Kerron Edmunson
International ICT Legal
and Regulatory Specialist
Kerron was admitted as an attorney in 1994 in South Africa; and in 2000 she was admitted as a solicitor in the United Kingdom. Having worked in a top 10 law firm in the United Kingdom as a solicitor for 5 years; she has also worked on projects in an additional 27 countries in a wide variety of regulatory matters in the public and private sector; and has acted as in-house counsel for 3 telecommunications companies in South Africa and 2 in the United Kingdom. Kerron has been practising as a legal and regulatory consultant internationally (based in Johannesburg) since 2006.
In 2022, Kerron worked with LS telcom to produce a regulation for spectrum monitoring and avoiding interference in the Middle East, which required benchmarking with 6 other countries in relation to spectrum management.
Kerron has also worked on submissions to the South African regulator and to government since the mid-2000s, on the award of spectrum and specifically 4G and 5G spectrum. In 2015, Kerron worked with a team of experts to challenge the proposed auction of spectrum in South Africa, in court. She has also worked with a number of local licensees on national roaming, iDAS and other arrangements to advance the capacity and quality of services of mobile operators; and on submissions to the competition and sector regulators on the attempted acquisition by Vodacom of spectrum belonging to Liquid Telecom (previously known as Neotel). She has been involved in numerous projects in seeking to improve efficiencies in the use of spectrum which involved analysing the assignment and licensing of various bands, and the impact on competition of making a spectrum award; as well as the impact on the market of transferring spectrum licences between entities.
In the UK, in one of the first spectrum auctions of its kind, Kerron and a team represented one of the bidders for 3G spectrum which required a review of possible auction models, the model then selected, the terms of licences for winning bidders, and the strategy for the auction itself.
She has represented a mobile operator in South Africa in making submissions on data prices to the competition regulator (including how access to spectrum affected prices), and on the broadband market inquiry carried out by ICASA, the sector regulator. In both, spectrum has formed a key part of the market analysis. The award of spectrum has been a feature of market analyses carried out in various countries, assisting in the determination of whether or not competition was effective. In addition, Kerron has advised on the use of spectrum for mining operations in South Africa.
