Category: Rant

MTN, South Africa’s supposed “Better Connection” is a Cellular Service Provider. But if you read this, you may begin to see why I say they aren’t the “clever connection“.

In my previous 2 posts, “Vodacom – How NOT to make money” and “Vodacom – Ship of fools” I talk about WHY I switched my cellphone contract to MTN.

But, let me briefly describe their genius method of pricing their contracts:

– The iMate K-Jam is now free (as of this writing) on all the Pro-Call contracts.
– On Pro-Call 120, you get 120 free ANYTIME minutes – Cost: R379 per month, including itemised billing
– On Pro-Call 150, you get 150 free ANYTIME minutes – Cost: R360 per month, EXCLUDING itemised billing
– Cost of Itemised Billing – About R18.

This mean, for a free iMate K-Jam and 120 free ANYTIME minutes on MTN, you will pay MORE than you would if you wanted the 150 free anytime minutes. Ok, only R1, but STILL!!!!

COME ON PEOPLE, USE YOUR BRAINS!!!

If you haven’t read it yet, please first read “Vodacom – How NOT to make money“.

After signing a new contract with MTN (supposedly the better connection), I went to cancel my cell phone contract with Vodacom. After all, they weren’t willing to give me a free cell phone, whereas MTN and CellC both were…

I walked into the VodaShop store and told the lady I wanted to cancel my contract. She handed me the form, and sat with me while I filled it out. She asked me why I wanted to cancel the contract, and I told her that I received a free phone from their competitor.

She said that I shouldn’t cancel, because I would be missing out on all the excellent services Vodacom was supplying me. I said, I got the phone I wanted (the iMate K-Jam) for free from MTN. It was simple, Vodacom didn’t think I was worthy of a free phone.

She then asked why I was cancelling, because they could give me a discount of R1000. And I said, R1700 is STILL R1700 more than NOTHING!

Oh well, I’m sure Vodacom will miss the money I gave them every month, what, with them making an after tax profit of R5.1 BILLION in 2005…

You’ll have to forgive me. The next couple of posts are going to be complete rants.

Vodacom is a cellular network in South Africa. Vodacom is probably the BIGGEST cellular network in South Africa. What does that mean? It means they don’t need any more clients/customers/plebs.

I spend a lot of money on my Vodacom cell phone contract. My subscription is only about R200 a month, and yet I make about R2,500 worth of calls a month. MTN and CellC are the other Cellular Networks in South Africa. They offer the iMate K-Jam phone free on a R430 a month contract. At Vodacom, on the same contract, you have to pay in R2,700.

I asked Vodacom if they were willing to give me the phone for free, because if I cancelled and went to another Service Provider, I could get the phone for free. I even said I was a “loyal customer” for the last 6 years. What could they do for me? The biggest discount they were willing to give me was R1000…

Is that clever? Is that wanting to keep a client who spends money? It’s almost like free money in my mind. They would make up the “loss” in 2 months. But Vodacom doesn’t know how to keep customers.

Read the next post to hear how nice it was to actually cancel my Vodacom contract…