The most striking feature of South Africa’s mobile market is the skewed allocation of spectrum and a seemingly endless sequence of failed attempts to hold an auction for it. A shortage of spectrum (or the inefficient assignment of it) is blamed, among other things, for South Africa’s relatively slow LTE 4G speeds. Through historical accident, the country has two mobile data networks in addition to the four licensed mobile operators. The response of operators has been to innovate using roaming and network sharing agreements; as we explore in this paper, these have become the de facto spectrum allocation process.

This paper looks at how the de facto industry structure has been moulded by spectrum holdings and sharing arrangements and asks how spectrum management could be improved. We observe that, although the number of mobile operators has effectively been reduced to 3 (a number which would raise concern in some circles), there exist a variety of arrangements between those three and other spectrum and network operators. The smallest of the current three mobile operators is still not able to offer a nationwide mobile service without a roaming agreement but, at the same time, the two larger operators depend critically on spectrum and roaming agreements themselves, mainly with the two physical data network operators that function as wholesale providers.

The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) was established as a consequence of a new constitution that was adopted in 1996 and it helped to create new institutional arrangements for the burgeoning mobile industry. The authority has nevertheless continued to be hampered, as we shall demonstrate, by political imperatives. This has been pointed out by other authors over the past twenty years and we add to this body of evidence by considering the spectrum auction planned (again) for 2021.

The “2021” auction is in fact an iteration of the auction originally announced in May 2010 and then abandoned (Song, 2011). The same thing happened again in 2016 (Paelo & Robb, 2020). Late in 2020, the regulator again announced an auction, due to take place during 2021 but by the second quarter of the year, two of the four national operators had already obtained a court injunction to stop it. The process is intertwined with a political imperative to establish a public wireless open-access network, which we discuss in detail.

We describe how the industry has navigated around policy and regulatory dysfunction and how competitive interaction among the South African operators has managed to prevail. Following Hausman & Taylor’s (2013) lead in their work on the United States, in this paper we provide a commentary on apparently perverse outcomes from significant regulatory, judicial and legislative actions (or, perhaps more accurately, inactions) governing the South African mobile telecommunications industry from the commencement of the current constitutional arrangements in 1996 to the present.

南非移动市场最显着的特征是频谱分配的不平衡，以及一系列看似无休止的拍卖失败尝试。频谱短缺（或分配效率低下）被归咎于南非相对较慢的 LTE 4G 速度。由于历史事故，该国除了四个持牌移动运营商外，还拥有两个移动数据网络。运营商的反应是创新使用漫游和网络共享协议；正如我们在本文中探讨的那样，这些已成为事实上的频谱分配过程。

本文着眼于频谱持有和共享安排如何塑造事实上的行业结构，并探讨如何改进频谱管理。我们观察到，尽管移动运营商的数量已有效减少到 3 个（这个数字在某些圈子中会引起关注），但这三个与其他频谱和网络运营商之间存在多种安排。目前三个移动运营商中最小的一个仍然无法在没有漫游协议的情况下提供全国性的移动服务，但同时，两个较大的运营商严重依赖频谱和漫游协议本身，主要是与两个物理数据网络运营商作为批发供应商。

南非独立通信管理局 (ICASA) 是根据 1996 年通过的新宪法而成立的，它有助于为蓬勃发展的移动行业建立新的制度安排。然而，正如我们将证明的那样，这一权力继续受到政治要求的阻碍。在过去的 20 年中，其他作者已经指出了这一点，我们通过考虑计划（再次）在 2021 年进行的频谱拍卖来补充这一证据。

“2021”拍卖实际上是最初于 2010 年 5 月宣布然后被放弃的拍卖的迭代（Song，2011）。同样的事情在 2016 年再次发生（Paelo & Robb，2020）。2020 年底，监管机构再次宣布将于 2021 年进行拍卖，但到今年第二季度，四家国家运营商中的两家已经获得法院禁令以停止拍卖。该过程与建立公共无线开放接入网络的政治要求交织在一起，我们将对此进行详细讨论。

我们描述了该行业如何绕过政策和监管功能障碍，以及南非运营商之间的竞争互动如何成功。继 Hausman & Taylor (2013) 在美国的工作中取得领先，在本文中，我们对管理南非移动电信的重大监管、司法和立法行动（或更准确地说，不作为）的明显不正当结果进行了评论行业从 1996 年现行宪法安排开始至今。