Icasa’s full statement on the outcome of the spectrum auction

Greg de Chasteauneuf:? Icasa’s full statement on the outcome of the spectrum auction

A little over a week ago, ICASA confirmed that the long awaited spectrum auction had been concluded, It marks an important next step in South Africa’s broadband journey, opening up high-demand spectrum.?

The revenue collected from this auction totals more than R14.4 billion, which will go to the national fiscus. This is the total amount generated from the Opt-In phase auction, which took place on 8 March 2022, and the main auction stage, which commenced on 10 March 2022 and concluded on 17 March 2022 with the administrative allocation of spectrum completed on the 22 March 2022.

In the first round of the auction Telkom Mobile and Rain snatched up 20Mhz each in the much needed sub 1Ghz bands.? This will help them with wider coverage and improve signal quality for thier user base in built up areas.?

In the main auction stange, the majority of the spectrum was in the 2.6Ghz and 3.5Ghz bands with Telkom, Rain, Liquid Telecoms, CellC, MTN and Vodacom all grabbing a slice of these lucrative bands. The higher frequency bands allows for higher bandwidth but does not have as good a penitration and coverage as the lower sub 1 Ghz bands.? This will speed up the deployment of 5G services, consumers and businesses will be spoilt for connectivity choice.

The (long) wait is over - now it is time to see how businesses leverage the abundance of connectivity options, to ramp up their cloud services with everything from Unified Communications, to cloud hosted workloads.??

The full story about the spectrum auction is available here:?https://www.icasa.org.za/news/2022/icasa-concludes-successful-spectrum-auction-and-collects-more-than-r14-4-billion-proceeds