Cell C Straight Up vs Vodacom Smart Plans

Vodacom recently launched a new range of contracts that look awfully similar to Cell C’s Straight Up packages which include voice minutes, data, and SMSes.

With a simple structure and easy to understand out-of-bundle pricing, Cell C’s deals live up to their name. Vodacom’s Smart Plans, on the other hand, are convoluted.

Not only are there off-peak, anytime, and Vodacom-only promotional and weekend minutes to keep track of, Vodacom’s out-of bundle rates are also fairly complicated.

This makes it difficult to form direct comparisons between these new combined plans from Vodacom and Cell C, as the elaborate tables below illustrate.

Starting with packages with the most similarity, we compare Cell C Straight Up 400 and Vodacom Smart Advanced:

Although both of the contracts compared above include per-second billing, 400MB of data, and 400 SMSes, Vodacom offers more minutes.

These additional minutes comprise 50 Anytime minutes, 180 promotional minutes for Vodacom-to-Vodacom (on-net) calls, and 180 “more weekend” Vodacom-only minutes.

Cell C’s out-of-bundle voice rate is a flat 99c per minute and to make up all 410 extra minutes offered by Vodacom would cost R405.90.

However, it can be argued that with the advent of number portability in South Africa you can’t be sure if a number you are calling is on the Vodacom network or not. As such, it is difficult to manage on-net minutes.

Combined with the fact that the 180 on-net anytime minutes are promotional, it is worthwhile to do a comparison where on-net minutes are disregarded as well.

In this case, a Cell C subscriber would have to pay R49.50 to make up the 50 additional anytime, any network minutes offered by Vodacom. Under this condition Cell C’s Straight Up 400 package comes away significantly cheaper than Vodacom’s Smart Advanced contract.

Comparing the other deals on offer by the two networks proved somewhat more complex, as indicated in the table below:

Vodacom Smart Standard offers less anytime, any network minutes than Cell C Straight Up 200, but includes 100MB more data and 100 extra SMSes.

As in the previous comparison, the two deals are placed on an even footing by making up the differences. In this case, Cell C offers the ability to “upsize” the SMS and data portions of their contract.

Two sets of equalised prices are shown for a direct comparison: one that includes Vodacom’s on-net minutes and one that excludes it.

It was interesting to see that even when all Vodacom’s on-net minutes are disregarded, it offers a slightly better deal on the Samsung Galaxy S3 than Cell C.

Out-of-bundle rates

The last point of comparison are the out-of-bundle rates offered by the two networks on their combined voice, SMS, and data contracts.

These are the charges subscribers should expect after they’ve used up their monthly allotment:

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