Well, cheaper than the ‘average casual rate’ of R128 per MB most users will see on their bill at the end of the month if they haven’t make any special data arrangements when they’re outside of South Africa’s borders.
At that price per MB, monthly bills can get pretty scary.
Craig Lowe from Exec Mobile (who will be launching the new unlimited international data roaming product highlighted in our headline on the 1st of September) says during the process of building the new international data product, his company came across clients in the fast moving consumer goods, private banking and legal professions that had seen their executives run up bills as high as R760 000, R650 000 and R210 000 for a few days worth of international data usage.
Those numbers are pretty unbelievable.
But, divide them out using that ‘average casual rate’ of R128 per MB and you’ll see that they equate to about 6GB, 5GB and 1.5GB of usage respectively – usage numbers that any uniformed, newbie user could very easily run up in a matter of days.
The new data product has a couple of other nuances, besides being uncapped.
Firstly, Lowe says it will work in 110 countries in Africa, Europe and the rest of the world as opposed to its current ‘global’ product that costs between R8 per MB and R6 per MB, and works in 74 countries.
Secondly, he explains, while it is ‘unlimited,’ the system does have the ability to detect torrent and streaming traffic, and take the requisite measures to curb this blatantly abusive behaviour.
“When users torrent or stream more than 200MB of data in a day, the speed of the connection may be throttled down to 250Kbps,” he says. Any other traffic, outside of torrents and streams will however be allowed, regardless of how much data they consume.
The third big difference with the new product is that it requires the use of a ‘MF60’ mobile 3G hotpot from ZTE, because there’s some custom firmware and javascript that makes the whole system sing. The device (with its customised firmware and a sim) will set you back R1300 and a R99 per month basic subscription fee. And then for every day of unlimited usage, users will be billed R350.
“We realise this product isn’t for everyone,” Lowe says.”But you will honestly not believe how positive the response from corporates who are used to paying alarming high bills for their executives to stay in contact are, at the arrival of this solution.”
Lowe says that usage levels of ExecMobile’s global product show that South African travellers use between 30MB an 50MB per day (R240 to R400 per day). The new solution will go a long way towards allowing customers to data roam without worrying about their monthly data bill.
