Remember the fifth mobile player?
Cell C set the mobile broadband market alight over the last four months with their fast and affordable 21 Mbps HSPA+ offerings.
8ta launched their first data services two months later, and although their services are not as aggressively priced as Cell C’s introductory offers it is still cheaper than Vodacom and MTN’s pricing.
Virgin Mobile is the only cellular operator in the country without any data bundles – and in fact they have no mobile broadband offerings at all. They do not seem set to launch broadband services anytime soon.
In August Cell C CEO Lars Reichelt confirmed that Virgin Mobile will have access to their new HSPA+ network to offer services, and at the time Virgin Mobile said that they are planning to launch their own brand of HSPA+ services.
“Virgin Mobile looks forward to offering its own unique products and services based on Cell C’s HSPA+ network,” said Jonathan Newman, Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer at Virgin Mobile South Africa.
Since then nothing much seems to have changed. Virgin Mobile was asked this week what their mobile broadband plans were and what developments took place over the last few months, but they merely gave the exact same answer as given in August.
It does not look like Virgin Mobile will have any mobile broadband offerings on the table before the end of this year, but there is some hope. According to Newman, Virgin Mobile “will have more to say sometime during Q1 2011.”
Virgin Mobile will be very late to the broadband market, and with both Cell C and 8ta aggressively marketing their data products as newcomers to an arena dominated by Vodacom and MTN, Virgin Mobile’s potential slice of the mobile data pie is getting smaller by the day.
Remember the fifth mobile player? << Comments and views
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