Neotel NeoVoice prices revealed
Speculation in the local industry has been rife regarding Neotel’s ability to challenge the monopoly, Telkom, on price and the cat is finally out of the bag – Neotel has released their call rates for enterprise services.
Neotel recently filed their pricing with the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA), and it is now available in the public domain.
Neotel’s NeoVoice service is aimed at enterprises, and the company has reiterated that the prices listed are enterprise rates, and not the consumer tariffs – which are still to be communicated.
Neotel further said that their NeoVoice service is a ‘real carrier voice service’ with the flexibility of a conventional primary rate interface (PRI) or session initiation protocol (SIP), and allows seamless migration between the two.
The second national operator said that it is already running millions of minutes per month of enterprise voice traffic through NeoConnect. It has further secured substantial contracts incorporating its other enterprise products NeoVPN, NeoInternet, NeoLink and NeoLink Global.
“Neotel's customers are starting to see the benefit of obtaining their services from South Africa's first converged communications network operator,” the company said.
The Rates
The company’s rates are divided into peak and off-peak times, and further into various categories, including local, regional, national and mobile calls.
“In keeping with its promise to reduce the cost of doing business in South Africa, Neotel's voice tariffs offer per second billing on all calls, and consistently low carrier pricing across all destinations. This results in substantial savings in the total voice bill for an enterprise migrating to Neotel,” said Neotel’s Angus Hay.
“Within its network, Neotel offers by far the lowest peak public network (PSTS) tariffs of 15c per minute local, 29c per minute regional, and 38c per minute national, with per second billing,” said Hay.
“Enterprises who choose not to migrate from the incumbent to Neotel typically pay 57c per minute, without per second billing, for the same calls. In addition, Neotel's tariffs are lower than published standard Telkom rates (outside bundles) for all calls to Telkom destinations, including local calls.”
“These are out-of-bundle, undiscounted prices, and hence are only directly applicable to NeoVoice, before any customer discounts are applied. They not directly comparable to Neotel’s forthcoming consumer products, for which bundle pricing is yet to be announced,” company spokesman Fani Zulu pointed out.
The table below shows Neotel’s VAT exclusive prices for fixed line and mobile calls
| Call Type | Example | Period |
To Neotel* |
To Telkom* |
| Local Calls | e.g. 011 to 011 | Peak | 0.15 | 0.30 |
| Off-Peak | 0.15 | 0.15 | ||
| Regional Calls | e.g. 011 to 012 | Peak | 0.29 | 0.40 |
| Off-Peak | 0.29 | 0.25 | ||
| National Calls | e.g. 011 to 021 | Peak | 0.38 | 0.50 |
| Off-Peak | 0.38 | 0.29 | ||
| To any mobile* | ||||
| Mobile Calls | e.g. 011 to 083 | Peak | 1.54 | |
| Off-Peak | 0.96 | |||
| * All prices are VAT Exclusive | ||||
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