Neotel consumer tariffs revealed

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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Neotel is slowly releasing its NeoConnect Prime offering into the consumer market and has revealed the product description and price.

NeoConnect Prime is Neotel’s first consumer and small business offering, providing subscribers with a converged voice, fast Internet and SMS service.

Pricing

NeoConnect Prime provides consumers with a CDMA voice & Internet device, a 2.4 Mbps Internet connection with 10 GB of monthly bandwidth, 1 000 free on-net voice minutes and 50 free on-net SMSs for R 599.00 per month.

There are no additional installation or activation charges, device rental or hidden costs. “It is a true all-in-one price…the only extra payment is for out-of-bundle usage,” said Neotel’s head of retail products and services, Maneesh Mittal.

Out of bundle bandwidth will cost 7 c per MB, and billing will be per MB precluding the need to purchase data bundles.

Text messages to other networks will be charged at 35c per SMS while out-of-bundle on-net SMSs cost 10 c each.

Out-of-bundle and off-net call rates will be the same as the recently published enterprise rates: Neotel call charges

This initial offering targets a specific segment of the market, but there will be many more flavours available soon Neotel pointed out. Mittal said that Neotel will launch a variety of new packages – some significantly cheaper while others will be more expensive – in May during its commercial launch which will be wider in scope.

Comparative pricing

Neotel’s price for its NeoConnect Prime offering stacks up well when compared with other similar offerings in the market.

The NeoConnect Prime service, with a peak speed of 2.4 Mbps, can be compared to iBurst’s Internet & iCall service, Telkom’s 4 Mbps ADSL service, MTN’s 1.8 Mbps HSDPA service and Vodacom’s 3.6 Mbps HSDPA offering.

The following table gives a fair reflection of how the various services match up.

Neotel pricing discussion