A leaked letter suggests MTN South Africa is to discontinue its uncapped BlackBerry Internet Service next month, in spite of previously expressing its belief in unlimited data.
The document, supposedly from MTN South Africa, “announces” a 200MB per month capped “MTN BlackBerry Absolute Package”.
HumanIPO reached out to MTN SA for comment but the company would not comment at this stage.
Blackberry had announced at the BlackBerry 10 smartphones and platform launch: “The R59 per month unlimited data for BlackBerry 7 is a proposition that we really believe in. We work very closely with our mobile network partners to keep that proposition in market.”
It seems what Vice President of Product & Channel Marketing Rory O’Neill did not mention was that the “proposition” of BIS will be on new terms and conditions..
Although O’Neill did say that they are in negotiations with mobile providers regarding how to structure BIS-related to BlackBerry 7 based smartphones, he did not mention that there is a possibility of a capped service which now “levels” the playing field for Blackberry 7 based smartphones as other South African mobile services providers are expected to follow MTN’s lead and release similar capped Blackberry packages that are targeted at BB7 users and not just BB10 users.
The alleged “new package” from MTN will replace BIS in South Africa on 1 March 2013.
Although the new Blackberry Absolute package will still cost R59 a month according to the leaked document, it comes with fair usage limit and will attract an R0.65 per MB charge once the bundle is depleted, much like any other data package available from MTN.
