The last few weeks have seen increasingly acrimonious debates in parliament, boardrooms and the media as to the wisdom of the South African government's demands that any undersea cables landing in SA must have majority local shareholding.
The attention is for good reason - SA's economic growth and competitiveness is critically dependant on dramatically lowering the cost of wholesale bandwidth. But this is only half of the telecoms crisis we face - unless South African companies have access to choice in operator in the local loop, end-user costs will not drop as fast as they must.
"Local loop unbundling gives competing operators direct access to the copper or fibre connecting consumers and businesses into SA's telecoms infrastructure, allowing them to provide new services at a price point relatively independent of Telkom's pricing. If done in a transparent manner, this has proved internationally to massively reduce end-user costs and improve choice by giving a spread of operators access to the physical infrastructure that was originally built using taxpayer money," says Willem van Rensburg, CEO of Storm Telecom.
"Unbundling is a complicated and long-term project - but there are many options that customers should be able to take advantage of right now while this process plays out. The simplest and most effective is carrier pre-select."
With carrier pre-select, a customer can request Telkom to pass all of their voice calls directly on to another, independent telecoms provider. Unlike "carrier select", where the company's PABX needs to be specially programmed (sometimes technically fraught), carrier pre-select is absolutely transparent to the user. You dial a number, the connection travels up the Telkom line to the exchange, where it's automatically and instantly redirected onto the network of a company like Storm, which has extensive expertise in finding lowest-cost ways to terminate long-distance and international calls.
"The Department of Communications has given a deadline of 2011 for local loop unbundling, which is a concern as it does not give specific milestones that need to be met along the way. South African businesses need to be pressing for unbundling, and driving forward with interim solutions like carrier pre-select to build a culture within both Telkom and the regulator of accommodating free market choice for customers."
To take advantage of carrier pre-select, all an enterprise has to do is to engage with an independent telecoms company to get a value offering at a price that makes business sense, then ask Telkom to programme its exchange accordingly. It's still a long way from a fully unbundled loop, but it's a major step in the right direction.
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