Summary: MTN set to remove its fair use policy and speed throttling on its uncapped mobile broadband products from 1 October 2011 to 31 January 2012.

MTN launched its first uncapped mobile broadband offerings on 1 June 2010. MTN’s Unlimited Lite package launched at a price of R749 per month while its Unlimited Pro package was priced at R1,999.

MTN has fair use limits of 3GB and 10GB on their Unlimited Lite and Unlimited Pro packages respectively. After a user reaches this fair use limit, their speed is reduced to 128kbps.

In July this year (2011) MTN slashed the price of its Uncapped Lite package from R749 to R299, and reduced the price of its Uncapped Pro service from R1,999 to R899.

On 7 July 2011, MTN announced that it had enhanced its uncapped internet packages with effect from 1 July 2011 “in response to its customers’ demands for faster and reliable internet access at an affordable fixed monthly cost”.

No throttling on uncapped packages

MTN is now set to introduce a promotion where it will remove the speed throttling from its uncapped broadband packages.

The cellular operator will run a promotion from 1 October 2011 to 31 January 2012 where no speed limit will be applied to its MTN Uncapped Lite and MTN Uncapped Pro packages.

These promotions will be available on 24 month contracts and come with an MTN [email protected] E367 modem or MTN [email protected] B660 router. Existing customers will automatically qualify for the unlimited broadband access.

MTN pointed out that the ‘uncapped without speed throttling’ promotion will only be available for four months, after which they are likely to apply their fair use policy and speed throttling again.

This is the first ever true uncapped mobile broadband in South Africa, and may well be used as a trial period for MTN to assess the impact of a true uncapped broadband on its network.

Related article: MTN uncapped mobile broadband price cuts