Paul Jacobson

MTN, one of our three mobile operators, has dropped its prices for data quite drastically.  Prior to this drop in price, data cost as much as R50/MB.  Its new pricing structure takes the price of data right down to a maximum of R2/MB.  Acknowledging that this is a rather bold move and quite a gamble, MTN hopes that this drastic drop in price will help it corner a sizable chunk of the mobile data market.

According to MyADSL (which reproduced an article by Financial Mail):

MTN's new packages include:

*
Basic: this is a "pay as you go" solution and includes no bundled
megabytes. There is no monthly subscription and data access costs
R2/MB.

* 10 MB bundle: this costs R10/month and includes 10 MB of access, which works out to R1/MB. The out-of-bundle rate is R2/MB.

* 100 MB bundle: again, this works out to R1/MB at a monthly charge of R100. The out-of-bundle rate is R1,50.

*
MTN 1 GB: this is the top-end offering and costs R499/month for an
effective in-bundle rate of 49c/MB. The out-of-bundle tariff is
R1,25/MB.

This price change is intended to coincide with MTN's launch of its EDGE upgrade to its network.  This change comes several months after its rival, Vodacom, launched its third generation network which has apparently been plagued by claims of unreliability.

Moneyweb and ITWeb carried similar articles.

I am pretty excited about this drop in prices notwithstanding the fact that MTN will only switch on its 3G network towards June or July.  I will probably buy the 100MB package and see what that does for my phone bills.