South African market leader Vodacom has warned against the prospect of new operators joining the country’s competitive mobile market. With four players – Vodacom, MTN, Cell C and Telkom’s 8ta – already battling it out in a saturated market, Vodacom’s Chris Ross told Mobile World Live that too much competition may not necessarily be a positive move for the market. “Ultimately it needs to have a commercial viability and I think if you look in the data world, in the fixed line space there’s a proliferation of little organisations that are out selling internet and so on and it’s not always good for the industry when you have too much competition at very different levels,” said Ross, Vodacom’s managing executive for commercial development.