Lloyd Gedye

Help is just a click of a button away for consumers who are fed up with the limited range and late fees of conventional DVD rental stores. Now you can rent movies from the comfort of your home and all you need is a credit card and an internet connection. PushPlay is South Africa’s first online DVD rental service that offers subscribers DVDs delivered straight to their door.

Mutual & Federal is putting some auto-body repairers’ noses out of joint in an attempt to deal with corruption from rogue operators that could be costing insurers billions. Recently the National Guild of Auto-Body Repairers marched from Mary Fitzgerald Square in Newtown, Johannesburg, to Mutual & Federal’s head office in the city centre to protest against "unfair" contracts it claims members are being forced to sign.

South Africans venturing online to buy music downloads need to shop around, because some retailers can be almost 12 times more expensive than others. The cheapest download option available to South Africans appears to be eMusic, the R130 a month subscription that allows consumers 75 songs at R1,70 each. The most expensive option appears to be Exactmobile, which charges a whopping R20 a song.

Big Food was scrambling for cover this week with the announcement that the Competition Commission has proposed fining Tiger Brands a whopping R98-million for its participation in cartel behaviour in the bread and milling industries. The custodians of some of South Africa’s most popular food brands have been colluding on a national level to set prices in an attempt to remove competition from their market.

While the government continues to point fingers at the telecoms sector crying foul about excessive pricing, perhaps it needs to hold up the mirror to itself as the single biggest shareholder in the sector. With a 37% shareholding in Telkom, the government is by far the biggest investor in South Africa’s ICT sector.

Up to a billion rands of funds invested in Fidentia are unlikely to be recovered, say the financial group’s curators. One curator, Dines Gihwala, of Hofmeyr, Herbstein & Gihwala, says the company is expecting to recover only a further R300-million of the missing money to add to the R300-million already paid to investors.

Imagine a telephone company that pays you money to receive calls — sound like pie in the sky? Well then you haven’t heard about Vox Telecom, the new Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) tele­phone services, which offer a real, cut-price alternative to Telkom’s fixed-line offering.

With the spectre of price controls on private hospitals looming, market leader Netcare has called for self-regulation by the industry to ward off moves by government to set prices. Netcare found itself in the eye of a storm recently amid accusations that it benefited from non-transparent pricing and for not passing on rebates from suppliers to its customers.

MTN could face a multimillion-rand fine if the Competition Tribunal agrees with Cell C and the Competition Commission that it has been involved in anti-competitive conduct. This follows the Competition Commission’s decision to refer Cell C’s complaint to the Competition Tribunal for adjudication after it found that MTN was engaging in "price discrimination".

Consumers beware — you might be forfeiting your cellphone handset’s warranty by porting to another network operator. Cellphone number portability might allow you to switch operators, but how likely are you to do this if it means you sacrifice the warranty on your handset? You might also sacrifice your warranty if you put a SIM card from another operator into your handset.

Africa’s east coast could go from having no undersea broadband cables to four. The planned East Africa Submarine System, touted as the solution for the bandwidth-starved continent, has been plagued by political squabbles that have resulted in it splintering into four mooted cable projects.

In a rapidly converging telecoms sector, the big question on every­body’s lips is when Telkom will sell Vodacom and who it will partner to re-enter the mobile market. MTN might seem a perfect fit with its large African footprint, but analysts feel the price tag of between R250-billion and R300-billion is too costly for Telkom. The deal would be unlikely to get approval from the competition authorities.