Icasa has decided to find out what the spectrum auction was worth to the people paying for data. Four years after operators bought the airwaves that were meant to make mobile cheaper, the regulator has gazetted a notice of intention to run a market inquiry into whether South Africans can afford to be online. It says the inquiry is aligned with its own job of monitoring what happened to pricing once that spectrum was assigned.
The notice is signed by Icasa chairman Mothibi Ramusi and issued under section 4B of the Act that created the regulator. Its stated purpose is an evidence-based assessment of what telecommunications services cost, what drives those costs, and what a regulator could do about them. The auction it is measuring raised R14.4 billion for the state, comfortably past the R8 billion Icasa had projected.
A decade of asking the same question
This is not the first attempt. The Competition Commission opened a data services inquiry in 2017 and reported in 2019 that mobile data pricing was structurally anti-poor, which produced cuts on entry-level bundles. Icasa then ran its own mobile broadband inquiry the same year and found retail mobile markets ineffectively competitive in many cases.
In August the communications department went out to tender for a six-month study asking why none of the previous interventions had delivered affordable voice and data.
What five years actually did to the price
Data prices did come down, just not quite as much as the spectrum auction was supposed to deliver. A prepaid gigabyte cost around R100 in 2020 and R79 by 2025, a drop of roughly 20%. Contract prices fell further, with one 5GB bundle halving to R99. Across the market, South Africa now sits below the global average for the cost of a gigabyte, although 27 African countries are still cheaper.
But cheaper data was only part of the deal. In return for access to spectrum, mobile operators also agreed to connect thousands of government facilities. Of the 21,878 facilities identified, Icasa says just 4,377 had been connected by October 2025. Its latest sector report also puts national 5G coverage at 58% of the population, falling as low as 7% in rural parts of the Eastern Cape.
And data affordability is only one of the 2 inquiries Icasa announced on Friday. The other will look at how internet services like streaming and messaging are affecting the broadcasters and networks it regulates. Neither inquiry names specific companies, and neither will produce answers anytime soon: Icasa still needs to publish its questionnaires, with findings only expected in 2027.
