While the Western model of business is often held up as the standard for Third World nations to follow, an expert has suggested that SA follows the Asian model of telecoms liberalisation when it comes to putting the second national operator (SNO) in place.
Ewan Sutherland, executive director of the International Telecommunications Users Group, says Asian countries provide the best examples of workable liberalisation.
"In Asia, the incumbent operators have generally accepted the political consensus gracefully. By comparison, many Western countries have resorted to 'snarling Rottweiler` regulators to achieve liberalisation - such as the unbundling of local loops - and even then the process has proved difficult," says Sutherland.
"The result is that countries such as South Korea are worried that their broadband offering of 8-12Mbps will soon be saturated and that they are running trials on video broadband (VDSL) at 50Mbps."
By way of comparison, the local equivalent to South Korea`s broadband offering is benchmarked at a little over 0.5Mbps.
Sutherland says Japan is another excellent example of a workable telecoms strategy, as it installs about 300 000 12Mbps ADSL lines every month.
"These are undoubtedly the best examples of liberalisation in the telecoms sector, whereas in many Western countries, the incumbent operators have strategic policies intended to stall the introduction of real competition, inevitably to the detriment of that country`s economic growth."
Sutherland quotes one case where the incumbent operator had 2 500 different rate offerings, a strategy, he says, which is obviously designed purely to confuse the consumer and hinder the regulator`s efforts to identify income generation.
In another example, he says the incumbent asked if the new entrant`s technical staff had security clearance, on the off chance they were terrorists intent on bringing down the country`s communications.
"Basically, incumbent operators in many of the Western nations have developed lobbying as one of their core competencies," says Sutherland.
"They look at how much money the new entrant has and how long they need to play unpleasant games with them until they die. Then they go to government and to the courts and appeal to the trade unions in order to manipulate the process so that you never quite reach competition."
The worry for SA is that we are in a similar boat, with Telkom using its powerful position to do all it can to manoeuvre itself to the forefront and marginalise the SNO, before it has even seen the light of day.
Sutherland believes South Africans need to counter the power leveraged by its incumbent operator by ensuring that the regulator, the Independent Communications Authority of SA, obtains sufficient independence and authority to ensure transparent managed liberalisation in the sector.
This, he says, is the only way to make certain that the telecoms sector is fairly, evenly and correctly liberalised.
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