Resources

Type approval is the formal process of certifying that a telecoms or radio equipment model meets a country’s technical and regulatory requirements before it can be sold or connected to a network there. If your product transmits or receives on a radio frequency — Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellular, or any other RF technology — it almost certainly needs type approval in each market you’re selling into. The quickest way to know for sure is to tell us what the product does and where you’re selling it; we can usually confirm applicability within a day or two.

It depends on the product, the market, and how complete your documentation is going in, but most certifications run somewhere between a few weeks and a couple of months from submission to certificate. The single biggest factor in timeline is how much rework a regulator requests — which is exactly why we review documentation thoroughly before submitting, rather than submitting early and iterating through the regulator’s queries. We’ll give you a realistic estimate specific to your product once we’ve scoped it.

We currently cover South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, and Zambia, working with each market’s relevant regulators — including ICASA, NRCS, SABS, SAHPRA, and the Department of Energy in South Africa, plus CRAN in Namibia, BOCRA in Botswana, and ZICTA in Zambia. If you’re looking at a market outside this list, get in touch — we may still be able to help or point you in the right direction.

They’re closely related and often confused. Type approval specifically certifies that a telecoms or radio equipment model meets a country’s technical requirements. Homologation is the broader process of certifying that a product meets a country’s regulatory and technical requirements before sale — type approval is essentially the telecoms-specific version of homologation. In practice, if your product is RF/telecoms equipment, you’ll usually need both processes handled together, which is exactly how we manage it.

Some regulatory frameworks require a named local representative in-country to act on a manufacturer’s behalf — and if you don’t have your own office in that market, this requirement can otherwise stop a submission before it starts. We act as local representative across the markets we cover, so this is something we can simply handle for you rather than something you need to solve separately.

It happens, and it’s rarely the end of the road. Usually a failed test points to a specific, fixable issue — a component, a firmware setting, a design choice — rather than something requiring a full redesign. We’ll walk through the test report with you, identify what needs to change, and help you understand whether retesting the same unit or a revised unit is the right next step. This is also exactly why product or technology consulting earlier in development is worth doing — it catches most of these issues before formal testing.

Yes — this is one of the things we’re built around. Rather than running four separate, disconnected engagements for South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, and Zambia, we manage multi-market submissions as a single coordinated project, sequencing the work so you’re not duplicating testing or repeating the same mistakes market by market.

It varies by product and market, but the starting point is almost always: a technical description of the product, any existing test reports or certifications from other markets, user manuals or labelling artwork, and basic company/manufacturer details. We’ll give you a specific checklist once we know what you’re certifying — the goal is to ask for what’s actually needed, not a generic document dump.

Some do, depending on the regulator and approval type — others remain valid for the life of the product as sold. We track renewal requirements for everything we’ve certified on your behalf and will flag it well before anything lapses, rather than leaving you to track expiry dates yourself.

Pricing depends on the service — certification and type approval are typically scoped per product and market, while consulting work is offered as fixed packages or an ongoing retainer for clients with continuous regulatory needs. Reach out via the quote form with your product and target market and we’ll come back with a clear, itemized quote rather than a vague estimate.