Human Interaction in the Regulatory of Telecommunications Infrastructure Deployment in South Africa

Telecommunications is increasingly vital to the society at large, and has become essential to business, academic, as well as social activities. Due to the necessity to have access to telecommunications, the deployment requires regulations and policy. Otherwise, the deployment of the infrastructures would contribute to environment, and human complexities rather than ease of use.

However, the formulation of telecommunication infrastructure deployment regulation and policy involve agents such as people and processes. The roles of the agents are critical, and are not as easy as it meant to belief. This could be attributed to different factors, as they produce and reproduce themselves overtime.

This paper presents the result of a study which focused on understanding how non-technical factors enable and constrain the development and implementation of telecommunications infrastructure sharing regulations. In the study, the interactions that take place amongst human and non-human agents were investigated. The study employed the duality of structure, of Structuration Theory as lens to understand the effectiveness of interactions in the formulation of regulations, and how policy is used to facilitate the deployment of telecommunications infrastructure in the South African environment.