Recently there was an article about how Telkom should abandon its cellular project, 8ta, due to the enormous footprint that MTN and Vodacom has already set. I beg to differ, if Telkom keeps at it I think that in a few years 8ta will be the dominant cellular data provider of the future.
I work work with a lot of clients who depend on affordable data. Sure MTN and Vodacom can drop their prices to compete with 8ta, but how far are they willing to go?
8ta has the backing of Telkom, who, as we all know dominates fixed line voice and data, they are basically the backbone of all telecommunication in South Africa. So although 8ta has big shoes to fill in order to compete with the big two, they have the enormous bandwidth support of Telkom to do it, like their current flagship postpaid data contract of R199p/m for 10gigs of data, no other provider can even come close to that deal. And we will surely see better deals coming from 8ta in the near future.