MTN South Africa has announced voluntary undertakings regarding data services but remains in discussion with the Competition Commission (CompCom) regarding their formalisation and implementation. They concern affordability of monthly prepaid bundles, lifeline data and zero-rating for public benefit service websites. This follows CompCom’s data service market inquiry.
MTN South Africa will reduce the price of its monthly prepaid bundles of 1 GB and below in April by 25-50 percent. Specifically, the 1 GB monthly bundle will decrease by 33 percent to ZAR 99. The operator said it had already cut the effective price of data by 76 percent since February 2017.
In terms of lifeline data, MTN SA will provide each customer with 20 MB of free data daily, or the equivalent of 600 MB per customer every month, through its Ayoba instant messaging platform. Ayoba currently has 500,000 customers in South Africa and is expected to continue to expand through the lifeline offering.
MTN currently offers zero-rated data to for websites of organisations such as schools and universities. These will form part of its public benefit website service. In April, MTN will extend the websites that form the public benefit service to include health, public universities, vocational colleges, educational resources and employment sites. The terms and conditions and criteria will be defined by MTN.
From April, MTN will launch the OpenTime service, providing free access to public benefit services through a link on its website. It will provide 500 MB of free data access monthly, amounting to 6 GB per year, to each of MTN SA’s 29 million customers.
While there will be pressure on MTN SA’s short-term financial performance arising from the initiatives, the operator says there will be compensation over time through elasticity and customer growth, and growth in prepaid data service revenue will return in a couple of quarters.
