Telkom is cutting the line rental cost of its mid-tier, 1Mbit/s fixed-line broadband product by 11,3% to R289/month on 1 July, from R326/month previously. Broadband line rental for 384kbit/s and 4Mbit/s users remains unchanged, the company says.

At the same time, Telkom is hiking its basic line rental — which broadband users also have to pay — by 5% from 1 August. Telkom residential customers now have to fork out R139,97/month and business customers R191,84/month per line. This means that, apart from users on the 1Mbit/s service, fixed-line broadband subscribers will have to fork out slightly more for the service.

Telkom filed its annual tariff adjustment with the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa), which must approve the proposed new tariffs before they can be implemented. Because they fall within what’s allowed, Icasa is expected to rubberstamp the changes.

Friday’s filing also shows that Telkom is passing on some, but by no means all, of the benefits of the 1 March reduction in wholesale mobile call termination rates — the fees mobile operators charge other players to carry calls onto their networks. The rate was reduced in peak times from R1,47/minute to R1,40; in off-peak, the rate has declined from R1,17 to R1,12/minute.

At the beginning of March, peak-time mobile termination rates for mobile calls fell from 89c/minute to 73c/minute, with off-peak rates coming down to 65c/minute from 77c/minute.

Telkom is reducing tariffs for all long-distance calls as well as standard-time call charges for local calls. It hasn’t specified by how much local call charges are being reduced by and a Telkom spokesman wasn’t immediately able to provide the quantum of the reduction. The local, per-minute call charge during off-peak times remains unchanged.

In broadband, the company is not changing the monthly subscription fees for its Do Broadband bundles. From 1 September, customers who subscribe to Do Broadband 2 and 3 bundles will receive an additional 1GB of bandwidth for the same price. It’s also introducing a new bundle costing R395/month and offering a 1Mbit/s line and 5GB of monthly data.

In the case of its Closer calling plans, Closer 1 will increase from R150 to R158/month and Closer 2 from R170 to R177/month. Closer 3 remains unchanged at R333. — Duncan McLeod, TechCentral