MTNBroadband said:
Decotey, I'm not sure your comments are fully true. I personally have been involved in a number of first steps with higher data speeds. We launched HSCSD which offered 57 600 kbps as far back as 2000. Our original circuit-switched RAS service used to cost 68c/minute (34c off peak) which was way below anything else. We launched GPRS first by quite some margin and also took the coverage national. Soon after that consultants worked with a very big financial house in Cape Town and showed that their staff got the best performance and value from our GPRS compared to anything else on the market at the time. We launched MTN ICE as the first mobile lifestyle portal and judging from international conferences were ahead of the pack internationally with that. For consumers, we revamped that with MTNLoaded last year and now have over 1.3 million active subscribers. We chose to launch EDGE as our first step in broadband because it was stable and had high handset penetration already and that has shown itself in our annual results with our relatively higher data revenue growth. For corporates we launched Corporate Mobility at the beginning of last year which brought the data tariffs down to R10 (well below prices at the time) and this product is still pumping and is certainly a leader in this market. Our data services changed the landscape of point-of-sale electronic transactions completely. When we introduced our traffic cameras they reached a million hits per month quite rapidly. Our data bundle of R499 for the add-on I still believe is the cheapest GSM service in the world. How else can one get such extensive data access in South Africa with the combination of speed versus coverage etc etc etc.
MTNBB, while I appreciate your patriotism to MTN, it'd be dangerous to make marketing type claims on this forum, forumites being the educated bunch they are
As you would have noticed, there are a few forumites with extensive insight into both networks.
A few corrections to some of the claims you've made:
1) Vodacom's camera service was actually available before MTN. It was not marketed though due, as you've stated yourself, the service had to be tested first before being made commercially available.
2) Vodacom has 100% GPRS coverage (MTN keeps on claiming they're the only one with 100% GPRS coverage) and a very large EDGE base already.
3) MTN claim they're the only network that can seamless switch between GPRS, EDGE and 3G. How do you get to this? Are you saying Vodacom can't. They can.
4) At R499/month MTN's 1Gb package is the cheapest 1Gb package available. However if you really want to compare apples with apples, you should compare the MTN contract that includes a data card with Vodacom's 1G offering. Here MTN is actually more expensive than Vodacom, i.e. R649 vs. R599.
5) Are you sure MTN is the cheapest in the world? I know of at least one country that's less expensive than South Africa.
6) Vodacom and MTN has about the same EDGE penetration with each at ~300K handsets.
Vodacom currently has ~1000 3G towers and about the same number on EDGE, according to them. What are the MTN numbers?
Not trying to start a flamewar. Just some facts.
PS. I don't work for Vodacom but do have some insight into both networks.
