Times Of Swaziland: SWAZI MOBILE FIRST CALL TODAY, E1.10 PER MINUTE

SWAZI MOBILE FIRST CALL TODAY, E1.10 PER MINUTE
================================================================================
 BY KWANELE DHLADHLA  on 28/07/2017 09:09:00


EZULWINI – With only five months of preparation from date of being granted a
licence to going live, Swazi Mobile customers will be able to make their first
call today.
This is the bold statement made by the third mobile telephony company after
Swazi MTN and Swaziland Post and Telecommunications Corporation (SPTC), during
what Chairman Victor Gamedze dubbed as the unveiling of prices of the mobile
company.
At 25 cents, the company has made their Short Message Service (SMS) rate five
cents cheaper than Swazi MTN, which has a newly introduced SMS rate of 30 cents.
The call per unit of the new player in the market will be E1.10 per minute (peak
time) and 66 cents off-peak.
Comparatively, this is lower than Swazi MTN, whose call per unit was recently
dropped from E1.80 per minute by a staggering 60 cents to stand at E1.20.
However, it should be pointed out that the price for calling on MTN Zone
remained the same, primarily because customers continue to enjoy making calls at
a far lesser price of the cost per unit depending on the discount at the zone
where they are making the call.  An analysis of the eagerly anticipated rates,
since the company was granted a mobile licence by the Swaziland Communications
Commission (SCCOM) in March, has unearthed that Swazi Mobile will be the first
company to provide Voice-Over-LTE (VoLTE), Video-Over-LTE (ViLTE) and
Voice-Over-WiFi (VoWiFi) on 4G in the kingdom.
Chief Strategy Officer Jeff Penberton explained that provision of voice over LTE
on voice, video and WiFi was a first in the kingdom.  Without referring
specifically to their main competitor, Swazi MTN, Penberton said most mobile
companies, not only in Swaziland but even in other parts of the Southern African
Development Community (SADC), use 4G purely for data and not voice calls.
He mentioned that even in South Africa – a fast developing economy which is
part of G20 – Vodacom was the only mobile company that provides all voice over
LTE on voice, video and WiFi. He said Telkom had most recently announced that it
would introduce this feature next month.
“It is very humbling to witness Swazi Mobile going live. It is one of the
goals we sought to achieve, which provides all the reasons to be happy and proud
of the team. A lot of people doubted that we would actually achieve this goal
(of going live within the set deadline) but we have gone beyond that to provide
a network that is used at First World countries that include the UK and the
US,” said Penberton.  In terms of data, Chief Marketing Officer Khulile
Dlamini explained that under standard data, their price had been placed at 80
cents per megabyte (top up and use).