Vodacom South Africa says it will introduce a range of initiatives from 01 April that will result in ZAR 2.7 billion in savings for customers using data services. The proposal was approved by the Competition Commission, which had ordered mobile operators to lower the cost of internet services.
Vodacom said it would reduce prices by up to 40 percent for 30-day bundles. A 1 GB package valid for 30 day will fall by 34 percent, from ZAR 149 to ZAR 99 through any channel. Discounts will be provided on all 30-day bundles, and more price cuts are planned from 01 April 2021.
In addition, the mobile operator said it would bundle several of its zero-rated data offers in a new service called 'Connect U', focused on socially relevant services. This includes free access to job portals, educational content such as its e-School platform, selected government websites, health and wellness information, Wikipedia and Facebook Flex, the low-data alternative to Facebook. Free access also will be provided to other essential information such as local and international headlines, trends and the weather, and customers who have made a purchase in the past month will be given two free SMS each day.
Vodacom also will extend discounted bundle offers to prepaid customers in areas where the majority of people are living beneath the food poverty line. This will benefit more than 2,000 suburbs and villages, ensuring that this benefits people that really need it most, Vodacom said.
In addition, the company will expand its zero-rated offering to all schools, universities and T-Vet colleges across the country. This will ensure that learners and students enrolled into these institutions will be able to access relevant information for free via their portals.
The changes are part of a broader Vodacom Group programme to create a social contract with its stakeholders that will address pressing societal challenges in each of the markets in which it operates, the company said in a statement. Over the past three years, Vodacom said it has made significant progress in reducing the cost to communicate and making data more accessible, particularly for poorer consumers and communities.
In 2019, it announced cuts in out-of-bundle tariffs and introduced hourly, daily and weekly bundles with much lower effective prices, in addition to overall reductions in bundle prices. These measures contributed to ZAR 2 billion in savings for customers and the circa 50 percent reduction in effective data prices in the past two years.
