Social distancing ices shared workspace hubs

Co-working was one of the hottest trends in commercial property just a few months ago.

Small and medium companies didn’t want to sign longterm leases at large traditional offices. Instead they saw value in renting space with communal facilities often located in business hubs. Among the most popular shared workspace providers was multinational company WeWork.

The emergence of the global shared office space provider looked set to bring many imitators in 2020. SA’s Workshop 17 was one of the local companies that would compete head-on with the US start-up. These companies would rent space from listed property funds and large landlords and then create office workspace offerings.

Back in the day, when you started a company as an entrepreneur you either worked from home or you looked for office space in some old, probably badly located building.

But if you rented space from WeWork, Workshop 17 and the like, you got access to a desk in a building in the middle of Sandton City in Gauteng or The V&A Waterfront in Cape Town. You sat next to other budding entrepreneurs whom you may be keen to do business with. And you had access to warm meals and bottomless beer on tap.

But Covid-19 has muted that dialogue. Nobody has been able to open new shared office spaces while the country has been in lockdown. And plans of opening new workspaces have been put on hold or cancelled.

As the government looks to restart the economy, it has to be done with health measures in place. Core to averting the spread of the pandemic includes social distancing which rules out sharing workspaces. The state’s plans include limiting how many people are allowed to be in one office at the same time.

Given that we may have to wait until the end of the year or longer for the pandemic to subside, the idea that the traditional office is being disrupted looks exaggerated. It’s unlikely that the concept of working from home will lead to the demise of traditional offices. Tenants will remain locked in five- and 10year leases regardless of where their staff choose to work from.

TELKOM, ICASA

Awar of words has erupted between Telkom and the Independent Communications Authority (Icasa) over spectrum allocation.

This week Icasa rebuffed Telkom’s claim that it cannot allocate spectrum already held by the fixed-line operator after assigning temporary radio frequency spectrum to operators in an effort to tackle communication challenges related to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Telkom says Icasa does not have the authority to assign spectrum already licensed to it. The company argues that the emergency Covid-19 regulations do not give Icasa the right to expropriate currently assigned spectrum, but Icasa argues to the contrary and that the spectrum had been available for allocation.

Now Telkom is considering its options, one of which is to argue that the regulator “has erred in its interpretation of the nature and extent of Telkom’s licence in the 2.3GHz band and that its decision is not in the interest of the country’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath”.

With regulatory and legislative experts acting on both sides, it will be interesting to see who wins this battle of wills.