Zimbabwe mobile tariffs now lowest in the region

By Staff reporter | 13 Jul 2019 at 19:59hrs
SADC
Zimbabwe mobile tariffs compared to the SADC region and other African countries have become insanely too low and no longer makes business sense a survey has revealed.

In a survey done by TechnoMag, Zimbabwe is currently charging tops of 22 cents RTGS per minute which when converted against the bank rate amounts to $0.024 USD per minute, as at 12 July 2019.

This is actually a quarter of a cent in USD value!

Mobile network operators have also raised serious concerns that they will soon be forced to go bankrupt, as they are now operating at a loss, in the past few months.

With the current drop of value of the pegged prices in RTGS, local operators are creating daily loses for services they actually import in USD value, to serve their market.

Bearing in mind operators actually do pay for voice transmissions and interconnection fees internationally, they are also forced to either terminate the service as this is a strong loss in actual USD value as they settle against the international voice call landing bill.

For local calls Econet Wireless is now charging RTGS$0,2157 per minute while Telecel is now charging $0 ,22 per minute and NetOne's new rates now stand at $0 ,2199 per minute.

In South Africa Vodacom charges R0.79 (seventy nine cents) per minute is offered on voice calls to any network at any time, and calls will be billed per second.calls while MTN Charges R1.20 for the first three minutes and get the rest of the call free (MTN-to-MTN only)You will be charged 79c per minute for calls to other networks, billed per second.

From 8ta Calls from an 8ta mobile phone to both Telkom and Neotel fixed lines will be priced at 65c per minute, independent of the time of the call (hence no peak and off-peak rates).,

On the data, Econet $1 is offering $1 for 40mb, $2.50 offering 250mb while their $5 has a cool 1g, $1 NetOne is now only offering $1 for 42 mb, $2 form91mb $3for 150mb and $5offering 1.2 gig, Telecel offers slightly more than all, but remeber these are only promotional bundles as well

This technically means the average $2 will get you 50mb, which is converted to 22 US cents per MB yet our 1 gig on promotion is averagely costing $5rtgs which is technically 55 us cents per gig

The primary networks in South Africa include Vodacom, Cell C, MTN and 8ta.

The South African regulator ICASA's statistics show Rain's "One Plan Package" prepaid mobile data offering costs R50 for 1GB of prepaid data, which is half the price of the next cheapest 1GB from Telkom Mobile, at R100, and a third of the price of both MTN and Vodacom's 1GB prepaid bundles, which cost R149.

The report shows that MTN and Vodacom charge the same prices for a 1GB and a 3GB data bundle at R149 and R299 respectively.

The average gig in South Africa is costing R50, which is an equivalent of $3.58 USD while ours in Zimbabwe is costing 55cents, meaning we are 655% cheaper than South African prices.

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