JOHANNESBURG – The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) on Thursday announced that data will soon no longer expire.

It was expected that data costs would be reduced at the highly-anticipated briefing but South Africans will have to wait a year or more for that.

The regulator said no decision on data costs had been taken.

“All licensees are no longer allowed to charge consumers out of bundle rates for data when the data has run out without their specific consent. This will ensure that consumers are not defaulted to out-of-bundle, which is significantly higher,” Icasa’s Botlenyana Mokhele said.

Icasa said this was just a culmination of an extensive market review process, which will come in three phases.

“This is the culmination of extensive market review processes initiated in 2017. We hope to finalise the three-stage process by June 2018.”

Icasa says the first step of the three phases is to stop “bill shock”.

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“At this point in time, it is more about dealing with out-of-bundle rates and expiring of data. But we have deliberately stayed away from dealing with prices at the moment until the 2nd or 3rd phase is complete.”

It said the final regulations will be published in the government gazette and will kick-in one month after it has been published.

This will allow interested parties, like providers, 30 days to comment on the new regulations and furthermore, time to amend some of their software to allow for the changes.

eNCA