South Africa Withdraws Woan Spectrum Reservation, Unblocking Idle Frequencies
South Africa has withdrawn the spectrum reservation held for the Wholesale Open Access Network, freeing up idle frequencies that had been locked for years pending the WOAN's establishment. The decision is described as a landmark shift in South African telecommunications policy.
SA Spectrum: four years of lost coverage, finally over
50MHz of prime radio frequencies — the kind that push mobile signals deep into buildings and out into rural areas — have been sitting unassigned in South Africa since 2020, held in reserve for a wholesale network that never got built.
Today that reservation is formally dead. What's striking isn't the policy shift itself; cabinet signalled this was coming back in 2022. It's that a draft withdrawal sat unfinished for four years, and the spectrum just... waited.
Minister Malatsi is right that idle spectrum isn't neutral. Every year it sat unused was a year operators couldn't extend coverage or relieve congestion. The people who paid for that delay in slow connections and patchy rural service weren't the operators or the regulators — they were ordinary users.
The licensing decisions now sit with Icasa, where they belong. Whether those 50MHz reach the people who needed them most depends entirely on what conditions Icasa attaches.
1 source
- Woan’s ghost exorcised · techcentral.co.za · T2