Media Comment - 06 March 2002
M-Cell's MTN sms service disconnected
 
More than 1m users of the free short message service (SMS) lost this service on 5 Mar 02 after MTN said it had stopped its mtnsms.com website because of pressure over costs from Telkom, which is demanding a fee for each international message sent. MTN said that the cost increase of running the service was not sustainable as Telkom was asking for an additional charge of 9c on each message sent internationally. The internet based service recorded up to 90m messages a month and 1bn messages were sent in the past three years making mtnsms.com one of the world's biggest internet communities. In the near future the firm will redesign and relaunch the service on a fee based structure in line with international trends. Details of the fee based service will provide a new revenue stream for MTN and will be announced in Apr 2002.