Airtel fires first shot in likely SMS war

Over the past one year, telecommunication providers across sub Saharan Africa have engaged in price wars as each aimed to undercut the other’s call tariffs for subscriber numbers and as a result, rates have reached their lowest levels ever and are unlikely to go down further for some time to come.
Rates for short message services (SMS) have however rarely been touched.
Airtel has however fired the first shot in a likely price war on the SMS front by announcing for the first time a reduction in the SMS rates while in some cases, a user just has to pay a one-off fee to get access to free SMS within the Airtel network.
Airtel announced this offer in its major markets across the 16 operations it rebranded at the end of last year.
The short message service is one area where mobile telephone operators make significant amounts of revenue given the high levels of SMS traffic – a function users consider cheaper than calling in some instances while among the youth, it is the best way to communicate.
In Uganda, the texting offer, which has been named ‘fretxt’ gives customers the option to sign up for unlimited daily, weekly and monthly text bundles at the cost of US Cents 0.08, US Cents 0.4 and US$1.7 respectively.
Further still, text messages across rival networks have also dropped drastically by more than half from US Cents 0.04 to US Cents 0.02.
Mr. V.G Somasekhar, Airtel Uganda managing director said mobile value added services like text messaging are very relevant today because the mobile phone has become a multipurpose tool that goes beyond making and receiving phone calls
“While customers are enjoying our affordable call tariffs, there is as much traffic in the use of text messages, which indicates that text messaging services are just as important to our customers,” Somasekhar said.
“We want to see more Ugandans enjoy the benefits of mobile telecommunication and by reducing our SMS costs we are making it even easier to reach friends, family and even boost businesses at almost no cost.”
Somasekhar also noted that the tariff was in response to customers’ needs and most certainly the youth segment. “We are in constant communication with our customers and have recently been called on to provide even more affordable SMS rates,” he said.
In Kenya, Airtel has reduced the charges for SMS across all networks to Ksh1 (US Cents 0.01) following a plea by the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) for mobile phone operators to lower their SMS charges. CCK has asked operators to have reduced SMS rates within the next five months.