MTN announces data price decrease to comply with the Competition Commission

We’ve been waiting to see what MTN’s reaction to the Competition Commission’s push to decrease data costs. And, honestly, we’re not even surprised. 

It looks like MTN was the guy in class who sneakily copied Vodacom’s answers on a test. The telecoms company today announced that it will decrease data prices by up to 30%. The same amount that Vodacom announced a few weeks ago. 

The 1GB data bundle (monthly) will decrease from R150 to R99 — not the #datamustfall numbers that we deserved, but the drop we received. Along with this, MTN announced that it will drop data costs on monthly bundles between R10 to R189 with up to 30%. We don’t know exactly what the costs will be, but we’ll see after 15 April 2020. 

Other changes

The Competition Commission’s request pushed telecoms to afford clients some free data on a daily basis. MTN today said that it ‘seemed impossible to give out free data’. Its answer to this, is the use of its free messaging service called Ayoba. 

Ayoba is MTN’s answer to WhatsApp, and using the service will allow users up to 20MB free data daily to use Ayoba Chat, Media and Channels. These Channels give users access to text, images, videos and news. This will be available from today, but the 20MB will be open to use on the internet from 1 July. 

MTN also announced that it will allow for open internet browsing between 12am (midnight) to 5am for all MTN users. 

As we saw with Vodacom, MTN will now zero-rate (no data use) selected websites that are essential for South Africans. This includes health services, TVET Colleges, highschool educational content, employment websites and public universities

Both MTN and Vodacom didn’t go into any detail about actual data prices, other than the announcement of what 1GB will cost going forward. Even after this decrease, these two telecoms companies still offer some of the most expensive data prices on the market.