South African watchdog considers spectrum boost

SOUTH Africa is considering giving telecoms companies increased spectrum, or air wave capacity, as millions of people switch to home working, testing networks and driving up data traffic, the communications minister said yesterday.

President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a 21-day national lockdown from midnight today in an address on Monday, saying Africa’s most advanced economy needed to escalate its response to the spread of the coronavirus, which has infected 709 people in the country.

The telecoms industry, which is regulated by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa), has experienced a spike in network data traffic in recent days after thousands of schools and universities were forced to shut down.

Telkom said that it is seeing increases of 15 to 30 percent in data consumption across mobile and fixed connectivity, while MTN Group said that it was too early to quantify the surge in data traffic.

MTN, Telkom and Vodacom are already providing free access to health sites and e-school platforms to support home learning and teaching, while MTN has waived fees on mobile money transactions in certain markets.

While South African telecoms operators say their networks have been able to cope so far, there are fears of congestion as more people work from home.

“One envisages a situation where there will be too much traffic on the network,” Minister of Communications Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams said, adding that Icasa is considering providing temporary additional spectrum.

The minister said that telecoms companies will be required to return the spectrum once the situation normalises.

“Icasa is currently engaging with sector licensees on possible ways of (providing) radio frequency spectrum relief for the duration of the declared state of disaster,” Icasa spokesperson Paseka Maleka confirmed.

Vodacom said that it would be engaging Icasa to “gain access to spectrum on a temporary basis.”