Icasa's New Rollout Rules Skip the Wayleave Fix

We've already covered the two halves of this story separately: in July, we reported on ACT's five-point ask to fix municipal wayleave delays, and on Telkom's security objections to the national infrastructure database in the same draft regulations. What's new, confirmed by Icasa's own gazetted text and by ACT's CEO in a 30 July 2026 interview, is what happens when you put the two together: Icasa's actual draft regulations do address the database. They set fines, notice periods and a dispute process. They do not set a binding deadline for how long a municipality can sit on a wayleave application - the single change ACT told Icasa, in person, was the industry's biggest ask.

This isn't a story about an idea getting rejected. It's a story about an idea that, as far as the public record shows, hasn't been engaged with at all - and about an industry body now putting a number on how long that might take to change.

Every figure below is tagged to its source. Icasa's own newsroom and document pages confirm the draft regulations exist, their stated purpose, and the 25 May 2026 comment deadline. The specific provisions - penalty amounts, notice periods, the dispute-resolution process - come from TechCentral's reporting, which we could not independently verify against the primary gazette PDF: Icasa's document library links to the actual regulation text, but it downloads as a file our tools could not extract readable text from today. TechCentral's coverage across three separate articles (12 April, 7 July and 30 July 2026) is internally consistent and names on-record sources for every claim, which is why we're using it here - but it remains a secondary source for the regulation's exact wording. mybroadband.co.za returned an access-denied response to every request today, so it isn't cited in this piece.

Stripped of the politics, the draft is a fairly conventional piece of infrastructure regulation. It requires every licensed network operator to submit a bi-annual, geo-referenced database of fibre routes, ducts, poles and towers (Regulation 7); it sets notice periods before an operator can start new deployment work or scheduled maintenance; and it lays out a dispute-resolution ladder running from good-faith negotiation through mediation, arbitration, Icasa's own complaints committee and, ultimately, the courts.

Two things stand out once you read the provisions as a set rather than one at a time. First, the penalties bite hardest on the paperwork obligation - the database - not on the thing operators say is actually slowing rollout down. Second, the notice periods (30 days for new deployment, 14 days for maintenance) apply to what an operator must tell others before it acts. Nothing in the draft imposes an equivalent clock on what a municipality must do once an operator has applied for a wayleave.

That absence is precisely what ACT flagged at Icasa's July hearings, and what its CEO, Nomvuyiso Batyi, confirmed was still unresolved when she spoke to TechCentral on 30 July. Two specific gaps, in her account:

• No binding municipal turnaround time. The draft requires operators to obtain wayleave certificates and other statutory approvals before building, but sets no deadline by which a municipality must respond - let alone the 30-working-day deemed-approval mechanism ACT proposed in July.
• A dispute process that assumes the wrong dispute. The draft's negotiation-to-court ladder is built for disagreements between two licensees - for instance, two network operators contesting access to the same duct. Batyi's point is that it gives an operator no formal path when the party holding things up is a municipality, which isn't a licensee at all.

Batyi also noted that Icasa's consultation for this draft reached network operators and fibre companies, but not the South African Local Government Association (SALGA) - the body that represents the 257 municipalities whose wayleave processes are the actual subject of the complaint. Regulating a two-sided problem while consulting only one side is, on its face, a reasonable thing for an industry body to flag - whatever the eventual regulatory outcome.

This has been building for three years, not three months. The full arc, from the original national policy to Batyi's latest estimate:

What makes the July hearings notable is how many different, sometimes competing, industry voices converged on the same underlying complaint - that the draft, as written, doesn't fix what's actually broken. None of the following four submissions repeat each other's specific objection, but they land on the same conclusion from different directions:

Telkom and Ispa don't agree on much - one is South Africa's incumbent fixed operator, the other represents the independent ISPs that resell wholesale fibre from operators like Telkom. Both telling Icasa the same draft has real problems, for different reasons, is a stronger signal than either complaint would be alone.

Fines only work as an incentive if they're aimed at the behaviour you actually want to change. Laid out side by side, it's clear the draft's financial penalties are aimed entirely at operator compliance - not at the municipal delays ACT says are the bigger problem:

ACT's July submission separately proposed replacing the flat R1-million GIS penalty with a graduated regime, and asked for the six-month database-compliance window to be extended to 12 months - Telkom had called six months "completely unrealistic" in its own July submission. Neither change is reflected in the draft as currently described in Icasa's own document library.

Icasa's rapid deployment hearings are a consultation, not a final ruling - the draft can still change before it becomes binding law. But Batyi's own estimate, given directly to TechCentral, is that final regulations could be as much as 24 months away, on the condition that Icasa works through local government first rather than proceeding without SALGA's input. She also pointed out that Icasa already has the legal tools to move faster: Section 21 of the Electronic Communications Act, as amended in 2014, empowers Icasa to set uniform procedures for permits and approvals at a reasonable fee - the exact power a binding wayleave deadline would exercise.

Two years is a long runway against wayleave delays that are already running six to 12 months per application. If Batyi's estimate holds, it means the practical experience of waiting for fibre in an underserved area - stuck behind a municipal approval a network operator has no control over the timing of - is unlikely to change through regulation before 2028, regardless of how the rest of the draft's provisions on databases, notice periods and penalties are finalised in the meantime.

Nothing about the draft regulations changes what's available at your address today, and nothing in this story suggests that will change quickly. The practical read is the same one we gave when we first covered ACT's wayleave complaint in July: check what's genuinely already live at your address using our fibre coverage map, rather than assuming a network's public rollout roadmap reflects when your specific street will actually get connected - that timeline is downstream of a municipal approval process this draft, as it currently stands, does nothing to speed up. If full fibre genuinely isn't available yet, our prepaid and township fibre guide covers the interim options that don't depend on the same wayleave process at all.