TCS - The TechCentral Show

South Africa’s mobile operators want tougher Sim registration, but not on the terms communications regulator Icasa has proposed.

Draft amendments to Icasa’s numbering plan regulations, published for comment last month, would require a fingerprint or face check against home affairs records for every new Sim, reactivation and Sim swap. Subscribers would be capped at five numbers per operator, and operators would have two years to re-verify existing customers.

In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Nomvuyiso Batyi, CEO of the Association of Comms & Technology (ACT), tells Duncan McLeod why the industry body won’t support the rules as drafted. ACT, which represents Vodacom, MTN, Telkom, Cell C, Rain and Liquid Intelligent Technologies, has spent two years working with the justice department on amendments to Rica, the Sim registration law, and its members agreed an industry framework in June.

Batyi says Icasa officials sat in meetings where that work was presented, so the draft came as a surprise. The industry framework would allow 20 Sims per person per network rather than five. It also targets informal dealers who sell Sims pre-registered in their own names.

Batyi explains why prepaid customers are the hard part – some traders in rural areas still register Sims over 2G connections – and what it will cost to query the home affairs database. She warns that forcing every subscriber to re-verify risks repeating the failures of digital migration, and describes the fraud driving the debate, from WhatsApp scams and stolen phones to one-time Pin fraud.

Don’t miss the discussion!

Réan van Niekerk

Metacom has spent 25 years designing its own routers and running private networks for some of Africa's biggest retailers, without a cent of venture capital.

In this episode of the TechCentral Show, founder Réan van Niekerk tells Fanie van Rooyen how the Cape Town company came to connect more than 6 000 ATMs, every Pep store in Africa and, by his account, well over half the communications Eskom uses to monitor and control electricity distribution.

He explains why Metacom designs its hardware in-house instead of buying white-label Asian routers, and why one box per store works better than equipment from four suppliers. He also says satellite services such as Starlink would be a "wonderful supplier", not a threat.

Van Niekerk also discusses enterprise technology spending in 2026, the AI-driven memory shortages that now force Metacom to order some components a year ahead, the company's cautious approach to AI, which keeps humans on its support lines, and why Africa is not one market.

Milkor's 380 drone is flying for a customer in the Middle East, but South Africa's own defence force has yet to buy one. In this episode of The TechCentral Show (TCS), Milkor vice-president for Africa Daniel du Plessis talks to deputy editor Fanie van Rooyen about why, and about where drones, AI and autonomy are taking modern warfare.

Speaking after the Africa Aerospace and Defence (AAD) expo at Air Force Base Waterkloof in September, Du Plessis explains what buyers were asking about most: drones of all sizes, data fusion and AI. He sets out where a 1.5-tonne surveillance aircraft that can fly for more than 30 hours fits in a world of cheap, expendable drones like those used in Ukraine.

He also tackles the more difficult questions: who decides who Milkor can sell to, and how do South Africa's arms export controls work? Where does a human stay in control as drones carry guided missiles and become more autonomous? Are fears about "killer robots" overblown? And how does the 380 keep flying when GPS signals are jammed or spoofed?

Closer to home, Du Plessis says the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) is severely underfunded, and that money, not interest, is what stands between the 380 and the SANDF and Border Management Authority. He warns that South Africa and the rest of the continent are not ready for cheap attack drones, but says the local defence industry can respond if government acts now.

The conversation also covers Milkor's larger 780, its new agreement with European missile maker MBDA and why about 99% of the 380 is built in Cape Town.

Frogfoot plans to keep buying smaller fibre network operators in South Africa’s suburbs as the market consolidates, but CEO Shane Chorley stopped short of ruling out a sale of the business.

“I’d be ignorant to say that we would ignore any offer,” Chorley said on the latest episode of the TechCentral Show – watch or listen below. “I would hope to say that we will be the acquirer rather than being sold.”

Frogfoot has already bought a couple of small suburban operators and wants to acquire “as many of those smaller operators as possible”, he told show host Duncan McLeod. He expects somewhat larger networks, of more than 30 000 homes, to come up for sale in the next few years, followed in time by “a much bigger consolidation of one or two of the bigger ones”.

The mooted merger of Octotel and MetroFibre had been “going on for a while”, Chorley said, and he expected consolidation among suburban operators to continue.

Abraham van der Merwe, who leads Frogfoot, Vox and Hypa, said consolidation was inevitable because “infrastructure requires scale”. But he said Frogfoot was unlikely to be consolidated any time soon because its “long-term and patient” investors, among them the founders, intend to own the business for a very long time.

The two spoke after a DNI-led consortium invested in the businesses in a deal valuing them at R14.4-billion. Most of the money will go into townships, where Van der Merwe said fewer than two million of 12 million to 15 million homes have fibre. Frogfoot wants to lift its build rate from about 80 000 connections a year to 360 000.

That untapped market is also why Van der Merwe is not worried about operators overbuilding each other. Overbuilding splits market share and wrecks the economics, he said, and there is little reason to do it when so many homes have no fibre at all. It took about a decade to connect the 4.5 million homes in the suburbs; the township market is three times that size.

Chinese companies have built their position in African technology one layer at a time – first phones and telecoms equipment, then fintech and now the AI models that local start-ups build on. American private capital, meanwhile, is pulling back. Lexi Novitske, general partner at Norrsken22, thinks US investors will regret it.

Novitske moved to Nigeria in 2012 and has invested from Lagos ever since. Norrsken22, a pan-African growth fund backed by Nordic tech founders including those behind Klarna, Skype and Minecraft, closed its debut fund at US$205-million in 2023. It is now about halfway through deploying that capital, with no exits yet.

In this episode of the TechCentral Show, she expands on the argument TechCentral reported last week: that African start-ups are increasingly building on Chinese AI models such as Alibaba’s Qwen because they are cheaper and more available, and that the US risks losing both a young, digital-first market and access to its data.

In the interview, with TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod, Novitske also discusses:

• How Nigeria’s start-up scene has changed since she began as an angel investor;

• Why unpredictable regulation and a shortage of top talent are bigger obstacles for Nigerian founders than power cuts;

• How Chinese-backed OPay and PalmPay won Nigerian fintech by absorbing years of losses, and why that now makes regulators uneasy;

• Why Silicon Valley’s AI boom has drawn venture capital away from Africa, and when she expects it to return;

• Why Egypt and South Africa offer the best opportunities right now, with Nigeria likely to follow; and

• What Optasia’s oversubscribed JSE listing means for Johannesburg, why the biggest African fintechs are looking to New York, London and Hong Kong instead, and why one or two winners can return an entire fund.

Don’t miss the discussion!