Prepaid prices: Who is really the cheapest?

The long awaited peak mobile termination rate cut kicked in on 1 March and it resulted in immediate price reductions on calls to mobile phones.  The 36c price reduction – from R1.25 per minute to 89c per minute – quickly filtered down to consumers.

Telkom passed the full 36c per minute saving on to their subscribers and dropped its peak rate for fixed-to-mobile calls from the current R1.886 per minute to R1.475 per minute. Neotel followed suit and cut its peak mobile call rate from R1.54 per minute to R1.20 per minute.

Vox Telepreneur clients have been paying R1.05 per minute instead of the usual R1.49 per minute from 1 December in anticipation of the interconnect price cuts.

Mobile Operators

Doubt existed as to whether the mobile providers would also reduce their rates, but recent moves in the market suggests that the lower peak interconnect rates did indeed have a positive impact on prices.

In late February MTN announced that it had cut call rates on its MTN One Rate PayAsYouGo price plan.  MTN said that this price reduction enables MTN subscribers to make calls all day across all networks for less than 3c per second.

“This new price reduction makes this the lowest per second call rate during peak times in South Africa,” MTN said at the time.  “With a significant reduction in call rates, MTN customers can now benefit from savings of up to 40% on calls made throughout the day.”

Vodacom followed this week with its own prepaid price cut.  Vodacom announced that its Prepaid All Day customers can now make calls at 2.8 cents per second (equates to R1.70 per minute).

This raises the question as to which cellular provider offers the best prepaid per-second rates in the country.  The following table provides an overview of the current prepaid offers from the major cellular providers (the Virgin Mobile website was down, and no up-to-date pricing information was therefore available from them).

Prepaid cellular prices << comments and views

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