Look out Vodacom, MTN and Cell C, Telkom wants your customers. And it might actually get them. The company has totally revamped its mobile products and will now offer six contracts — each focused on data — under the banner FreeMe. The new contracts will be available from next Monday (25 July) and, well, they’re pretty darn compelling. How does R599/month for 20GB, as many calls to mom as you like and free SMS sound? Too good to be true? Well, read on.
The six new packages are priced between R99/month and R999/month. The R99/month package includes 1GB of data, zero-rated WhatsApp, Viber and BBM (sorry net neutrality fans), free calls to other Telkom mobile phones or Telkom landlines and free SMS.
The next tiers up offer 2GB/month, 5GB/month or 10GB/month respectively along with the rest of the features the entry-level package includes. The 10GB package will cost you R399/month.
Step up to the top two tiers and you get free calls to any network and free use of Telkom’s 6,000 public Wi-Fi hotspots. For R599 you get 20GB of data while R999 gives you unlimited data (though we suspect there are some fair-use stipulations around that one).
“Telkom FreeMe offers our customers smartphone plans that liberate them from everything they’ve ever hated about their network,” says Attila Vitai, Telkom Consumer’s CEO. “Data has become the central requirement for most smartphone users, so that is what we have prioritised.”
According to Telkom, it’s able to be so aggressive because it has “reviewed [its] spectrum capacity” to allocate it more efficiently and “achieve greater coverage and deliver faster data speeds”. As a result, it’s been able to “bypass the interconnection fees charged by other networks”. Umm, well alrighty then. You had us at zero-rated WhatsApp, Viber and BBM.
Just in case you need further convincing, Telkom says customers will “soon” be able to order a FreeMe package online “in just fifteen minutes with next day delivery in metropolitan areas”.
Fan us with a kipper and call us Petunia, we might actually have to port to Telkom. And we were just getting settled on Afrihost’s similarly priced (but not nearly as generous) mobile packages.
