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VoiceSA to scrutinise telecoms

Staff Writer
By Staff Writer, ITWeb
Johannesburg, 25 Aug 2011

The second annual VoiceSA conference aims to facilitate open discussion and collaboration around important telecoms industry issues.

The free one-day conference and networking event will be held on 22 September in Midrand, Johannesburg.

Local loop unbundling is currently touted as one of the major stumbling blocks holding back the liberalisation of South African telecoms, notes event organiser the Ramp Group, but industry heavyweights have identified other factors, not reliant on ICASA's legislations, to take telecoms in SA forward.

These and other issues affecting the local telecoms industry will be discussed at VoiceSA by Rapelang Rabana, co-founder and CEO of Yeigo Communications and head of R&D at the TelFree Group; Justin Colyn, GM of fixed mobile convergence at MTN Business; Wayne Speechly, executive of communications at Internet Solutions; and Jed Hewson, director of 1Stream.

“The next crucial steps in forcing greater competition in South African telecoms will be to break the stronghold that incumbent operators have on the 'last mile' access to the customer's end device,” says Rabana.

According to Colyn, the biggest change affecting the industry is the realisation of fixed mobile convergence, which offers businesses and users the choice of working from anywhere, over any medium, using any device.

“The only way you can effectively achieve the flexibility and economies of scale to take advantage of what technology has to offer is to have a cloud strategy for all your ICT requirements,” concludes Colyn.

Speechly notes that service providers need to do things differently. “Customers in SA's telecoms landscape are not benefiting from this ever-changing environment. The industry at large needs to unite better to truly dislodge incumbents.

“VoiceSA is a great initiative for operators of all nature to collaborate, and I'm particularly excited about sharing some of the mainstream restructuring of the market both from a regulatory and technology perspective,” notes Speechly.

VoiceSA is free to attend. Delegates are required to register at www.voicesa.co.za prior to the event.

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