The telecommunications sector is a funny place.
Not funny as in rolling around having a good bellyache, but rather in that it is littered with so much irony that one cannot help but chuckle a little here, or have a little snigger there.
This week two companies made me smile. Ironically, one is called Smile Communications, the only company to actually oppose the Altech action on the licence convergence process.
Uninet also had me chuckling with the news that former Telkom CEO Papi Molotsane's Synglo had decided to buy a chunk of it.
The irony in the latter is rather obvious, as Molotsane headed Telkom when it bitterly opposed Uninet's link up with the Knysna Municipality to bring a low-cost voice solution to that area.
But the smile that Smile Communications brought to my face is a little more oblique. It is due to its opposition to the Altech application against communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri and the Independent Communications Authority of SA (ICASA), which revealed more about itself than it may have realised.
Smile CEO Irene Charnley states in an affidavit that it has cost her company R20 million since April last year to put its various submissions together, and ensure and demonstrate its business plan is viable. On top of that, a further R8 million has been spent on fixed assets.
"It [Smile] has no prospect of any return on this investment until it is awarded an I-ECNS (individual-electronic communications network service) licence," Charnley writes in her affidavit.
Smile wants to bring affordable telecommunications to people who earn less than R14 per day. Funnily enough, Uninet has a similar plan, although it has never articulated it as such.
The telecommunications sector is just like any other in that it needs money to make money. It is not about the target market or the technology.
Paul Vecchiatto, Cape Town Correspondent, ITWeb
Both companies want to use WiMax as the means of doing this and both need an I-ECNS licence that would allow them to build networks to achieve their goals. They are not the only ones to have put forward such cases, but they have both been the most consistent about it.
Matsepe-Casaburri mentioned a policy directive in her budget speech in June that ICASA should look at licensing a company that wants to provide low-cost communications for the previously disadvantaged. At the press conference afterwards, I pressed the minister to say whom she had in mind. Her answer: Smile.
The irony here is that Uninet has been fighting an uphill battle for more than nine years to achieve just that. It has faced criminal charges laid by ICASA at Telkom's instigation and it has been repeatedly sidelined or ignored by those in government and within the regulator.
Yes, minister
So why has Smile got the minister's attention?
Smile's expenditure of R28 million in the little over one year of its existence is more than the total turnover Uninet has had in its nine years.
Obviously, it shows that those who have the deepest pockets win. The telecommunications sector is just like any other in that it needs money to make money. It is not about the target market or the technology.
I don't blame Smile for its lobbying activity - it is its democratic right and more South African companies should do it. But it is up to the politicians to recognise what it is and that while companies are lobbying in their own best interests, it is an education process as well. So when making a policy decision, it is not so blatantly in favour of one.
But there is a final ironic twist to this tale. ICASA has mandated that a qualifier for a WiMax licence is 51% BEE ownership. Uninet now has 65% BEE ownership, while Smile is still 70% Saudi owned.
Now doesn't that just want to make you chuckle - even just a little bit?
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