Subscribe

Cell C drops termination rates court case

Paula Gilbert
By Paula Gilbert, ITWeb telecoms editor.
Johannesburg, 08 Mar 2016
Cell C says the amount of time it had to wait for a court date effectively made its application redundant.
Cell C says the amount of time it had to wait for a court date effectively made its application redundant.

Cell C has dropped its drawn-out court case against the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) over mobile termination rates (MTRs).

The regulator has welcomed Cell C's decision to withdraw its application to review ICASA's 2014 Call Termination Regulations.

"It vindicates ICASA's view that the regulations were both lawful and procedurally fair," ICASA told ITWeb in a statement.

MTRs are the fees mobile operators pay each other to carry calls on their networks. The debate over what rates each network should pay has been a contentious issue since early 2014.

Cell C originally lodged an application with the South Gauteng High Court in December 2014 to try get a copy of the record leading to ICASA's decision to promulgate new MTR regulations in September 2014.

However, Cell C's chief legal officer, Graham Mackinnon, says the length of time it has taken the case to get to court has effectively made Cell C's application redundant.

"Cell C's decision to take this step is purely based on timing. The decision to withdraw follows a lengthy process of more than a year of obtaining the record from ICASA, finalising the papers in the review application and obtaining a court date for the hearing," he says.

ICASA is due to start its review of the market in the next few months in anticipation of the existing MTR regulations coming to an end in 2017.

"This would mean that even a successful ruling in Cell C's favour would have had little practical effect, as the relief Cell C was seeking was to ask the court to order ICASA to revisit its decision by conducting a market review," explains Mackinnon.

He says Cell C will participate in the upcoming ICASA process to consider MTRs post-October 2017 "to ensure its concerns are addressed in that forum".

In early 2014, ICASA changed the mobile termination rate regime in a move that was subsequently thrown out by the South Gauteng High Court, which ruled those contested termination rates were invalid.

The regulator's first attempt at an MTR regulation change heavily favoured smaller players Cell C and Telkom Mobile, but it was later forced to change the rates and the planned glide path.

At the time, Cell C expressed its disappointment over the revised regulations which it called a "dramatic U-turn" by ICASA. This was mostly because Cell C and Telkom Mobile lost considerable asymmetrical advantage. Cell C said then that without a "pro-competitive remedy, the South African market will remain a duopoly".

Share