MTN South Africa plans to offer a 4G smartphone that costs just R99 to 1.2 million of its prepaid customers as part of work to shift the country from older 2G and 3G technologies.
The initiative will be executed in three phases commencing in May 2025 until the end of 2026, MTN said in a statement on Monday. One of the conditions for receiving the device is that it can only be used with an MTN Sim card.
“In phase 1, 5 000 carefully selected customers will be offered 4G smartphones. The selection will be based on usage profiles, spending patterns and tenure, and will mainly be in Gauteng,” the company said.
“In phase 2, more than 130 000 customers nationally will be offered the devices. In the third phase, more than 1.1 million MTN customers across the country will benefit.”
The devices will come pre-loaded with a variety of applications. MTN didn’t say if WhatsApp — the de facto messaging app owned by Meta Platforms and used by millions of South Africans daily — was among them.
MTN South Africa CEO Charles Molapisi said: “Regardless of where they live, we want to ensure that all South Africans can access the digital world.”
MTN has partnered with Smartphone For All, founded by Babatunde Osho, a former CEO of Metrofile Nigeria who also served as chief enterprise solutions executive at MTN Nigeria. Osho holds an MBA from Imperial College Management School and an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has also completed executive programmes at Wharton Business School, Oxford Said Business School and IMD Business School.
Driving down costs
MTN did not immediately share technical details about the 4G device or who manufacturers it. TechCentral has asked the company for this information and will update this article once feedback is received.
The move by MTN comes six months after rival Vodacom South Africa announced it was introducing a 4G “smartphone” for R249.
The Mobicel S4-branded phone, which Vodacom described as a “cloud-based handset”, was introduced to “reduce the cost of smartphone access in the country” and to migrate more of the operator’s customers to 4G.
Read: And now for the R200 4G ‘smartphone’
“The cloud phone will help customers still anchored to 2G phones and not familiar with the touch-screen experience, allowing them to appreciate a smooth transition to the data and application world,” said Davide Tacchino, managing executive for terminals at Vodacom South Africa in a statement at the time.
South Africa’s mobile operators are under pressure to migrate legacy 2G and 3G users to more modern technology so the spectrum can be freed up for more advanced technologies, including 4G and 5G.
Vodacom last year cited a 2022 Vodafone-funded report by the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development in 2022, which argued that lowering the cost of devices was key to increasing access to smartphones.
“The Alliance for Affordable Internet estimates that a smartphone priced at US$62 could cost almost 63% of the average monthly income across Africa. The Broadband Commission’s report recommended that so-called thin-client phones – like the new cloud-based phone which Vodacom has delivered – should be explored. The new cloud-based phone leverages the power of cloud computing to deliver a range of features typically associated with entry smartphones at a more affordable cost.” – © 2025 NewsCentral Media
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