Vodacom has announced that it will be dropping its data rates by as much as 43% for contract customers and about 39% for those on pre-paid.

Vodacom CEO, Pieter Uys, said yesterday:

We hope these price reductions will contribute to making the internet more affordable and give our customers an enhanced connected experience.

The new tariffs, which come into effect from the first of August, may have been spurred on by 8.ta’s recent offering of R199 for 10GB of data per month.

The offer translates into rates of about seven cents for contract customers, which should put a smile onto the current grimacing faces of Vodacom’s over-tolled user-base.

In addition to the savings, all existing and new Vodacom contract customers will be given another allocation of the same size as the subscribed data bundle to use anytime between midnight and 05:00. This service, called Night Owl, previously only on promotion, is now available as standard to all Vodacom contract subscribers.

The statement then goes on to give me some very happy news personally.

Vodacom customers who previously bought a MyMeg 110 data bundle at R88 (80c per megabyte), will now only pay R49, for a MyMeg 100 (49c per megabyte) – a cost saving of 39% per megabyte. They will also get double their data for free resulting in a net saving of 69%.”

Well done Vodacom for cutting prices of a massively over-priced product to what is now just an over-priced product.

[Source : News24]