South Africa’s Communications Minister Solly Malatsi has confirmed that MTN and Vodacom may each face fines of up to R5 million, which is roughly $298,000, for failing to comply with new regu
South Africa’s Communications Minister Solly Malatsi has confirmed that MTN and Vodacom may each face fines of up to R5 million, which is roughly $298,000, for failing to comply with new regulations regarding the expiration, rollover, and transfer of mobile data bundles between customers.
The Minister explained, in response to questions in Parliament, that ICASA (the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa) is in charge of setting and enforcing penalties under the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act. According to Malatsi, ICASA believes the current penalties are enough and doesn’t plan to raise the maximum fine.
Besides financial penalties, operators who do not comply also risk having their names published in national media and being ordered to run consumer awareness campaigns at their own expense. For big companies like MTN and Vodacom, this kind of bad publicity can be just as damaging as a fine.
ICASA published the regulations at the centre of the dispute in January 2026 as amendments to the End-User and Subscriber Service Charter Regulations. They introduced a unified framework covering voice, SMS, and data bundles, replacing a patchwork of separate rules.
Solly Malatsi – South Africa’s Communications Minister Under the new rules, operators must send customers a notification (via SMS, push notification, or other means) when their bundle reaches 50%, 80%, and 100% usage. Customers can choose whether to receive these alerts. Operators can only charge out-of-bundle rates if the customer has explicitly agreed. Any leftover data must roll over at least once after the bundle expires. Customers must also be able to share all or part of their bundle with other users on the same network.
Why MTN and Vodacom are challenging the rules in court
Despite the threat of fines, MTN and Vodacom have initiated legal challenges concerning the regulations, filing their court applications in late July 2026. The companies state that their objections are not aimed at opposing consumer protection but are instead directed at certain provisions which they regard as ambiguous or impractical.
Vodacom put forward four particular concerns. Concerning out-of-bundle usage, it pointed out that the present wording might cause calls to end automatically as soon as a customer’s bundle is used up if the customer has not chosen to have out-of-bundle charging, an effect which the company states was not the intention of the regulation.
With bundle transfers, Vodacom warned that permitting transfers to an unlimited number of recipients on the same network could lead to opportunities for unintended arbitrage. On the issue of rollovers, it expressed concerns about products with very large fixed wireless access quotas since the mechanics of rollovers in such cases are more complicated.
Similar read: South Africans risk losing inactive prepaid phone numbers after 90 days under new ICASA rules
The company also questioned why mobile virtual network operators, being smaller companies that lease network capacity from the larger operators, are exempt from the same rules.
MTN echoed concerns about regulatory fairness, saying a sustainable, competitive market requires even rules for all similar service providers.
The legal challenge prompted a response from Khusela Diko, chairperson of Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Communications and Digital Technologies. After MTN and Vodacom filed their court papers, Diko visited MTN’s offices and said publicly there’s no technical reason for mobile data to expire in South Africa. “We’ve never understood why data must expire,” she said, adding that the committee is engaging with operators to understand their challenges but isn’t seeking to change ICASA’s position on the regulations.
The standoff leaves South African consumers in limbo. The rules are in place, the fines are real, but the legal challenge may delay full enforcement until the courts resolve the dispute.
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