The Southern African Telecommunications Affiliation (Sata) plans to foyer regulators and cellular operators in Southern Africa to implement a flat knowledge roaming price for folks travelling between international locations within the area.
That is in accordance with Telkom Group CEO Serame Taukobong, who spoke on the opening of the Sata 2025 convention held in Johannesburg on Tuesday. The multi-day convention, which incorporates delegates and trade stakeholders from South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Zambia – amongst different Southern African Growth Group (Sadc) member states – is working till Friday.
“Our first challenge is to create the Sadc borderless fibre community ecosystem. This can hyperlink up all 14 Sadc international locations, from South Africa to Angola,” Taukobong instructed delegates in his opening tackle.
“Our second challenge is establishing a tier-4 regional knowledge centre hub complemented by our Openserve fibre community, which can additional advance our digital transformation efforts. The third initiative includes the implementation of the One Sadc roaming flat tariff, aimed toward considerably enhancing cross-border communication and fostering deeper regional integration amongst Sadc member states.”
Based on Taukobong, for a subscriber of 1 cellular community to have the ability to have steady companies in one other Sadc nation when travelling, operators should permit for uninterrupted entry with out having to accumulate a neighborhood Sim on the vacation spot.
The issue with setup, Taukobong defined, is that knowledge fees are “prohibitively costly”, with travellers subjected to roaming charges that, in some cases, are 100 occasions what they might pay of their residence nation.
Bilateral agreements
Some Sadc member states, together with Botswana and Namibia, have already signed bilateral agreements aimed toward slicing name and knowledge roaming prices by 60% to foster larger communication – and extra financial exercise – between the 2 international locations. It’s anticipated that increasing such agreements throughout the whole Sadc would have an analogous influence on intra-regional commerce.
Telkom’s Openserve will take over the Sata presidency from Botswana’s BoFinet on the finish of this week’s convention. The deal with slashing knowledge roaming charges – and never a lot name charges – aligns with Telkom Cellular’s technique, which is premised on the concept that knowledge is turning into the first technique of communication amongst cell phone customers.
Learn: Telkom urges Icasa to scrap name termination charges utterly
Sadc wouldn’t be the primary regional block to implement flat roaming charges. The EU has arguably taken the idea to its excessive by way of a “roam like at residence” coverage that permits Europeans travelling between international locations within the EU bloc to be charged the identical charges as of their residence nation.
The EU launched laws that regularly minimize roaming charges as early as 2007, nevertheless it was solely 10 years later, in June 2017, that roaming charges have been scrapped solely. EU regulators confronted stiff opposition from the biggest cellular operators within the area, together with France’s Orange, Germany’s E-Plus, Sweden’s Comviq and others, which argued that slashing roaming charges would eat into their margins, forcing them to lift home costs or minimize prices on the expense infrastructure funding and jobs. Operators within the Sadc area are prone to have related misgivings.
A 2023 research revealed within the Worldwide Journal of Industrial Organisation discovered that there was a correlation between the EU’s gradual slicing of roaming charges and the gradual decline within the common income per person (Arpu) of cellular operators within the area. The research additionally discovered that cellular operators in international locations with greater tourism visitors have been disproportionately affected by flat roaming price laws.
Nonetheless, the “client surplus impact” – the tendency for patrons to make use of a product extra because it turns into cheaper – have been discovered to have helped offset income declines.
“Whereas the laws have drastically benefited hundreds of thousands of travelling customers within the EU, we assessed the influence of roaming regulation from its begin in 2007 and located that it led to decrease Arpus for cellular operators within the area,” mentioned the report.
Motion between Sadc international locations is climbing. Other than enterprise journey and leisure tourism, many individuals within the area spend a lot of the 12 months working exterior of their residence nation, solely visiting residence throughout holidays similar to Christmas and Easter.
In accordance South Africa’s Border Administration Authority, 1.1 million travellers handed via the nation’s 71 ports of entry within the 2024 Easter interval, a 24% improve from the earlier 12 months’s numbers.
“Contemplating the extent of inhabitants migration inside Sadc, it’s important that operators set up a framework to empower customers to be accessible and to entry telecoms companies seamlessly throughout borders. By eradicating pointless prices and establishing a framework that ensures reasonably priced charges, we can deepen digital entry,” mentioned Telkom’s Taukobong. – © 2025 NewsCentral Media
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