Icasa 'serious' about changing rules to enable rollover of unused mobile data

One of South Africans' consistent moans is the cost of mobile data and the fact that their data does not roll over after its cut-off point, whether it's for a day or a month.

While the price of data has been coming down over the last few years, our country is still ranked among the more expensive around the world.

RELATED: Data remains far more expensive in SA than in peer countries

Now the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa), our telecoms regulator, is working on new rules that will allow consumers to roll over their data bundles, as Business Day reports.

It says that Trade, Industry and Competition Minister Parks Tau stated in a written response to a question from the EFF this week that Icasa “is currently concluding for publication the final regulations.... to address the rollover and transfer of bundles and align with the provisions of the Consumer Protection Act”

Icasa is serious about this, affirms Koketso Moeti, founding executive director of non-profit organisation amandla.mobi, which has been involved in the ongoing campaign to bring data costs down.

The way the changes are implemented are crucial, Moeti emphasizes, in the sense that they shouldn't benefit only high-income consumers, but low-income earners as well.

These people tend to buy smaller data bundles, and are much more impacted by the inability to roll over.

"Low-income consumers tend to buy an hour of data, or an hour a day and so on. People talk about how they choose between buying a loaf of bread and buying data and sometimes when there's load reduction - which still happens in many townships, and you've spent some of your last money on data and then there's no electricity and no network. By the time the power comes back you've already lost the data you would have had."

We have to fight to ensure that the benefits of a change to enable data rollover, benefits particularly these low-income South Africans, Moeti reiterates.

To hear more from Moeti on this important development, listen to the interview audio at the top of the article