The Department of Communications (DOC) will make amendments to the Electronic Communications Act, which will give the regulator more tools to deal with its industries.
DOC director-general Mamodupi Mohlala says the aspects of the legislation that deal specifically with the cost of communication in SA will be the first to be fine-tuned, followed by those that limit the Independent Communications Authority of SA (ICASA) from speedily carrying out its tasks.
Mohlala says the new amendments can be expected by the end of the DOC's financial year, which ends in the middle of next year. “We need to capacitate the regulator and give them access to different sets of tools to help them do what they are mandated to do,” she says.
In July, the regulator's chairman, Paris Mashile, called on the department to consider amending the Act. Mashile said high interconnect fees and the cost of communication in SA could be traced back to the “labyrinth” of the Act.
At the time, the regulator said the Act needed to be totally rewritten rather than amended; however, the DG's plans are simply to make the Act more accessible to the regulator.
She says ICASA's bugbear, Chapter 10, which deals specifically with regulatory processes, will be looked at. Currently, the section of the legislation forces the regulator to perform an in-depth market analysis before it can pass certain forms of regulations.
Mohlala says this will most likely change, with the DOC including the allowance of international benchmarking studies and other tools that will give the regulator more leeway and take less time.
Integrated Act
According to Mohlala, the amendments will precede the department's plan to integrate all the current and pending policies in communications and broadcasting into a single Act. “This is critical to the DOC. We have a broadband policy and we are working on a spectrum policy, but all these will be expected to feed into our integrated IT policy.”
The DG says, because the department is solely national and does not have provincial representation, the new integrated policy needs to speak to all aspects of ICT, including the provinces' plans for broadband and IT.
“We need a coherent strategy, especially on things like broadband roll-out,” she says. The DOC's plan for the current administrative period will be to pull together all the possible expected broadband plans and figure out how they are funded and to what extent they will be rolled-out to rural areas.
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