MTN

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by greedyflyza</i>
<br />MTN seems to have a newer technology threshold - they seem to bring out the newest stuff first and seem to have the latest technology. However, Vodacom concentrates on new products within the scope of their current offering. They also have more coverage and the most subscribers by far (due to them being first and a powerful initial advertising campaign -- yebo gogo)
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Just for interest, Vodacom recently passed the 10,000,000 subscriber mark in South Africa, and they obtain average revenue of R184/month per subscriber. That's a total income of R1.84 billion per month! I think they're truly making a killing from us :/, draining the masses' disposable income to fill their coffers. They have a further I think 1,500,000 subscribers in other African countries where they provide service.

I remember some years back some evidence came to light that Vodacom and MTN were engaged in illegal price fixing to keep prices high, but that due to some or other technicality the evidence could not be used. Can't remember the details. While one could not at this stage overtly accuse them of price-fixing, just by a simply examination of the market, e.g. the product pricing structures over the years, it is amply clear that there is absolutely no competition going on between the two (nor with Cell C for that matter). Looking at their marketing though, I sometimes think that their three respective advertising agencies are the only ones competing with each other, for best marketing campaign.
 
Yip. they are making a killing. Thanks to their service being good, they get away with it (unlike Telkom for example..well - nobody moans about Vodacom)

Obviously in our little 3rd world country they dont *need* to make <i>that</i> much but its the old monopoly game again..

Its fairly evident that they could still be profitable if call costs for the consumer/subscriber where about 50c a minute all round. Thanks to Telkom having high landline prices (read: no competition) they can relax and keep their prices high.

The SNO is gonna be the same. Thats why I got my 24 month contract anyway because the system is not going to change while we have the goverment we do i.o.w for a very very long time.

Why do the cellular companies jack up their prices every 18 months or so and get away with it? Their costs dont go up at all. Well, the majority of their costs are actually going down as more and more of the new towers etc get paid off quicker. Thanks to our lovely rainbow nation and how it is run, people are dying and starving while the goverment run or government controlled (influenced) companies make a killing. IMO they arent really giving enough back to the public (donations and sponsorships arent good enough. We need lower consumer pricing)

Anyways.. we can do nothing. Just stay bent over.

/end political_rant

Thanks for the info Ditch [^]
 
In my opinion Cell C made a huge difference. Before cell came along we getting **** ass phones with contracts and then they still made us pay a fee for it. So in terms of deals that we get with our phones nw isn't that bad.

Just where we get a 100 free minutes overseas they get 1000 soo ya...


..- dot dot dash ;)
 
Yea all networks GPRS rates are scary! I mean R30 to R50 per megabyte for traffic, as against 40cents per megabyte in either IS or UUnets hosting environments.
Nuts!
 
I don't really have any idea what I'm talking about, but if the GSM companies are *digital* why don't we use the digital cellphones like the ones they have in the states?

Tower: PTA Sunnyside (36)
Signal: 38%
Package: 128K
 
You have to be kidding!!!
There are more analogue cell phones in the USA than anywhere
else. It's in Japan where you will find the more advanced
technology (DoCoMo)

<font color="blue">Bay of Plenty: </font id="blue"><font size="1"><font color="black"> Signal 46% - SNL 17 - ber 71%
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WTF? Our cell technology is about 100 times better than USA.. my word..

- Colin Alston
colin at alston dot za dot org

"Getting traffic shaping right is easy and can be summed up in one word: Dont." -- George Barnett
 
Anyone care to explain why GPRS is so expensive? At the end of the day, Vodacom or whoever is still paying the same money or same rates to Telkom for bandwidth. How can they justify those charges for last mile? Yes, they have to put GPRS infrastructure in place but it has been mentioned that they have sufficient money lying around.

Assuming on Mywireless you pay 2c/MB (128), or 1.2c/MB (256) or 1c/MB (512) at full speed. So assume 20c/MB avg for 128kbps. Now why cant GPRS cost like R1.50 a MB? Why must it be like R50 a MB? Surely if it were cheaper, a lot more people would use it (sounds like the Telkom mindset again.. man this country has fscked up ways of running IT)
 
1. Karnaugh, yes that’s 100% true. They are still living with dropped
calls and poor quality similar to our early days of cellular in SA.
(Though GSM is slowly becoming available in almost all the major
centers there - Thank heavens for our Tri-Band hardware!)[:D]

2. Greedy - That’s why I don't believe that the cellular players
so called "wireless internet solution" will be anything to
write home about! It's bound to be another expensive "cost per
packet" solution.


<font color="blue">Bay of Plenty: </font id="blue"><font size="1"><font color="black"> Signal 46% - SNL 17 - ber 71%
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I agree that GPRS is way overpriced for a casual user. It gets better if you buy the business packages but still very pricey and no reason why it should be. Hopefully now that Cell C are offering GPRS it will help out a little.
 
then how come it says digital on so many of their phones?
http://www.nokiausa.com/phones/8265

Tower: PTA Sunnyside (36)
Signal: 38%
Package: 128K
 
OK... I'm presuming that you have not visited the USA:
Unlike in SA and Europe, Nokia is not the big player in the
USA market, in fact, most travellers from SA will very soon
notice that many of the handsets they see there are not popular
SA models like Nokia but rather Motorola and even more recently
Samsung, LG as well as House Brands (i.e. re-branded Verizon’s etc.)
The reason: Nokia started off with the European GSM standard,
something that did not even exist in the USA until only recently.
Some 4 years ago, GSM in the USA was almost unknown.
Then slowly it appeared in the large cities (i.e. New York & LA)..
and even now still does not have a national footprint.
as for Digital… it is highly unlikely that GSM will ever become
a major player in the USA market, as technology from Qualcomm
(CDMA) is the one making the most ground there at present! This technology
is also the basis for 3G. Something that MyWireless is also based upon.


<font color="blue">Bay of Plenty: </font id="blue"><font size="1"><font color="black"> Signal 46% - SNL 17 - ber 71%
</font id="size1"></font id="black">
 
ok, then why doesnt our phones say digital ?

Tower: PTA Sunnyside (36)
Signal: 38%
Package: 128K
 
Because we don't need to! We are 100% Digital here anyway.
There is no installed analogue cellphone technology
anymore (Telkom pulled the plug on their one years ago).
"Digital" is pure marketing hype to get users to move
away from the analogue technology.

<font color="blue">Bay of Plenty: </font id="blue"><font size="1"><font color="black"> Signal 46% - SNL 17 - ber 71%
</font id="size1"></font id="black">
 
ah ok, i get it now :)

Tower: PTA Sunnyside (36)
Signal: 38%
Package: 128K
 
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Ditch</i>
<br /><blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by greedyflyza</i>
<br />MTN seems to have a newer technology threshold - they seem to bring out the newest stuff first and seem to have the latest technology. However, Vodacom concentrates on new products within the scope of their current offering. They also have more coverage and the most subscribers by far (due to them being first and a powerful initial advertising campaign -- yebo gogo)
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Just for interest, Vodacom recently passed the 10,000,000 subscriber mark in South Africa, and they obtain average revenue of R184/month per subscriber.
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Vodacom and MTN's market share have essentially always been roughly 40%/60% in Vodacom's favour, Vodacom's made up subscriber numbers with their prepaid offerings. This is a market that MTN's never been very keen on since it's very expensive in terms of operational overheads to manage and they've been actively persuing the business cellular and data market, hence MTN Network Solutions, a tier 1 ISP. So despite Vodacom having a bigger subsciber base, MTN's actually making substantially more money from their smaller number of subscribers.
Cell C's pretty much picked up the scraps at the bottom end of the market. Despite C's marketing blurbs about subscriber numbers, only roughly 25% of those are active subscribers, ie. people who've done something they could be billed for within the previous three months.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">
I remember some years back some evidence came to light that Vodacom and MTN were engaged in illegal price fixing to keep prices high, but that due to some or other technicality the evidence could not be used. Can't remember the details. While one could not at this stage overtly accuse them of price-fixing, just by a simply examination of the market, e.g. the product pricing structures over the years, it is amply clear that there is absolutely no competition going on between the two (nor with Cell C for that matter).
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Actually all price plans from the operators, and Telkom's included in that, have to be approved by ICASA. So they can't just charge whatever they feel like. Interconnect charges from mobile to fixed (read: to/from Telkom) are fixed by ICASA with very little room to move by the cellular operators. So despite having multiple "competing" parties, all pricing is determined by ICASA [of which there's only one, of course]. Essentially all price plans are a subtle balance of upfront payment, ie. monthly subscription, vs post-paid billing, ie. the per second charge.
 
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by asmith</i>
<br />Yea all networks GPRS rates are scary! I mean R30 to R50 per megabyte for traffic, as against 40cents per megabyte in either IS or UUnets hosting environments.
Nuts!
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There's a simple reason why GPRS has to be expensive [V] The way GSM works is that all connections, voice or data, are allocated time slots on the base station. This is a finite resource. Voice is digitially encoded onto one slot which, depending on configuration, carries roughly 9600/14400bps data. That's why you can only get 9.6/14.4kbps connection speed when using your cell phone as an AT-command compatible "modem". GPRS operates by combining several slots to provide higher data rates, but at the expense of consuming more resources on the base station. A Class 10 GPRS device can hog 10 timeslots to give you the mythical 115200bps maximum data rate. That's equivalent to ten voice calls which could have been billed at say R2.00/minute. So you can see why GRPS is a very resource intensive/expensive service for the network operator to offer.
In addition, the 900MHz spectrum allocated at the moment doesn't have very much spare capacity left in it for GPRS; voice pretty much keeps it choc full. That's why both Vodacom and MTN have been trying to get hold of 1800MHz spectrum where GPRS is a much better business proposition and additionally gives them room to expand their voice customer base even further. Unfortunately ICASA has determined they can only get 1800MHz licences if they pay to move the military which has been using some of the 1800MHz band. Cell C has been given an 1800MHz licence for building their own metropolitan network (how far that's progressed, I don't know); in rural areas they'll still be running on top of Vodacom's 900MHz network.
 
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">In addition, the 900MHz spectrum allocated at the moment doesn't have very much spare capacity left in it for GPRS; voice pretty much keeps it choc full. That's why both Vodacom and MTN have been trying to get hold of 1800MHz spectrum where GPRS is a much better business proposition and additionally gives them room to expand their voice customer base even further. Unfortunately ICASA has determined they can only get 1800MHz licences if they pay to move the military which has been using some of the 1800MHz band. Cell C has been given an 1800MHz licence for building their own metropolitan network (how far that's progressed, I don't know); in rural areas they'll still be running on top of Vodacom's 900MHz network.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Vodacom and MTN are using the 1800MHz band alright. There aren't many of those towers (yet) but they are in use. Where I live, they've been using the 1800 MHz band for a couple of months already.
I've noticed on Vodacom they keep you on the 900 MHz band and then when you make a call and you're within range of a 1800 MHz tower, they switch you over (probably to make room for more calls on the 900 MHz band). On MTN if you are in range of a 1800 MHz tower, your phone parks on the tower, period.

Actually Vodacom has been playing around with 1800 MHz towers for the last year.
For those of you wondering how I know this, older phones like Nokias have a "hidden menu" called "Netmonitor" which shows you stuff like the channel numbers (which translates to a frequency), distance to the tower, etc.

Hope Vodacom and MTN don't come after me now! [}:)]

Ajax
 
"Nokias have a "hidden menu" called "Netmonitor"
Tell us more about this????? How is this accessed??

<font color="blue">Bay of Plenty: </font id="blue"><font size="1"><font color="black"> Signal 46% - SNL 17 - ber 71%
</font id="size1"></font id="black">
 
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