New call termination rates announced

·4 Sep 2014

The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) revealed its new call termination regulations at a press conference called at the last-minute on Thursday, 4 September 2014.

Call termination rates are the fees telecommunications operators charge each other to connect calls to one another’s networks.

This comes after the regulator’s previous regulations were struck down by the South Gauteng High Court as unlawful and invalid.

However, the judge suspended the declaration of invalidity for six months, giving Icasa until the end of September to produce new regulations.

These new regulations offer significantly lower asymmetry to smaller players such as Cell C and Telkom Mobile, which is partly what MTN and Vodacom fought for.

Asymmetry in the rates means that the regulations allow that Cell C and Telkom Mobile charge more for Vodacom and MTN to connect calls to their networks than the larger operators are allowed to charge the small ones.

The same principle applies to fixed networks, albeit to a lesser extent, with Telkom considered the large network.

In the table below the new mobile call terminations that Icasa announced are summarised.

The fixed call rates from 1 October 2014 to 28 February 2015 will be 12c within the same area code and 19c between different area codes.

From March 2015 the ternimation rates for fixed and mobile calls will be the same.

Mobile termination rates
Date	Termination rate	Asymmetry
1 October 2014 to 28 February 2015	20c	50% (30c)
1 March 2015 to 29 February 2016	16c	38% (22c)
1 March 2016 to 28 February 2017	12c	33% (16c)
1 March 2017 to 28 February 2018	8c	25% (10c)