MTN bites back at Cell C claims

·9 Oct 2013

MTN SA director, Zunaid Bulbulia has responded to claims of anti-competitiveness made by Cell C, saying that running on-net promotions is an industry standard.

On Tuesday (8 October) Cell C formally lodged a complaint with the Competition Commission against the dominant incumbent mobile operators, MTN and Vodacom, for anti-competitive conduct.

Speaking at the 2013 MyBroadband Conference, Cell C CEO Alan Knott-Craig said that Vodacom and MTN are abusing their dominant market positions with far lower on-net calls.

Knott-Craig vowed to fight against the unfair practices and poor policies in the country’s telecoms space.

Speaking in the conference’s second session, Bulbulia briefly addressed his competitor’s statements, saying that he cannot see the merits for the complaint filed by Cell C, arguing that the practice of running on-net promotions is an industry standard.

Bulbulia said that, while he hadn’t had much time to digest the claim, he questions how “by MTN and Vodacom having an on-net promotion, we are are disadvantaging them (Cell C),” pointing out further that Cell C runs its own on-net promotion, Supacharge.

“We can’t see any merit when it’s a practice being done by all networks,” Bulbulia said.

According to Cell C, the crux of its complaint relates to the manner in which the dominant incumbents discriminate between their on-net and off-net effective prices, which has a dramatic and direct impact on smaller operators’ ability to acquire new customers.

“The two dominant incumbents discount their effective on-net prices substantially while charging a premium for their customers to call off-net. This amounts to discriminatory pricing and is without doubt anti-competitive when adopted by dominant operators,” said Cell C CEO Alan Knott-Craig.