ALL YOU CAN EAT

As technology improves, does it feel like your data is disappearing at a quicker rate than before? Maybe, but the reality is you are using more. Vodacom’s executive head of innovation Jannie van Zyl told Parliament’s portfolio committee on telecommunications and postal services. Specifically, Van Zyl addressed the myth that people’s data was depleting more rapidly.

Faster networks, better phones and consumers’ own habits have all led to perceptions that their data is disappearing, said Van Zyl. “Data cannot disappear. It is consumed by your handset,” he told the committee. “Sometimes you use your data; sometimes your handset uses it (unnoticed) in the background.”

When quizzed by committee chairperson Mmamoloko Kubayi on why data bundles have limited “life”, Van Zyl said misunderstandings arose from the perception of data as a product. “Data is not a commodity, or a consumable product that you can take home. It is a service,” he answered. “Data flows… more like a river or a stream. It is constantly flowing 24/7, and when you activate your data bundle, you place it in the river and it gets carried down the stream. If you don’t activate it, that data is gone. It’s not like at the end of the month there’s all this data leftover that we can donate to a school.”

Both Vodacom and MTN told the portfolio committee that the freeing up of old radiofrequency bandwidth currently occupied by analogue radio and television stations would drive the costs of data down. Radio and television broadcasters have been mandated to migrate off of the old frequencies to new digital transmission services, but red tape has stalled the process over the last half-decade. It was this so-called “spectrum crunch” that made data that much more expensive in South Africa than other countries, they said.