Telecommunications groups Telkom and Cell C have signed agreements with the Competition Commission over IP Connect’s pricing and data prices respectively.

Telkom agreed to a significant reduction of wholesale broadband access costs in order to remove excessive pricing concerns in respect of IP Connect concerns raised in the Data Services Market Inquiry Report published in December last year.

“One of the findings was that there was a case, at face value, of excessive pricing against Telkom Openserve with regards to IP Connect, a wholesale product used by Internet service providers (ISPs) to connect fibre and ADSL clients,” said Competition Commissioner Tembinkosi Bonakele.

Telkom’s wholesale division Openserve will now introduce a new wholesale product suite to replace IP Connect, with the structure and proposed initial pricing of the new offering reducing wholesale charges to ISPs for fibre broadband wholesale customers and, in effect, removing the pricing concerns raised in respect of IP Connect.

“The new Openserve offering, which is structured as an aggregated end-to-end solution, will allow ISPs to manage their costs and compare the Openserve fixed-broadband prices with the prices of other wholesale broadband providers more easily. This, as a result, will enhance competition in the fixed-broadband connectivity market,” the commission noted.

Telkom also agreed to improve the transparency of its pricing, in line with the inquiry’s recommendations, by displaying the cents per MB for all its data only packages and notifying its customers of the in-bundle effective rate per megabyte in its purchase confirmation messages to subscribers.

The company will also offer zero-rated access to essential government services and educational institutions, including the primary URLs of more than 60 universities and technical and vocational education and training institutions, as well as other knowledge enhancing sites such as Wikipedia, Everything Science, Everything Maths and DBE Cloud.

Meanwhile, mobile operator Cell C signed a memorandum of agreement to improve access to data and increase pricing transparency for consumers.

From May 1, Cell C will offer a free lifeline package capped at a bundle size determined by Cell C and will include a delivery conversion to SMS for customers who are not on the app; five free Cell C-to-Cell C SMSes for each customer a day, seven free Call Me’s each day and free basic internet.org access.

“The lifeline bundle will be pulled by customers through a USSD string, app or portal. If the customer qualifies, the lifeline bundle is activated and the customer will be SMSed confirmation; the bundle expires at 00h00, the system will send the customer a depletion / expiry message It will also display balance and status on App and portal and USSD,” the commission explained.

Limits will be put in place to manage risk of fraudulent usage/abuse.

Further, within the next six to nine months, Cell C will undertake the necessary systems development, network capacity enhancements and related software upgrades to enable the effective rate notifications for shorter than 30-day bundles, hybrid and post-paid.