For years now South Africa’s mobile phone operators have been accused of milking customers with higher data prices while banking exorbitant profits.
The data prices have come under sharp scrutiny from consumers leading to #DataMustFall on social media and consumers calling for the boycott of mobile phone operators not dropping their prices.
In a surprise move, Vodacom on Thursday promised its more than 39 million customers lower data prices.
Vodacom, South Africa’s biggest mobile phone operator, announced on Thursday that its effective price for mobile data dropped 18.9% in the first quarter to end-June 2017.
Shameel Joosub, Vodacom Group boss, said this reflected the company’s commitment to driving down the cost to communicate in South Africa.
“As I have stated previously, there is more work to be done on this front, and we will be introducing additional measures this year to give greater control to customers by improving our out-of-bundle pricing”
He added that the company’s pricing transformation strategy continues to deliver greater value for its 39 million South African customers.
Last month Vodacom, which is owned by Vodafone, launched Vodacom Meg Your Day Promotion providing subscribers with free data of various services such as Facebook and Instagram, etc.
The mobile phone operator said that for subscribers to qualify for more data for free they must buy 100MB data bundle or more and have a balance greater than zero MB.
The telco has partnered with the different platforms and websites that our customers know and love to enable them to access more of what the internet has to offer.
