Vodacom has dropped data prices by 40%, and out-of-bundle rates by 70%, over the past 12 months.<\/p>\n
This is according to Jorge Mendes, Vodacom’s chief officer at the company’s consumer business unit, who was speaking at the 2019 MyBroadband Conference.<\/p>\n
Vodacom will continue to drive down data prices in South Africa, but key to this will be more spectrum being allocated to the mobile network.<\/p>\n
The company has also created a range of smartphone contracts which run over 36 months, which provide users with a lower per-month fee.<\/p>\n
For prices to continue to drop at mobile networks, though, these reductions must be done in a sustainable manner.<\/p>\n
The move to drop prices must also be inclusive, and will work in tandem with Vodacom’s drive to truly understand what its customers want.<\/p>\n
With no new spectrum allocation, however, Vodacom will have to balance these price cuts with the capital investment it makes every year in its network.<\/p>\n
Vodacom spends billion of rand on its network infrastructure, which is a requirement to ensure it maintains a world-class network.<\/p>\n
It is about a whole “Vodacom experience” for a user, and the customer must be taken care of at all points, added Mendes.<\/p>\n
Mendes also spoke about the Huawei “ban” being implemented by the US.<\/p>\n
He said the Huawei brand has been impacted by the US trade war, and Vodacom has put plans in place to deal with any circumstances which arise as a result.<\/p>\n
From a network side, this means looking at options without Huawei network hardware – which was a “scary” prospect.<\/p>\n
From a device side, however, there has been little negative impact on smartphone sales to date.<\/p>\n
Huawei smartphone sales have gone up in South Africa and globally since the trade war started, and Huawei has shown great resilience in the situation, said Mendes.<\/p>\n
“Personally, I hope the situation is resolved.”<\/p>\n
Vodacom has dropped data prices by 40%, and out-of-bundle rates by 70%, over the past 12 months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":323724,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[58256,21115,41],"class_list":["post-323720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cellular","tag-jorge-mendes","tag-mobile-network","tag-vodacom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323720"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=323720"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":323726,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323720\/revisions\/323726"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/323724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=323720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=323720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=323720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}