SA is sitting on an invisible hidden asset with the potential to put billions into state coffers.
And the person with the keys to the safe is Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams, who was reappointed as minister of communications, telecommunications & postal services last week.
In April, before she was reappointed as minister, she said she would leave the policy direction on unassigned high-demand spectrum to the next administration. Kicking the can down the road, to herself.
"Issuing the policy direction on unassigned high-demand spectrum remains an apex priority for the minister and will soon be effected," the minister's spokesperson, Nthabeleng Mokitimi-Dlamini, said on Friday in an e-mailed response to questions, without giving a specific time frame.
"With respect to the benefits, spectrum licensing is a socioeconomic imperative that will enable sector development," she said.
MTN's chief technology & information officer, Giovanni Chiarelli, told Business Times that "spectrum is the oxygen for the telecommunications industry".
And mobile networks, especially market leaders MTN and Vodacom, have been holding their breath for a long time. It has been 15 years since new spectrum was allocated and the big companies in the sector complain that they have had to use more expensive ways to keep their customers connected.
Data users, in turn, complain that they are paying too much, and the Competition Commission last month issued a report that accuses the big mobile networks of strangling economic growth in SA with high prices.
This is a sore point with the companies involved. They say data prices have come down sharply. And it could have been by more had they not been forced to "densify" due to lack of available spectrum. The move to faster speeds on 4G from about 2012 called for some clever engineering.
"We, in effect, had to build a 4G network on 3G infrastructure," Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub told Business Times. And to do that, they had to put up radio sites at about R2m each.
"It cost [the industry] billions. We had to put up thousands of sites," said Chiarelli.
And without adequate spectrum, the performance of 4G is not reaching its true potential. "It was almost performing like a good 3G," he said.
It also forced the companies to go slower than they probably wanted to, trying to balance the quality of service with the size of the network.
Assertions that the big operators have been stingy are not fair, according to Joosub.
"It's not a lack of investment. The sector spent R29.7bn last year. The question is whether we are spending it completely in an optimum way," he said.
The companies want Ndabeni-Abrahams to move fast. And they are not only asking for the long-overdue spectrum to be allocated for 4G networks, but also for the next generation — 5G. "It should be done within months," said Chiarelli.
And there is hardly any chance of building a 5G network on 4G infrastructure. Demand for the superfast internet will simply be too high, especially with data consumption growing by more than 50% a year.
Telkom managed to "re-farm" some of its existing spectrum from 2G and 3G to 4G. And newcomer Rain has some spectrum available from previous allocations, so it might be able to launch 5G first. But that would work only in pockets.
The withdrawal last month of planned amendments to electronic communication legislation could make this easier as Ndabeni-Abrahams will be able to allocate the spectrum using existing rules. The amendments would have shaken up the sector by setting up a so-called "open access network", a complete overhaul that gave rise to much uncertainty.
MTN and Vodacom say they would prefer a spectrum auction. "We think this is the most transparent way," said Joosub.
And therein lies the opportunity to raise money for a straining fiscus.
