“Currently 55% of South Africans would have to spend 15% of their income to buy a very modest 1GB of mobile data. The actual cost is much higher. More than one mobile network provider has‚ in recent months‚ aggressively marketed a 30MB bundle for R12‚ a price point that those living in poverty could possibly afford.
“Yet‚ this equates to R400 per gigabyte of data or over 40% of the monthly income of 30 million South Africans.”
He said it appeared mobile networks were taking advantage of poorer South Africans by charging them disproportionately high rates‚ with wealthier individuals qualifying for post-paid contracts paying approximately half the cost of 1GB prepaid mobile data.
Koketso Moeti and Paul Mason of Amandla.Mobi in their submission said “out-of-bundle” data prices were 10 times higher.
“There is significant competition at the top of the market with promotional offers that offer higher income contract consumers data at 0.03c or less. This means that those consumers who are using small data bundles or using data ‘out of bundle’ may be paying 50 times what richer consumers are paying.
“Low income consumers purchase goods in much smaller quantities and pay a higher price per unit. Why should the poor pay more for data than the rich?”
Commission spokesman Sipho Ngwema said the commission had engaged with Icasa about extending the deadline.
“We are confident we will meet the deadline. The extension was requested because of the amount of work that still needs to be done‚ including public hearings which will happen over two days in October.
“The work we still need to do relates to further investigations and interviews with different stakeholders‚ who include everyone affected by data costs.”
“We need the time to do a thorough job. While we have an adequate team for the task‚ the commission has been hit hard by a lack of resources. We are extremely under-resourced which affects our deadlines. The commission is interacting with our different stakeholders to get more resources to address our case backlog.”