Telkom exclusivity ends, Sentech gets licence

By Phillip de Wet for Telkom
Johannesburg, 07 May 2002

Today marks the first day of a partially liberalised fixed-line telecommunications regime in SA; the five-year monopoly Telkom was granted in return for rolling out services to rural areas officially ended at midnight last night.

You could be forgiven for not noticing. Telecommunications users are still bound by the de facto monopoly created because the planned competitor to Telkom has not yet been licensed.

Telkom today marked the event by looking back at its achievements over the last half-decade and promising that little would change even when the second national operator (SNO) is operational.

"We will not be entering into a price war," said CEO Sizwe Nxasana, speaking via a video linkup from London this morning. He added that Telkom would act defensively to minimise the number of customers lost to a competitor, but would stick to its knitting rather than being reactive.

Nxasana said the only significant change under the non-exclusive regime is that Telkom is no longer bound to customer satisfaction measurements, or to roll-out infrastructure in rural areas.

Communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri will mark the day with a budget speech in Parliament where she may announce the publication of the long-delayed invitation to apply (ITA) for a stake in the SNO. Foreign operators are to apply for a 51% stake in the SNO consortium, which will also include state-owned Eskom Enterprises and Transtel as well as an empowerment stake.

Officials could not confirm the publication date of the ITA this morning, but said it is "ready".

Although invisible to consumers, the industry did see a significant change last night. State-owned broadcast signal distributor Sentech received its licences to operate a multimedia service and another for an international gateway for it to act as a carrier-of-carriers, enabling it to sell international bandwidth to operators such as Telkom.

The Independent Communications Authority of SA says it has issued both licences to Sentech, as well as certain frequency spectrum allocations, and will publish the text of the licences online later this afternoon. The documents are to be gazetted later this week.

Telkom has strongly opposed some of the terms of the Sentech licence, but said it would be premature to comment on the documents as it had not yet officially seen them.

Sentech could not immediately be reached for comment.