Is Cell C about to radically change the mobile data market?

There are two interesting stories in TechCentral about Cell C’s mobile data offerings that caught my attention (they will probably catch yours too). In the first story TechCentral reported that Cell C is going to offer 42Mbit/s (just read that again … 42Mbit/s) mobile data across its network, up from the current 21Mbit/s available in the PE area during its current trial there. The second story which completes this picture is news that another aspect to Cell C’s mobile data offering is data at an effective rate of between roughly R42/GB and R33/GB depending on which mobile offering you go with.

In contrast, MTN’s data bundles cost including pricing 1GB at R289 and 2GB at R389. Its R50 per day data offering is subject to a soft cap at 128kbps once you hit the “fair use” limit of 150MB of data usage. MTN’s speeds run to 7.2Mbit/s (please correct me if I am wrong here) if you are in a good coverage area under a base station.

I am probably out on some of the specifics of MTN’s data offerings but the Cell C pricing still puts MTN (and probably Vodacom) to shame. Granted Cell C’s speeds are only available in PE and we may not see sustained data transfers quite at those speeds once the service rolls out across the country but even data at R42/GB at usual 3G speeds is a pretty good deal! It begins to put fixed line providers under a little pressure, certainly the mobile providers. It also changes the dynamics of the local broadband market.