Vodacom has been planning a price reduction of their mobile broadband offerings for a while now, and they have finally announced it with savings of up to 43%.

Vodacom recently also launched a 2GB + 2GB for R149 per month special that competes head on with the Cell C special of 2GB for R149, but this is only a promotion and does not offer any value to current Vodacom Standard broadband subscribers.

The company has now taken the wraps of their new mobile broadband data offering prices with lower in-bundle and out-of-bundle pricing, and they have also removed the 600MB, 1.2GB and 2.3GB packages, replacing them with 1GB, 1.5GB, 2GB, 2.5GB and 3GB packages. Out-of-bundle pricing has also been reduced from R2 per MB to R1 per MB.

From 1 August 2011 all Vodacom Standard data packages will be replaced by the packages bellow, all contract customers now also qualify for the Vodacom Nigh Owl service which offers customers extra bandwidth to the same amount as their bundle size during the hours of 00:00 to 05:00.

New Vodacom Mobile Broadband Pricing

8ta, South Africa’s newest cellular operator has just dropped the bomb on rival cellphone network operators by introducing the cheapest mobile broadband package available in South Africa.

The new 8ta deal called Internet 5 will give subscribers access to 10GB of bandwidth at only R199 per month, and for an additional R100 users can get another 10GB that can be used between 12AM and 5AM.

This new deal from 8ta undercuts the current deals by Cell C, MTN and Vodacom that offers customers a mere 2GB of bandwidth per month for R149, by a large margin.

The 10GB package from 8ta for R199 per month will be available at all 8ta flagship stores from 26 June 2011, users will need to sign a 24 month contract and the deal is only applicable on 8ta base stations and not where 8ta uses MTN coverage to serve its customers.

To see if you are covered for the 8ta 10GB package see the Internet 5 coverage map.

Web Africa has just launched a new Home ADSL product range that is sure to shake up the local South African ADSL market. The new product called Home Connect gives users double the bandwidth for the same prices compared to other ADSL providers.

Having analysed home user ADSL bandwidth trends, Web Africa have come up with the Home Connect product that offers users peak and off-peak usage allowances, resulting in low prices starting from R29 for 2GB of ADSL bandwidth.

I have to point out that the off-peak usage allowances is not like other broadband providers’ where you only get to use the bandwidth when you would normally be asleep, but rather when you would use the internet most as a home user, between 7pm and 7am.

Head of Product and Marketing, Cliff Hazell, says: “We have specifically designed this product for home users who are looking for good value for their money and don’t want to spend a fortune on quality ADSL. The majority of home users’ bandwidth is utilised outside of business hours or on weekends, allowing us to offer ‘off peak’ usage at much lower rates, whilst still providing sufficient bandwidth for normal peak-time usage and pass the value on to our customers.”

Web Africa Home Connect pricing

For more details visit the Web Africa Home Connect ADSL product page.

Last week MyBroadband leaked information about a broadband promotion that Vodacom was set to launch in May 2011, shortly after that Vodacom put details up on their site about the promotion.

The Red is mofoya promotion initially promised users 2GB of mobile broadband data, a 7.2Mbps USB modem and an additional 2GB of night owl data that users could use between 12AM and 5AM in the morning, on a 12 month contract for R149pm.

The promotion that was set to compete head on with the Cell C’s SpeedStick offering has since seen a turn for the worst. Yesterday I and many other users noticed that Vodacom have amended the Terms and Conditions of the promotion and now the deal has been removed from the Vodacom website.

Vodacom has not made any official statement regarding the matter but the removal either suggests that Vodacom has decided not to offer the Red is mofoya broadband promotion anymore, or they have taken it down to finalise the Terms and Conditions.

Last week Vodacom introduced their new Red is mofoya promotion to compete directly with Cell C’s Speedstick offering, giving clients access to 2GB of data plus another 2GB of night owl data for only R149pm for 12 month.

At first glance the Vodacom data promotion set to look allot cheaper than the similar offering from Cell C, but upon further investigation I actually found out that the promotion is not that cheap after all.

The R149 per month fee is applicable to 12 months, which makes it the same as the Cell C offering, but what was hidden a bit was the fact the after that 12 months you had to pay normal MyGig 2 data contract prices of R349pm and the Night Owl data is only applicable to the first 12 months.

The Red is mofoya data promotion from Vodacom is in fact a 24 month contract with reduced rates for the first 12 months, bringing the cost per megabyte up substantially from the initial 3.6c per MB as reported by MyBroadband, to 8c per MB or R83 per GB over the period of 24 months.

The fine print does state that you can cancel the contract after 13 months without a penalty, but you still have to pay R349 for the 1 month additional bandwidth.

[UPDATE]
Seems like Vodacom took down the promotion on their website.

[UPDATE]
Vodacom clarified Red is mofaya broadband deal for R149pm

It seems like just about every company out there are joining in on Vodacom’s Red campaign, first there was Cell C, then Afrihost and now the latest company to launch a red promotion is local ISP Web Africa.

For the whole week until Friday, Web Africa will be giving the first 30 customers who sign up through their Red Alert page access to 30GB of bandwidth for only R199 per month.

Web Africa will open registration every day at 12:00 and give the first 30 customers 30 gigs of bandwidth for only R199, they will also throw in 100GB of free Download Plus bandwidth which can be used between 12am and 6am in the morning.

For more information about the Web Africa Red Africa promotion view the Red Africa page.

A lot of you may have noticed all the recent Heita advertisements on TV and in public and wondered what it is all about. Techcentral unraveled all earlier today.

Heita! That will be the new brand under which Telkom will launch its new Mobile Broadband offering to the public on 14 October 2010.

Heita! will only be the brand name under which Telkom will provide mobile services to consumers while sticking to a more traditional name with Telkom in it for business offerings.

It looks like Telkom has embraced social media with its new Heita brand when you have a look at the new Heita website. It features a twitter feed keeping track of the keyword #heita as well as a blog feed that shows the latest blog posts with the Heita keyword in them. Apart from the streams the Heita website also features Wallpapers and Videos of its advertisement campaigns.

With Cell C that recently announced its new HSPA+ mobile broadband data at prices starting from R34 per GB it would be interesting to see at what Telkom’s Heita mobile offering will be priced.

Earlier this year MWEB started the broadband price wars by bringing affordable uncapped Internet to the South African market, a few months in and just about every other ISP out there are offering these uncapped accounts undercutting MWEB with a few rands here and there but nothing big.

Axxess has now introduced a brand new Uncapped Internet offer to the market aimed at the average household user that would just like to surf the Web, watch Youtube videos, Skype with their friends and family and download the odd file now and then.

The new package from Axxess is called Just Surf and offers the average household user Uncapped Internet at a mere price of only R99 per month for 384Kbps. There are also 512Kbps and 1024Kbps Uncapped Internet packages available at R149 per month and R249 per month.

Managing Director of Axxess, Andrew Simpson, has however warned that the Just Surf packages are not meant for heavy downloaders and even though there are no Fair Usage Policy on these new Uncapped Internet accounts, users making use of bulk downloading protocols like BitTorrent or any other Peer 2 Peer service will be slowed down.

Other ISPs are however not sitting back and within hours of Axxess announcing their new Just Surf Uncapped Internet packages, OpenWeb has already hit back by introducing the exact same Uncapped Internet packages undercutting Axxess by a mere R1.

OpenWeb’s Uncapped Internet are priced as follows:

1. R98 – 384Kbps
2. R148 – 512Kbps
3. R248 – 1024Kbps

Cell C recently rebranded and rethink its strategy in the South Africa mobile space and made it clear that they are ready to take on the bigger cellphone operators MTN and Vodacom.

With the relaunch of Cell C’s branding the company also announced that they will be launching a brand new 4G network capable of broadband speeds of up to 21Mbps.

Cell C is already advertising its new HSPA+ packages on its website, currently seems like there will be 2 packages available, one with a maximum speed of 7.2 Mbps and another with a maximum speed of 21.6 Mbps.

The two broadband offerings from Cell C comes in way bellow that of MTN and Vodacom working out R63 and R50 per GB respectively.

1. 7.2 Mbps capable modem with 2GB worth of data every month for 12 months at only R1499
2. 21.6 Mbps capable modem with 5GB worth of data every month for 12 months at only R2999

Availability of these new Cell C broadband packages will be made public later this week.

Africa has come a long way with regards to broadband, previously relying heavily on Satellite connections for Internet access the continent now has a multitude of undersea fibre cables serving it with access to high speed Internet.

Some African countries like South Africa, Senegal, Ghana and Cameroon have already been making use of underwater fibre cables for Internet access since a few years back but due to the age and high bandwidth prices on the SAT3/Safe cable system these countries did not really have access to affordable high speed broadband.

Since the landing of Seacom in July 2009, African countries have been enjoying high speed Internet access at affordable rates and with numerous cables still to land in Africa, the speed of broadband in Africa is steadily on the rise while the prices are declining as the competition heats up.

With all these underwater cables landing in Africa, who cries king in terms of the fastest broadband speeds in Africa? According to tests conducted by users of African countries on Speedtest.net here is a list of the top 5 broadband countries in Africa:

Compared to the top rated broadband countries in the World, Africa still has a long way to go to catch up to avg. speeds of 34 or 24 Mbps, but its good to see that Africa’s top 5 countries has at least broken the 2 Mbps mark for average download speeds.