MTN has denied allegations of a faulty multimedia messaging service (MMS), which it says began circulating after it announced its tariffs for MMS.
An e-mail from a disgruntled user claiming the service was overpriced and unreliable began circulating among MTN subscribers after the company announced its MMS pricing structure yesterday.
An MMS (which up until now has been free) is now charged at a flat rate of R2, a pricing structure that MTN says is "guided by market-led pricing".
Donovan Smith, MTN GM of consumer marketing, says the accusations that have been levelled against MTN are unfounded.
"MTN has been accused of having a faulty MMS platform since it allegedly crashed over the New Year. However, there was never a crash, with the only outages being for approximately one hour on 28 December when a CPU upgrade was performed. There were, however, network delays similar to those experienced with SMS.
"The e-mail also says MTN does not give delivery reports when an MMS is delivered to Vodacom phones, but neither does Vodacom," Smith says.
Responding to claims that the service is excessively priced at R2 a message, Smith says Vodacom is not necessarily cheaper.
"Vodacom charges according to message size with a minimum charge of R1. An MMS with a picture only on a regular handset is 11Kb and would cost a Vodacom subscriber R1.20. However, if the picture were 21Kb (a common size), the MMS would cost R2.20. Our pricing structure is therefore simply different and with SMS costing 86c a message, R2 an MMS for pictures, sounds and long text is competitive," Smith says.
MTN says there are 250 000 MTN MMS-capable handsets in circulation. In October 2002, MMS was free of charge, and there were in excess of 30 000 consumers making use of the service by October 2003.
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