Faizel Patel, Radio Islam News – 27-10-2017

Mobile operators have called on the South African government to provide more spectrum to bring down the cost of data.

Representatives from Cell C, MTN and Vodacom were speaking at the My Broadband Conference at Gallagher Estate in Midrand on Thursday.

The conference is a premier ICT event attracting top IT executives and professionals to discuss technology, cyber security, communication systems and telecoms amongst other tech related agendas.

While the price of data has been a contentious issue in South Africa with a number of protests in the #DataMustFall campaigns, MTN’s Godfrey Motsa says it needs government’s assistance to bring down the cost of data.

“If we don’t get the spectrum, we are actually robbing the poor. The spectrum crunch is hitting us. At MTN we believe we can offer a gig of data for R50 if the government can give us spectrum.”

Motsa says MTN will within the next 30 days make an announcement regarding data prices.

At the same time, Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub says data prices will continue to drop, but echoed Motsa’s sentiment that more spectrum is required.

“What we’ve been doing very well over the last 5 years I would say is that we have made sure that all our customers are on the new relevant plans. So we never leave customers behind. We pro-actively move people off the old plans and we manage those price declines as well.”

Joosub also says Apple’s much-anticipated iPhone X will launch in South Africa by mid-November.

Meanwhile cyber security consulting firm SensePost says the biggest data leak in South Africa’s history containing the personal details of millions of South Africans may not be the only sensitive information available online.

The leaked database backup file – called “masterdeeds.sql” – was stored on the webserver of Jigsaw Holdings and was said to have over 60 million records in it.

It has now emerged that the company’s database server was also poorly secured.

Speaking at the My Broadband conference, SensePost’s Chief Technology Officer Dominic White says security researchers easily obtained the login credentials of Jigsaw’s database server.

The live database contained millions more records than the backup file.

While copies of the live database are not as readily available as the backup file, security researchers say people should assume the data is in the hands of hackers.

After a successful conference that also saw many prizes being given away to delegates, tech reporter, Aki Anastasiou closed the conference highlighting that more discussions are needed to bring down the cost of data in South Africa.

Twitter: @FaizelPatel143