Prepare yourself (and your wallet) – Telkom is hiking prices across a number of products, including mobile, DSL, voice, and fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) services. Any customers currently paying for mobile, DSL, or voice services will have their bills raised on 1 April. Those using any FTTH services will avoid the hikes for a month longer, with their bills set to increase on 1 May.
Telkom points towards the country’s record high inflation rate as the reason for the increase, stating that they were “necessary and unavoidable.”
“The imminent price increases across fixed voice, ADSL, FTTH, and mobile offerings will ensure continued quality service to Telkom’s customers, including small and medium businesses, whilst maintaining competitiveness,” says Telkom.
Accept your fate
Telkom’s price increases are as follows:
- FTTH – 11% increase
- DSL and voice services (combined) – 8.4% increase
- DSL-only (including bundles) – 8% increase
- Voice calling plans – 8.8% increase
- Fixed voice-line rentals – 8.8% increase
- SmartBroadband mobile subscriptions – 5% increase
- Yep! Products – 7% increase
Read More: Telkom is finally opening up its network to MVNOs
Don’t get too excited. We’re not being let off that easily. The company announced price hikes for several data bundles and out-of-bundle data rates for mobile voice, SMS, and data services. “Voice rates for out-of-bundle consumption will increase from R0.75 to R0.80 per minute and data rates will increase from R0.32 to R0.35 per MB of data, on most plans.”
The CEO of Telkom Consumer and Small Business claims that with the hikes comes “continued improvement of our products even in challenging times.” He failed to expand upon this comment and offer any explicit examples.
We do already know of the incoming upgrades to the company’s FTTH products, with Openserve recently announcing upgrades to the company’s fibre speeds, set to take effect from 1 April.
For a full breakdown of the affected packages and increased tariffs, see here.
