ADSL prices continue to tumble
It’s funny, this bandwidth-becoming-cheaper thing.
South Africans expected an overnight drop in broadband prices. We’re all guilty of it. The magical R2 per MB charged as a “standard” fee by mobile operators for 3G broadband was expected to suddenly become R1. ADSL bundles were expected to halve in price too.
That hasn’t quite happened as we had thought. What has though is an aggressive move downward. We saw the first drops in September last year.
The latest headline-grabbing move sees Wireless G cut its price per GB to R14. There is a catch though: you need to spend R389 on bandwidth and use the data within 30 days. The R389 gets you around 28GB of data.
Wireless G is in effect reselling bandwidth from Vodacom Business and it is highly likely that this pricing is below cost.
Afrihost has capitalised on the “cheap bandwidth” train and has been selling DSL bandwidth at R29 per GB. It claims that there is “no contract and no catch”, with Afrihost CEO Gian Visser publicly saying that it is subsidising the price for a limited number of clients by using the company’s marketing budget. Every so often, Afrihost cuts the price to R14.50 per GB (using its buy one, get one free promotion).
Cybersmart has been offering a “Weekender” service from this month, where any usage from Friday evening at midnight until 5:59 on Monday morning will not be counted towards the customer’s cap. This is an add-on service, and costs an extra R99 per month but is only available to 384kbps subscribers.
Cybersmart says a user could easily download 20GB over the weekends in a month, which means the effective rate is around R5.80 per GB. Users are obviously required to buy a 384Kbps service from Cybersmart, together with the smallest cap (1GB): R152 + R17 + R99 = R268.
In addition to this, any 512Kbps and 4Mbps users will see only 1/10th of their usage over a weekend count towards their cap.
Not to be left out, iBurst is launching its own ADSL service, dubbed iDSL. Pricing is set at between R49 per GB (for a 1GB, 2GB, 3GB or 5GB package), R39 per GB for a 15GB one and R29 per GB for a 60GB bundle.
Telkom will increase its bundles, with 10GB, 15GB and 20GB data bundles due to be launched this year. It is reported that the operator is also working on prepaid offerings and an improved top-up service.
For DSL users who aren’t convinced by the price cuts – bear in mind that FNB Connect’s 6.9c per MB (R69 per GB) offer in May last year was heralded at a breakthrough at the time!
So from R69 per GB to half of that in less than a year… I’ll take that!
ADSL data prices << discussion
* Hilton Tarrant contributes to “Broadband”, a column on Moneyweb covering the ICT sector in South Africa. He is suddenly quite eager to get a DSL line installed at home as he’s sure he’ll find a use for 30GB a month…
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