{"id":767,"date":"2007-07-26T07:44:00","date_gmt":"2007-07-26T05:44:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2007-07-26T07:44:00","modified_gmt":"2007-07-26T05:44:00","slug":"is-cell-c-s-free-calls-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/cellular\/767-is-cell-c-s-free-calls-enough.html","title":{"rendered":"Is Cell C&#8217;s free calls enough?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last month Cell C let its 3 million customers call each other for free over weekends. To qualify, prepaid customers had to recharge for as little as R5, but contract users first had to finish their off-peak minutes. <\/p>\n<p>Now <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cellc.co.za\" target=\"_blank\">Cell C<\/a> has lifted the minimum recharge voucher to R10, citing &quot;tremendous positive response&quot;, despite several complaints that subscribers were unable to make calls because of traffic on the network.<\/p>\n<p>We all love freebies, especially when we pay so much to call. As Cell C put it, the demand &quot;shows how cost sensitive cellphone users are&quot;. <\/p>\n<p>Lifting the recharge minimum is a smart way to grow those sales figures by as much as 25 percent. <\/p>\n<p>But the complaints have fuelled talk that Cell C cannot cope with the demand for talk time. <\/p>\n<p>It seems the network was so tired that some customers could not make calls even on Monday. Cell C must solve this problem or it will lose clients, which it cannot afford to do. <\/p>\n<p>The operator has had rough times in the past six years. Its debt ratings have been downgraded and its base is growing at a snail&#39;s pace compared with Vodacom and MTN. <\/p>\n<p>But Cell C is staying positive that it will break even and double subscriber numbers by 2010. It has shifted its focus to the lower end of the market, because high-end users need more than voice and text messages: they also need high-speed internet access, and Cell C will have to invest heavily to offer that service. <\/p>\n<p>A month of Sundays is a start, but it is a long, hard road and people are wondering whether Jeffrey Hedberg and his team will make it.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/vb\/showthread.php?t=82307\">Comments<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>CELL C Woza Weekend fever is catching up with the country&#8217;s smallest cellular network operator.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cellular"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767"}],"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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}