In South Africa, the name of the game is per mb downloaded/uploaded. Whether its cell phone data plans or bandwidth for the internet, you play more you pay more.
Talking to Scott Franzen, a mobile data consumer in Chintsa, South Africa, he was excited to tell me that they are starting to adopt the American way of flat fee pricing in the coming months for specific mobile data plans. It was interesting because they always see themselves as playing catchup to the American Tech game, but interestingly, many phones in the US may be adopting this per mb plan to keep usage down. When I told him we may be taking this approach as well, he laughed and said “I knew we were ahead of you guys this whole time!”
Even at the local internet cafe in Muizenberg, I was humbled to find out that spending an hour on the internet uploading a few albums to Flickr was going to cost me nearly $12! Unlike most internet cafes that I’ve visited around the world, these guys really wanted to get me for my bandwidth usage--no flat fee here.
I fear for my friends that may think that they are ok with a per mb plan if they so choose to use a provider with that system. It seems like the people of South Africa are much more aware of their data use and hardly ever opt to using this network for obvious reasons.
This concept made me think twice about my data consumption and made me at least feel good about my unlimited broadband and data plans back home. PLEASE DON'T GO TO A PER MB SYSTEM USA!!
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