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Letter to the editor: Hopelafleur responds to ITWeb article

Staff Writer
By Staff Writer, ITWeb
Johannesburg, 17 Feb 2012

Dear Editor
The article “SA's spectrum audit tarnished?” which was published on ITWeb on 16 February 2012, and written by your deputy news editor Nicola Mawson, refers.
As the object of the article I hereby exercise my right of reply.
Regards
Julia Hope

Introduction

I wish to submit that the heading of the article is sensational and mischievous for the following reasons:

* although it is posed as a question it gives a very negative impression of the very important project the government is embarking on, and

* it draws conclusions from unfounded facts from so called experts consulted by the reporter.

I therefore conclude that:

This is a poorly researched article which seeks to deliberately mislead your readers by claiming that a spectrum audit is the same as a spectrum auction. The two activities are vastly different. A spectrum audit examines usage of the radio frequency spectrum while a spectrum auction is one of the ways used by regulators to licence the radio frequency spectrum to the highest bidder.

Nicola Mawson, the ITWeb deputy news editor, is an experienced writer on ICT matters in South Africa and should know the difference between the two activities. The only conclusion one can draw from this attempt to equate a spectrum audit with a spectrum auction is that she has ulterior motives which are best served by misleading your readers.

I will now address some of the specific inaccuracies contained in the article.

1) Bart Henderson, CEO of risk management consultancy Henderson Solutions, says if the process interrogated the bidders' relevant interests, which could potentially be impacted by the audit outcome, the winning bidder should not have won on the basis of the potential for a conflict of interest.

No spectrum licensee - including Telkom and Vodacom, will be impacted by the spectrum audit outcome since the DoC does not licence the radio frequency spectrum and is prevented by law from doing so.

2) Mobile operators have been waiting since 2009 for the audit, which was finally set to get off the ground early last year. However, several attempts to auction spectrum use stalled until the department finally appointed HopeLaFleur Networks last month.

Mawson has deliberately confused the DoC's spectrum audit, which will examine the usage of the radio frequency spectrum between 500 MHz and 1000 GHz, with ICASA's cancelled spectrum auction of 2010 which sought to licence spectrum in the 2.6 GHz and 3.5 GHz bands by way of an auction (see GG 33249 and GG 33247).

As stated in point 1 above, the DoC is not responsible for spectrum licensing which is an ICASA function. The spectrum audit has no impact on ICASA's plans to licence spectrum for mobile services. Mawson has neglected to mention that the ICASA licensing process for spectrum to be used for mobile broadband services is in fact ongoing as evidenced by the publication in Government Gazette number 34872 on 15 December 2011 of a draft spectrum assignment plan for the 2.6 GHz and 800 MHz bands, and draft Invitation to Apply (ITA) for spectrum in these two bands.

3) Dominic Cull, owner of Ellipsis Regulatory Solutions, says the audit is “absolutely and utterly critical”, as SA is on the brink of developing spectrum plans and assigning frequency. He explains that ICASA needs the information from the audit to allocate space.

This statement is obviously inaccurate since ICASA embarked on its processes to licence spectrum in the high demand spectrum bands for broadband wireless access, in May 2010 and December 2011, before the spectrum audit tender was awarded by the DoC in January 2012.

4) Cull says, while a conflict of interest may not arise in reality, there is the potential that the companies could benefit from inside knowledge.

The stated “potential” is farfetched since the team appointed to conduct the Spectrum Audit is a multi-disciplinary and multinational team. There is no chance that any of the said companies could benefit from the results of the audit.

Mr Cull seems to miss the point here and we wish to assure the public that the work done by the HCN team is of high professional standard and will benefit the industry, and not the purported companies.

5) The DOC must “take every possible step” to make sure the audit cannot be challenged, says Cull. He says it would have been better to award the tender to a neutral party as the DOC cannot afford to have this process “tarnished by any actual or perceived conflict of interest”

The DOC has responded appropriately to this point. I submit that HCN presented a proposal on a public tender and the DoC made the decision based on its criteria. We are pleased to be appointed to do this work, which is of high national priority.

Finally, we come to the aim of this article. In her article Mawson states that there were only two bidders for this tender. If one follows the logic of the statement above then HCN should have been disqualified and the tender awarded to the other bidder. It seems that Mawson wrote the article out of “sour grapes” that the other bidder did not win the tender.

I assume that Mawson could find no fault with the technical competence and expertise of the HCN consortium and has therefore decided to use outright lies to cast doubt on the spectrum audit process.

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