Telkom South Africa has launched a new mobile network dubbed “8ta” that currently has 800 HSPA cell towers up and running with plans to quadruple that number relatively soon. Now while many of our readers don’t come from South Africa, how operators charge for their services is a subject that has fascinated me for quite some time. On numerous occasions I’ve made comparisons of how operators in Finland charge for data versus how it works across the pond in America. Over here all data plans are unlimited, but you pay more for a fatter pipe, similar to how many of you pay for your fixed line broadband. Data buckets, which have recently been introduced by Verizon and AT&T, are the wrong direction to be heading in and I hope that operators back off from forcing people to constantly check how many bits they’ve got left on their account.
Anyway, this new kid on the block, 8ta, has a business model for voice that is genuinely unlike anything I’ve heard before. For now all plans with 8ta are prepaid, which isn’t too much of a surprise since prepaid is huge in Europe/Asia/Africa, pretty much everywhere but the UK, USA and Japan where mobile phones are subsidized. When someone calls you the call is of course free, but here’s where the magic happens. For every 3 seconds you’re on the phone with someone who rang you up, you get 1 second of free air time. This offer works all day, every day, across all operator networks, and it’s encouraging the usage of services, thus increasing customer revenue.
How cool is that? Think what would happen if something similar were rolled out by Verizon or AT&T? It’s probably never going be adopted stateside since all the operators in America are interested in shoving consumers into these one size fits all unlimited packages, and I absolutely hate that. Prepaid is the way to go because some months your social life is insane, while others you just stay home and watch DVDs all day. Why should people pay for something they don’t use?
[Photo above is of the totally zef South African rap group “Die Antwoord“]