Stop data robbery
THE #DataMustFall protests are long overdue and every South African resident should be joining in – either through petitions or actively participating in pickets such as yesterday’s around the country.
It is about time these money-grubbing network providers are taken to task for milking us dry.
Recently released research by Research ICT Africa has revealed that South African mobile network providers are fleecing their customers dry, charging dizzying rates for data.
According to the research paper, we pay much more than other mobile network users on the continent and, in some cases, we pay six times more. For example, where we pay about R70 for 1GB, Tanzanians can get the same data for R11.86.
How ridiculous is this? As if that is not enough, unused data expires. Just like that. You buy data and if for some reason you are unable to use it all within a specified period, it expires.
This is daylight robbery and has to be stopped. People work very hard for their money and these mobile network providers cannot be allowed to continue bullying us. An effective way of protesting would be to boycott them.
But unfortunately our lives are so dependent on their networks they are probably fleecing us on purpose, knowing we’ve got no where else to run to.
The Right2Know Campaign held pickets outside the offices of the four network providers yesterday, demanding that action be taken to ensure the cost of data and airtime is affordable to all.
In their memorandum, they also called for the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) to regulate the cost of airtime and data.
Icasa bosses agree the prices are unjustifiable, which they told Parliament last month while briefing the select committee on communications and public enterprises on data costs.
Icasa acting chief executive Willington Ngwepe went on to say that the Competition Commission was already investigating if there was collusion in the industry.
The investigation is expected to be concluded by August and we can only hope the findings will benefit South Africans at their wits’ end over network providers.