Telkom now carries 22.6 million prepaid subscribers, an 11.9% jump in a single financial year, while data traffic surged 18.5% and mobile data revenue climbed 10.5%. These numbers suggest a network operator finding serious traction in a market where Vodacom and MTN have long dominated. The figure that catches the eye is not the growth itself but what Telkom left unsaid: prepaid average revenue per user flatlined at roughly R60. More customers are consuming far more data without spending meaningfully more money. That arithmetic only works if Telkom is either slashing connectivity costs to the bone, or engineering its customer base so precisely that it can offer R29 gigabytes to some users while charging others standard rates without either group noticing.

The mechanism is Mo’Nice, launched in 2017, and its successor Customer Value Management systems. These are not tariffs you can look up. A customer dials *123# or opens the Telkom app and receives an offer generated by algorithms weighing their top-up history, call patterns, data consumption, and physical location against network capacity and competitive pressure in that specific area. Two prepaid users on the same street in Soshanguve may see entirely different bundles. A rural Limpopo subscriber might be offered 1GB for R39 with a seven-day window, while a Sandton user with heavier historical usage sees 2GB for R69 with thirty days and a matching night allocation. The system is designed to be opaque by nature, which is precisely why it works and resists easy comparison with Vodacom’s published R85 gigabyte or MTN’s R79 equivalent.

How the pricing actually breaks down

Telkom’s standard published tariff sits at R75 for 1GB over thirty days, a baseline that looks uncompetitive against its own hidden offers. Mo’Nice and CVM bundles routinely discount that effective price per anytime gigabyte to between R29 and R49, though often with compressed expiry periods or smaller base allocations that require more frequent purchases. The research design now underway in Gauteng, Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal, and the Eastern Cape will track precisely these variables across four weeks: not just the headline price, but bundle duration, night data inclusion, out-of-bundle protection status, and measured network performance at the point of use.

Night data is a critical component of the perceived value. Many personalised offers include a “Night Surfer” allocation, typically valid midnight to 7am, that matches or exceeds the anytime volume. For a customer who can schedule downloads or updates overnight, this effectively doubles the data at no extra cost. Out-of-bundle protection, enabled by default on Telkom prepaid, prevents the bill shock that has burned trust on other networks. Data simply stops when the bundle depletes unless the user actively opts into continued usage at standard out-of-bundle rates, typically R0.30 to R0.49 per megabyte.

The coverage question that cheap data cannot answer

Aggressive pricing means little if the signal does not reach indoors, or if speeds collapse during evening congestion. Telkom operates its own LTE network, concentrated in urban and suburban areas, but relies on a national roaming agreement with MTN for 2G, 3G, and extended LTE reach. This dual-network architecture creates a performance lottery that varies by region and even by building.

In Gauteng, Telkom’s native LTE infrastructure is dense enough that most prepaid users experience consistent coverage. The research hypothesis becomes more interesting in Limpopo, the Eastern Cape, and parts of KwaZulu-Natal, where expanded network reach has reportedly driven subscriber acquisition. Users in these areas may spend more time on MTN roaming infrastructure or on slower fallback technologies. A R29 gigabyte that buffers for forty-five seconds before loading a job application form is not a bargain. It is a frustration tax dressed in affordable clothing.

The study will measure this directly: signal strength, download and upload speeds, latency, and whether the connection is native Telkom LTE or roaming. These technical metrics determine whether Telkom’s growth reflects genuine value delivery or merely the acquisition of price-sensitive customers who will churn the moment they experience unusable service.

What the flat ARPU reveals about strategy

Prepaid ARPU holding at approximately R60 while subscriber numbers and data traffic surge tells a specific story. Telkom is not extracting more money from its growing base. It is extracting more engagement, more dependency, and more data consumption habits that raise switching costs. The CVM platform allows this without sacrificing revenue across the entire portfolio. A heavy data user might receive cut-throat pricing to prevent defection to Vodacom, while a light, habitual user sees less aggressive discounts because their loyalty is already assured. The segmentation is surgical enough that ARPU stabilises even as individual transactions become cheaper.

This is not necessarily consumer-hostile. For price-sensitive households, students, and informal traders, a R29 gigabyte that actually works represents material relief in a country where data costs have historically consumed disproportionate household income. The policy question, rather, is whether this model scales transparently or whether it fragments the market into information asymmetries where sophisticated users optimise their Mo’Nice timing while less engaged subscribers pay closer to published rates without realising alternatives exist.

What to watch as the research progresses

The four-week tracking study across four provinces will produce the first empirical picture of how these personalised offers vary in practice, not in theory. Key outputs will include the range of effective prices per anytime gigabyte, the distribution of expiry periods, and the correlation between network performance metrics and customer-reported satisfaction.

Several outcomes are possible. If Telkom’s cheapest offers cluster in areas with strongest native network performance, the strategy is coherent: discount where the infrastructure can bear the load, acquire customers who will have a good experience, and build brand equity that justifies future price adjustments. If the cheapest offers instead appear in areas with weaker coverage and heavier roaming dependency, the model risks creating a base of subscribers who associate Telkom with unreliable service regardless of price.

The roaming agreement with MTN adds another layer. Telkom pays for that access, and heavy roaming usage by discount-stimulated data consumers could compress margins in ways that published results do not yet reveal. The FY2026 numbers show revenue growth and traffic growth in healthy proportion, but they do not disaggregate the cost of delivering that traffic across native and partner infrastructure.

Telkom’s management has explicitly credited regional expansion and targeted bundles for the prepaid surge. What remains unproven is whether this constitutes winning the network war on connectivity costs, or merely fighting a more sophisticated holding action through customer segmentation. The research now in the field should clarify whether a R60 ARPU multiplied by 22.6 million subscribers represents a sustainable new equilibrium, or a transitional phase as Telkom buys market share now and hopes to monetise it later.