As of 1 March this year MTN will be introducing a 200MB “fair-usage” cap to the data that can be used as part of their BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) offering. The service provider will be renaming their R59 per month BIS package at the same time, calling it BlackBerry Absolute.This has been confirmed via SMS messages sent to MTN BIS subscribers.

MTN South Africa’s general manager of core and Internet protocol planning Devan Chetty is quoted as saying “The BlackBerry Absolute plan is aimed at optimising the network to make it efficient so as to provide a world-class experience for our customers.”

There will be additional tiered BlackBerry offerings from MTN, all of which provide less data per month along with less access to BlackBerry services for a lower monthly fee, according to a recently leaked document.

The image that lists the new packages from MTN also has the following text: “Take note, the current uncapped BIS service will no longer be made available to new subscribers or to existing subscribers wanting to reprovision the service as it will now become legacy.”

The data cap restriction will then apply to all BIS users eventually, though it seems that current users will enjoy uncapped data until their contract term expires. MTN neglected to mention when launching the new BlackBerry 10 devices that BIS would be changing form for all BlackBerry subscribers in the long term.

Those who go over the 200MB cap will reportedly either have to load a data bundle to their device or they can opt for having the data deducted from their airtime balance.

Source: Techcentral