8ta stun competitors

Telkom has revealed on Thursday that 8ta will be introducing a low-cost broadband product offer of 10GB of data a month for R199 upon signing a 24-month contract.

For an extra R100/month, consumers will have 20GB of bandwidth — 10GB plus 10GB to use between midnight and 5am.

When equating it to cost-per-megabyte, it means consumers will pay less than 2c for megabyte, making it the most affordable pricing in South Africa to date. The out-of-bundle rate will be 30 c/MB.

Competitors like  Cell C currently offer  5 Gigs of data per month at R299 per month and 2 Gigs of data at R149 per month while Vodacom offer 2 Gigs of data per month plus 2GB of data to use between midnight and 5am for R149 per month.

All of the above offers are on 12-month contracts and come with 3G modems.

Coverage will only be available in areas where Telkom have built 8ta towers and not in areas where the company has to rely on their roaming partner MTN for coverage.  There almost 1000 active 8ta broad band stations across the country and the broadband provider aims to have more than 2000 by March 2012.

Amith Maharaj, managing executive of Telkom Mobile, told TechCentral consumers have expressed concern about the cost of mobile data and he believes 8ta’s aggressive new pricing will help win over those customers.

“Price has seemed to be the barrier to entry until now,” Maharaj says.

He stressed that the two new products will be a special offer, but did not divulge when the offer will end. Those who sign up to a 24-month contract are, however, guaranteed that prices will not increase throughout the contract period.