South African mobile network operators must zero-rate content from approved public benefit organisations

PBOs include non-profit organisations, trusts, and government departments with .gov.za domain names.

These PBOs will be required to apply to Icasa to assess whether they meet the requirements for having their content zero-rated. Once approved, the PBO’s content must be zero-rated within 14 business days.

The successful bidders will have 36 months to fulfil the zero-rating obligation, starting 15 January 2024.

Well, this is good news for citizens needing to access essential services. Quite interesting too that the PBOs will need to host their site inside of the country to be zero-rated (problem being it can often be cheaper to host your site outside the country).

This will primarily benefit (although everyone should get this zero rating) less affluent customers, meaning these users won’t find their data usage being consumed by using these services.

The mobile providers need to monitor and manage these zero ratings. What I’m really confused about is, what will our mobile data counters on our phones know about this usage? If a user sets a limit of say 2 GB data for the month so that the phone warns when the usage is going high, that won’t be excluding zero-rated sites and data. End users will also have no way at all to know whether their access in real-time is zero-rated or being counted (there is a 300 MB limit per day per user for zero-rated data).

So, all great, but the management of this by all parties is going to be quite hazy.

See mybroadband.co.za/news/telecom…
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