Vodacom has begun selling 4G services based on long-term evolution technology but coverage is extremely limited - for now.
You'd be forgiven for thinking South African business can't operate except through the courts. Right now we have three significant industries – cellphones, gas and digital television – either in court or on its steps, squaring up to one another or the regulator or both.
The lawyers smile, but the consumer is burdened with insufficient choice and prices that are too high, while deep-pocketed companies prolong their market advantage through legal measures rather than by offering better deals to their customers.
The result is that we all suffer from a sluggish economy that continues to fail us in our key imperative: creating sustainable jobs.
But you can't short-cut the law, and companies have rights too. The courts are there to call the bureaucrats to order and to ensure that our economic affairs are built on a sound legal footing.
Often missing in these processes, though, is the consumer – whom reform is meant to benefit. Here we'd point a finger at our regulators and their political masters. Too often there is little public involvement, so these discussions become tussles between vested interests and regulators in dark corridors.
Far better would be for those charged with economic reforms to take the public into their confidence, to provide examples of international best practice, and to back this up with numbers that show why change is both needed and overdue.
In this way they would win these battles in the most important court of all – theDStv court of public opinion. It would follow too that incumbent companies exposed to their customers as beneficiaries of largesse would then be much less likely to scurry to the courts to protect such unearned privilege.
We have too many big and powerful companies that dominate their sectors and hold us all back. The regulators, though, have a more powerful ally – millions of consumers. More transparency and exposure of the market advantage of the incumbents can only drastically lessen the potential for yet another dispute being fought in legal corridors and courtrooms, when that dispute should be solved by the market.