8ta slashes BlackBerry BIS offering, concentrates on social

South Africa’s fifth mobile operator 8ta today announced that it would be offering a BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) package for around half its usual price.

There is a catch though, but it’s not a big one. Under the ‘BlackBerry Social & Email’ plan you still get full access to online browsing to BlackBerry’s native messaging app BBM, BlackBerry mail, internet browser, social networking, and BlackBerry App World. The only real difference between it and the full BIS offering is that you get one web-based e-mail account from 8tamail, Gmail or Yahoo mail instead of 10.

That makes sense, BlackBerrys are incredibly popular among South Africa’s youth and was voted the “coolest brand” for the second year running in a recent national youth survey. How many teenagers do you know of who have to manage 10 email accounts?

Keeping up-to-date with their friends on BBM, Facebook and Twitter is much more important.

“We are dedicated to providing our customers’ real value for money and tailor-made offerings. Being first to market also demonstrates the flexibility in our state of the art systems and network.” says Amith Maharaj, Senior Managing Executive of Telkom Mobile.

8ta is the mobile division of the country’s dominant fixed-line provider Telkom.