‘Construction mafia and spies’: alarm over new Icasa rules
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South Africa's major telecom operators are pushing back against Icasa's draft rapid deployment regulations ahead of public hearings. Industry groups including ACT, Vodacom, Telkom, and ISPA argue the rules impose new compliance burdens on licensees while failing to address the real bottleneck: slow municipal wayleave approvals that can take 6–12 months. Key concerns include a mandatory GIS database requiring operators to submit geo-referenced infrastructure data twice yearly — which Telkom warns could expose network locations to 'construction mafia, anarchists and spies' — a six-month implementation window deemed unworkable, and R1-million fines seen as disproportionate. Operators point to the EU's Gigabit Infrastructure Act as a better model, with binding permit deadlines and deemed-approval mechanisms. Telkom goes furthest, calling for the regulations to be paused until related legislative processes, including the Electronic Communications Amendment Bill, are resolved.
