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Cape Town – South Africa's third largest mobile network Cell C has slashed its pricing for broadband amid increasing market competition and growth from its rivals.
The junior operator announced an aggressive reduction in mobile broadband offerings in major metros as people increasingly demand data at lower cost.
On prepaid, Cell C is offering a SIM only option of 100GB for R999 valid for one year.
Contracts start at R99 for 5GB of data with 15GB of after-hours data and top out at R999 for R100GB including an extra 100GB “Nite data”.
Prepaid offers are valid for a year and come as Cell C ramps up its investment into higher speed Long Term Evolution networks.
Data growth
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“We have invested significantly in our LTE network, which is capable of service speeds of up to 70Mbps [megabits per second] download and 35Mbps upload,” said chief executive Jose Dos Santos.
Cell C has been under pressure to grow its subscriber base and Telkom [JSE:TKG] recently dropped its bid to acquire the operator from Oger Telecoms which owns 75%.
Blue Label Telecoms also indicated that it would buy 35% of Cell C to limit the latter’s debt to R8bn.
Data is on an exponential growth curve in SA and Vodacom [JSE:VOD] reported in 2015 that data made up 26.7% of its R62.1bn service revenue while MTN reported data at 31.7% of revenue.
Cell C does not publically report its financial details.
Telkom offers a 5GB data contract for R99 that includes a router and Vodacom’s base data plan starts R45 for 500MB of data and 500MB “Nite Owl” data.
Here are the Cell C data offers:
ERROR UPDATE: Fin24 had earlier incorrectly reported the basic offer with additional data for R999.
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