South Africa's telecoms sector has a stock excuse it reaches for whenever a powerful player wants to do something anticompetitive, and it never seems to wear out: we're doing this for the underserved communities.

The South African media landscape has been saturated with Starlink coverage for months. Every ministerial statement, every regulatory development, every parliamentary objection becomes headline news. Yet amid this relentless coverage, a curious question emerges: why Starlink specifically?

Everyone's talking about artificial intelligence. And I mean everyone. The hype reminds me of the fanfare around 5G's launch – all promise, waiting to see delivery. We built and enabled those towers everywhere, and now? Well, let's just say the revolution was somewhat overstated.

What a week it's been! The 2025 WAPALOZA Conference wrapped up in Johannesburg this week, and I'm still buzzing from the energy, insights, and genuine passion for connectivity that filled the room.

We've all heard the famous parable of the chessboard: start with one grain of rice, double it on each square, and by the time you reach the halfway point, you've got 43 tons of rice. But it's the second half of the chessboard where things get truly mind-bending. We're not just talking about rice anymore – we're talking about artificial intelligence, and folks, we've just entered that exponential second half.

It seems our beloved mobile network operators (MNOs) have coined these terms, perhaps to spook governments and society into favouring their services – all while maintaining prepaid pricing models that could make a billionaire blush. Ironically, this "exclusion" stems not from a lack of infrastructure but from these operators' sky-high pricing structures.