Vodacom hiking prices by stealth

Hilton Tarrant

Vodacom’s “overhaul” of its Smart and Red integrated contract plans has increased bundled minutes, SMSs and data across the board, it has also lifted prices by up to 47%.

Its mid-level Smart M+ plan is now R469 a month (excluding a device subsidy), from R349 in the promotional period (August to March), and R319 prior to that. In that time, customers would’ve gone from a bundled allocation of 120 minutes, 300 SMSs and 300MB of data per month to 120 minutes, 120 SMSs and 750MB of data and to 400 minutes, 400 SMSs and 750MB of data.

Customers are getting significantly more but, in this case, the monthly subscription has increased by 47%. Do customers really care that they now have 400 voice minutes and an equally unusable number of SMSs?

Changes apply only to new contracts.

To be fair, the world looks very different today when compared to March 2013 when Vodacom first released the Smart and Red price plans. Vodacom will argue it had to alter allocations within these plans, as habits and usage has changed. It might also say that the price increases in each of these Smart plans are justified, because customers now receive so much more “value”.

Smart M (M+) went from 254MB a month in December 2013 to 667MB in December 2016, an increase of 163%. The bundled data would’ve been sufficient in 2013 (at 300MB) and now (750MB).

Vodacom recently disclosed “high-end smartphone” usage is up 31% in the past year to an average of 1.7GB per month.

Its higher-end “Red” plans have gone from three prior to March 31 to six, extending all the way from R749 to R2 099 per month, and are far more apt for 2017.

The Red Select+ plan makes very little sense when compared with Smart L. An additional 1GB data bundle (to bring the two plans to parity on that basis) would cost R149, meaning a monthly total of R848 (versus R999 for Red Select+). And expecting customers to pay an extra R100 per month for the top-up version of Red Select+ is simply outlandish.

For data users, the most attractive price plan is easily Red More Data. It’s R50 a month more than Smart L+, and is less than half the price of the cheapest other Red package with 10GB.

Expecting customers to pay an extra R100 per month for the top-up version of Red Select+ is simply outlandish