New low-usage iBurst offering launched
“i-Go lite is South Africa’s most affordable broadband offering and with speeds of up to one megabit per second it’s also the country’s fastest mobile broadband,” said Thami Mtshali, CEO of WBS.
Mtshali’s claim that it is the country’s most affordable broadband offering is however not entirely accurate.
Vodacom, which has already rolled out a commercial HSDPA network, is offering users packages of 150 MB of data at R 149-00 and 250 MB at R 200-00. In fact, Vodacom’s most affordable package starts at a mere R 35-00 for 20 MB of data.
MTN is even cheaper in this ‘low data’ market with a 350 MB package at R 220-00 per month.
Comparing the low data packages becomes easier when converted to cost per Megabyte and WBS works out to 93 c per MB of data. Vodacom’s similar offering will cost users 80c per MB and MTN takes the cake at charging a minimum of 63 c, far less than both Vodacom and WBS’s offerings.
It must be said that WBS’s top-up rate is much less than the mobile providers at R139-00 for 500 megabytes or R229-00 for one gigabyte. Both mobile providers charge R 499-00 per gigabyte often pricing them out of the market.
One question that needs to be asked is why WBS’s charge of R 195-00 for 210 MB of data is so much more than the top-up rate of R 229-00 per Gigabyte.
It is unclear why WBS did not opt for a 1 GB package at around R 250-00 if they want to be competitive in the hotly contested wireless broadband environment.
iGo lite users should also be aware that they can exceed their data allowance within 30 minutes of usage if the service is performing at its maximum speed of 1 Mbps.
Mtshali’s claim of being the fastest mobile broadband provider in South Africa is also debatable. Vodacom’s HSDPA service is already in a semi-commercial phase, and comfortably exceeded 1 Mbps in some of the tests performed on the service.
Mtshali, who has recently asked for tax breaks for broadband subscribers, highlighted the need for a higher broadband penetration.
According to Mr Mtshali, “South Africa needs a massive uptake of broadband by individual users to put the country firmly on the road to 6% GDP growth. Our economy is suffering because we have a paltry 100 000 broadband users out of a population of 45 million people.”
Mtshali has hit the nail on the head regarding the need for massive broadband uptake to ensure sustained economic growth but his figure of 100 000 broadband users is off the mark. The number of broadband users is actually somewhere between 150 000 and 200 000.
WBS expects the new i-Go lite package to help the company fulfill its mandate of making quality mobile broadband accessible in South Africa’s underserviced areas. WBS has offered wireless broadband in Soweto, Alexandra and in townships in Pretoria East since 2004.
“Opportunity lies where no one has gone before. It boggles the mind that the three million people who live in Soweto still have no access to fixed line broadband 11 years into the democracy that was supposed to give everyone a voice,” concluded Mr Mtshali.
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