Cellphone consumers – it’s time for you to start using Telkom mobile services. Telkom offers more high value plans for its prepaid subscribers than any other operator in South Africa.
“Telkom had strong plans and a variety of options at virtually every price point,” stated Beth Teitel, Tarifica’s South Africa analyst. “MTN and Cell C were each competitive in one or two profiles, but only Telkom’s plans provided strong consumer value across the board.”
Telkom offers best value for prepaid consumers, according to new study by Tarifica, a leading telecommunications pricing research firm.
The Tarifica Score has been used to evaluate the consumer value of South Africa’s contract plans every month since July 2014 but this marks the first occasion that prepaid plans have also been evaluated.
Unlike contract plans, prepaid plans generally do not have set usage allotments. Therefore, they are scored based on three user profiles (light, medium and heavy) which define the minimum included usage for voice, SMS and data.
Plans with scores above 75 (top quartile) are designated “Top Value Plans” in each user profile. Across all profiles, 28 plans achieved this distinction, 15 of which were from Telkom, followed by MTN with eight, Cell C with four and Virgin Mobile with one. In addition, Telkom had the top overall value plans (highest scoring) for both the moderate and heavy user profiles. Cell C took that honor for the light user profile.
Telkom captured three top value plan positions in the light user profile, seven in the moderate user profile and five in the heavy user profile. Its success was based on having the second least expensive per-minute calling rate and aggressively priced SMS and data bundles that allow users to easily scale to match their mobile usage.
“In today’s mobile marketplace, consumers are flooded with hundreds of plan variations and constantly shifting promotions and deals—the majority of which come with different costs and services and access networks of differing strengths. Even though consumers can easily switch prepaid plans and operators, Tarifica Scores can help them to quickly identify the prepaid plans in each profile that offer the best value for the money,” said Tarifica Program Manager, Will Watts.
Telkom Mobile, a business unit of Telkom, posted a 21,2% rise in customers to 2.19 million total subscribers in the year to end-March 2015.
The number was driven by the addition of 383 099 new subscribers.
The Pretoria-based firm said last month Telkom Mobile increased mobile data revenue by 50.6% to R988 million. Data revenue now constitutes approximately 35,9% of group revenue, which increased 4,5 percent from the prior year.
Last month, Telkom also announced it would consolidate both its Telkom Mobile bundles and its All Network bundles into one set of pre-paid options that will provide national coverage for subscribers.
