Cape Town, 25 May 2007
Communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri slammed media reports that the four-year period to unbundle the local loop extends Telkom's monopoly.
"I wish people would not interpret things like this incorrectly. Unbundling the local loop can take between eight and 15 years in most countries and so we have set an ambitious target. The main challenge is to get everybody ready for a change and this includes telecommunications companies, corporations, the media and consumers," she says.
The minister made the comments at the end of today's handover of the local loop unbundling report by the unbundling committee she appointed last year.
In her budget speech before Parliament yesterday, Matsepe-Casaburri said she had made a policy directive that the local loop unbundling be completed by 1 November 2011.
Chairman of the unbundling committee Tshilidzi Marwala says the unbundling of the local loop is not an event, but a process.
"This process is only complete once the necessary regulations, technical facilities and capabilities by the companies who want to partake in this process are complete."
Price regulation
Marwala says the process also includes the issue of policy directives by the minister and then composition of regulations by the Independent Communications Authority of SA (ICASA), which will eventually give people "the freedom to choose".
According to the report, the local loop is that portion of the telecoms network that is situated between the end of a subscriber's telephone connection and the main distribution frame, where all the user lines come together before being connected to the telephone exchange. The telecoms company owns the physical wire connection between customers.
The report recommends the pricing levied by the incumbent, Telkom, for access to the local loop be regulated. It also suggests that regardless of who owns the local loop, any operator appropriately licensed should have access to the local loop to deliver voice and or broadband services. Marwala says it is more than likely a hybrid of the three unbundling models would evolve.
The three models are: full unbundling, where the pricing is regulated; line-sharing, where a customer can get voice and data services from two different suppliers; and bit-stream, which means wholesale access where a company, such as an Internet service provider, can install its own equipment.
The report also recommends ICASA implement carrier pre-selection as soon as possible so that customers would have a choice of who would transmit voice and data on the local loop to their premises, regardless of who owned the local loop. It also recommends that any form of collocation of facilities for the local loop unbundling be fully allowed to ensure flexibility and reasonable access for the interim.
Finally, the report also recommends ICASA be given the ability to physically inspect the incumbent premises to establish the size, location and other information that may be required for the implementation of the unbundling of the local loop.
The full report will be available on Monday, 28 May, on the Department of Communications Web site.
Share