Vodacom slashes their data prices

After the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa sent out a notice stating Vodacom and other network providers should have data prices inclusive and accessible to all South African citizens, Vodacom was required to reduce their prices by 30 per cent by April.

The new data prices are:

• 50MB will cost R12
• 150MB will cost R29
• 325MB will cost R55
• 500MB will cost R79
• 1GB will cost R99
• 3GB will cost R229.

Byron Kennedy, executive for media relations at Vodacom explained that since the company started their pricing transformation strategy three years ago, customers have benefited from significant reductions in data prices and the cost of voice calls.

He added, “Vodacom has made significant progress in reducing the cost to communicate and making data more accessible, particularly for poorer consumers and communities.

“For example, in 2019, we announced substantial cuts in out-of-bundle tariffs and introduced hourly, daily and weekly bundles with much lower effective prices to drive affordability in addition to overall reductions in bundle prices. These measures contributed to R2 billion in savings for customers and the circa 50 per cent reduction in effective data prices in the past two years.”

Many South Africans have protested the price of data, which gave rise to the #DataMustFall social media movement.

In light of the current lockdown, the Midrand Reporter asked what the company was doing in order to adjust their services and provide better network in order to accommodate people working from home. Kennedy said Vodacom has seen a significant increase in traffic over both its mobile and fixed networks, since South Africans started working from home in light of the current Covid-19 national state of disaster.

“One of our key priorities as the current situation unfolds, will be to maintain the quality of service of our networks. Our teams will continue to focus on network availability and network capacity to deal with new, irregular usage patterns, especially as more customers work from home.”