The headline on a street pole last week read: "Lights stay on." SA is so entrapped by Eskom’s broken power supply that it’s now newsworthy when there isn’t any load-shedding. I thought of that street pole headline when news broke that the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) had convinced Telkom, MTN and Vodacom to drop their impending lawsuits over spectrum allocation.

So unusual is it for the telecommunications industry not to be litigious that I wrote my own imaginary four-liner on a street pole: telecom industry sees common sense. This is the second time in a year that Icasa has convinced angry mobile operators to back down from their legal high horses — it attempted to auction spectrum this March, but foolishly made the process unnecessarily complicated...

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