South African mobile operator Cell C and internet provider MWEB have entered into an agreement to provide lower rates on data to customers nationwide.
“We believe that Cell C’s products will be a perfect complement to our ADSL packages with their competitive deals to the market,” said Carolyn Holgate, General Manager at MWEB Connect.
The promotion offers R89 per month for 2GB of data. Apart from this Cell C offer, MWEB also has a 5GB, 10GB and 20GB packages available at R499, R899 and R1,799.
Furthermore, any Cell C customer on a 12 or 24 month contract will be benefitted by MWEB offerings, like 300MB free Wi-Fi per month, one year of free, uncapped website hosting, a 2GB mailbox with five email addresses, virus and spam filtering, technical support through social media, retail stores and the call centre, as well as a 5GB Store-It storage account.
Alan Knott-Craig, Chief Executive Officer at Cell C, believes the cost of mobile services is an obstacle to the growth of the industry. Knott-Craig has worked for Vodacom previously in expanding the market, but since 2001 he has focused on the reduction of prices.
“You have to get the market open so that people can compete properly. You can’t just put them in a market and hope for competition, that just does not happen in telecoms – it doesn’t even happen when you sell bread,” Knott-Craig told News24.
The mobile guru believes South Africa “screwed up” as a country on the grounds of providing competitive prices to the market. It is currently the 98th most expensive country in which to access the Internet out of 150.
“We’ve built this incredible industry in this country, and I think we have, but we’ve kind of missed the boat,” he added.
Derek Hershaw, MWEB’s Chief Executive, said the infrastructure and investment measures are still “heavily dependent on Telkom”. On the financial side, “the way they (Telkom) commercially model and price it for either ISPs like ourselves or directly to the consumer” further hampers independent progress for network operators.
