away, it's Eskom all over again. I would also be concerned about this, we will look like complete nitwits if there's a communication blackout -AND- a electricity blackout during the world cup.

All those people sending off MMS/Photos/Emails/SMS back overseas...and there our networks delay their messages for 6 hours, drop their calls and have no network service...

I think tourists might deal with crap public transport, but not being able to communicate in the middle of Johannesburg will not go down well, although maybe alot of tourists expect that anyway...mud huts and lions and all.

I'm also suspecting this is what's going on with MTN (in my area anyway). I don't think they expanded/upgraded at the same pace as their subscriber base. 100 million subscribers might sound nice, not so nice if you do not actually have the infrastructure for it.
 
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Yes the networks have been terrible of late, Vodacom, MTN and CellC playing in the same bad service league as Telscum, I am not even mentioning our second national operator, Neosuck... another thing is get all these telemarketers of the air - they are wasting precious bandwidth, I get about 10 withheld spam calls a week.
 
In all honesty how many people are we gearing up for to come to our country? 1 million at most?
 
Would like to see some numbers to back this BS. X visitors, Y sms/day, Z mms/day, T calls/day... No rightminded visitor will phone home, ET realized years ago it was too damn expensive!
 
OUR Government Thinks late AS Usual Always !

OUR Government Thinks late AS Usual Always !

They always tend to try to prevent a situation after the Situation has happened.

Its sad. Simply beacuse we have been saying so for years.

3 Mobile Operators for 50 million people just ain't enough.

Rwanda has less than 10 million population size and they have 3 Mobile Operators.

Ghana has less than 20 million Population size and they have 5 Mobile Operators.

Tanzania has less than 40 million Population size and they have 5 Mobile Operators.

Kenya has less than 40 million Population size and they have 4 Mobile Operators.

Benin has less than 8 million Population size and they have 5 Mobile Operators.

Who do you think has the lowest Call rates from all of the above ?

Who do you think has the highest Call rates from all of the above ?


DXL - Team
 
If Telkom becomes the fourth cellular company, I can see lots more problems happening on the Vodacom, MTN and CellC networks.

Telscum will start sabotaging the other companies wrt to backhaul, etc to get customers to join them. Expect very dirty tactics and if I was any of the three companies mentioned above, I would be worried sick.

The govirmint is too damn stupid to do any proactive planning, or listen to any advice.
 
Assuming that Paris Mashile's fears and foreboding are justified, whose fault is it really???

Sounds to me like Paris Mashile has just woken up to some sort of reality where he is ultimately to blame [Poison Ivy is no longer around] for failing to properly regulate in the interests of the public and the country as a whole [2010 reputation on the line], and so Paris has decided to try and deflect attention away from himself. Paris would do better to spend less time in bed with COSATU, and more time promoting competition in the telecoms sector.

There is also the distinct possibility that the solution to Paris Mashile's fears and foreboding, would be to simply MNP his number away from the CellC network, or maybe Paris is using Telkodemonopolies' HSPA network which doesn't quite have enough base-stations to allow for the desired level of overcrowding in the taxis that he mentioned [yet].

As for portable base-stations, that is AFAIK standard practice at major events, so I'm sure all the cellular network operators would be doing that anyway.
 
Does this fool realise he is effectively announcing that he and ICASA haven't done their job properly by not regulating the industry? What an utter moron.
 
Hey Paris old chap... hope you'll stew in your own juice.

See what happens when you ignore the sad state of telecoms?

2010 is just round the corner, there isn't enough time to fix things.

Hope you'll see your behind soon.
 
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