BY THE PARLIAMENTARY COMMUNICATION SERVICES ON BEHALF OF THE CHAIRPERSON OF THE PORTFOLIO COMMITTEE AND ON COMMUNICATIONS AND DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES, MS KHUSELA SANGONI DIKO
The Portfolio Committee on Communications and Digital Technologies has welcomed the engagements with the country’s mobile network operators (MNOs) on Friday, namely Vodacon, MTN, Cell C, Telkom and Rain.
Acting in line with Parliament’s Oversight Model, the committee invited the MNOs to evaluate how they support national priorities and complies with South Africa’s legislative, policy, and regulatory frameworks.
The committee has sharply raised issues relating to the cost of data and called for the MNO to consider measures to further reduce cost to communicate and prioritise rural connectivity.
The MNOs highlighted the urgent need for legislative and policy reform to make the environment conducive to conduct business, the need to regulate over the top (OTT) services and to consider alternative approaches to spectrum allocation.
The Chairperson of the committee, Ms Khusela Sangoni Diko, said that all the information received will come in handy when the committee meets to deliberate on the budget of the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies in the coming weeks.
Ms Diko said that the department’s budget will outline plans for the next five years and one of the things that the committee will raise is its extreme dissatisfaction with the pace at which the department is moving regarding policy reform.
Ms Diko said that the committee has asked the department to provide a realistic and more palatable timetable for a project of reforming legislation, especially the Electronic Communications Act 36 of 2005, and policies.
Failure to do so will demand the Committee to consider alternative measures to fasttrack much needed legislative reform.
To this end, Ms Diko added that the committee is also waiting in anticipation for the White Paper on Audio and Audio-Visual Content Services which is anticipated to address the glaring regulatory gap within the OTT space.
The committee has encouraged for the coordination of all the MNOs’ corporate social investment projects (CSI) realising that they are contributing greatly to communities with the only issue being that they work in silos.
Further to this, the committee has called for more engagements on the issue of expiration of prepaid data.
“I think we may have to engage more on this topic especially because people buy this data and it cannot simply disappear on the basis of MNO determined timelines,” said Ms Diko.
In the interest of national security and technology sovereignty the Committee has called on the MNO to consider the mobilisation of own resources to build the country’s satellite for communication.