A few weeks ago Telkom’s mobile network, 8ta, surprised us with some pretty great prepaid deals. These included the lowest all day cost rate to mobiles in SA, but some pretty great deals like for every 5 SMS’s you send, you get 50 for free. But many of us were waiting to see what they would bring when they announce their contract pricing. Well wait no more.
Contracts range from R90 all the way up to R500. But unlike the prepaid deals, these deals seperate the costs between on-net and calls to other networks. What bothers me are that these contracts are not really clear upfront about what you get, you have to go dig a bit on their site:
Contract 1 gets 90 minutes to 8ta and landlines, and only 15 minutes to other networks. This also gets 25MB of data. R90 pm
Contract 2 gets 130 minutes to 8ta and landlines, and only 30 minutes to other networks. This also gets 25MB of data. R130 pm
Contract 3 gets 230 minutes to 8ta and landlines, and only 60 minutes to other networks. This also gets 25MB of data. R230 pm
Contract 3s gets 230 minutes (13800 sec) to 8ta and landlines, and 60 minutes (3600 sec) to other networks. This also gets 25MB of data. R230 pm
Contract 4 gets 500 minutes to 8ta and landlines, and 200 minutes to other networks. This also gets 50MB of data. R500 pm
What you should note is that all except one of these contracts have only per minute billing, which I find odd. The phone selection is not bad at all as well – you might want to go take a look at what is available. 8ta is also making the deal a little sweeter for contracts – you can phone one landline number for free for the length of the contract. So if you phone one number a lot, it might make sense to look at a 8ta contract.
But presently the bigger concern is the mobile broadband deals – competition is heating up with Cell C taking the market by storm with their deal.
So how about 8ta’s data deals?
Internet 1 ““ 650MB for R195 p/m
Internet 2 ““ 1.5G for R280 p/m
Internet 3 ““ 3.2G for R500 p/m
At present these deals look quite competitive with Vodacom and MTN, but do not come close to Cell C’s current deal. If you are someone who wants to get a notebook with your data contract however, 8ta’s deals look very good, but 8ta might want to consider giving more info about the netbooks and notebooks they are supplying with the contracts…
