If you’re part of the generation that used to have to call someone’s landline to make plans, then you’ll know what I mean when I say that cellphones changed everything.

Now, if you don’t have one you’re pretty much dead to the world. A lot of you are probably reading this article on your phone. You use it for work, to keep in contact with friends, and to meet potential partners – or hookups. You do you.

Point is, everyone has a cellphone and, if you have a cellphone you need data. In this country, data is not only expensive, but it expires after 30 days.

We’re so used to this, that we haven’t realised that this isn’t the norm. When compared to Russia, China, India and Brazil, South Africa’s data prices are on average 134% higher.

Here’s Fin24:

Following years of delays and with an election looming, government is pushing for the release of radio frequency spectrum in aid of lower data prices.

Spectrum, or radio frequency spectrum, is essential to radio and television stations’ ability to broadcast and mobile operators’ ability to provide data to consumers. It is a limited national resource, owned by South African citizens, and assigned by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) “to entities that apply and want to provide services to the South African public”, says Icasa spokesperson Paseka Maleka.

The invisible waves through which cellphones transmit and receive information are called radio waves. Each wave has a “unique identity” – based on the number of times it repeats in a second. This is frequency. Frequencies are grouped into bands ranging from low to high frequencies, with this set of frequency bands called a spectrum.

The availability of the spectrum could reduce data prices by almost half, which is great, but it’s 2019, so why has this taken so long?

Ironically, the reason why this spectrum was not yet available was the delay in digital migration (the switchover from analogue to digital broadcasting that would free up spectrum), which is a government-led process.

Digital migration, which was supposed to be completed seven years ago, has been plagued by policy flip-flops and a tug of war about conditional access, which would determine whether broadcasters could use the “decoders” South Africans will need once digital migration has been completed to offer pay-TV services.

The spectrum would allow operators like MTN, Vodacom and Cell C to provide more data for the same price.

Asked whether halving prices could mean that a R99 bundle might in future cost R49.50 or that a consumer would pay R99 as before but get double the amount of data, Vodacom said it could be a combination of both “plus whatever innovations might be pervasive in the market once spectrum is allocated.

In a fiercely competitive market, competitors react in different ways to remain both competitive and differentiated from each other”.

Yeah, we’re going to have to add greed as another reason why mobile data is so expensive, too. There’s no doubting that our biggest mobile providers could provide cheaper data if they were so inclined, but that’s a story for another day.

The new deadline is July 2020. We’ll have to see how it all plays out.

[source:fin24]