MyBroadband is busy testing the uncapped mobile data package by Afrihost, which runs on the MTN network, and was surprised by how easy it was to get working.
Afrihost launched its first mobile data products almost exactly nine years ago, on 20 August 2013.
It began by offering 5GB of mobile data for R145 on a month-to-month contract — the cheapest at the time.
In April 2015, it launched fixed-LTE services with prices ranging from R29 for 500MB to R397 for 8GB.
Initially called Afrihost Mobile, it rebranded the service to Air Mobile on 26 May 2019, offering new prepaid data packages with 1GB of free monthly data.
Nowadays, Afrihost offers many different data packages with month-to-month payment options, allowing flexibility when deciding how much data you need.
These packages, shown in the screenshot below, range from 500MB to 100GB.
Afrihost also recently launched an uncapped package for R497 per month.
During all nine years that Afrihost has offered mobile data products, they have run on MTN’s network.
Although it has always been possible to use MTN contract SIMs to access Afrihost’s mobile data services, the ISP did not officially support prepaid SIMs initially.
In June 2015, Afrihost CEO Gian Visser explained that supporting prepaid SIMs proved challenging and that they were beta testing various systems.
Afrihost has since solved the issue, and activating any regular MTN SIM to use with its products is dead easy.
When selecting a new package, you can opt to get a new SIM, a device with a SIM, or use an existing MTN SIM.
While signing up for Afrihost’s new uncapped package, we had an MTN SIM available.
It was already active and RICAed, so we decided to try it.
Afrihost’s portal showed that the number would work.
We purchased our data, and 5 minutes later, we were up and running.
The only other step was to change the access point name (APN) on the device we are using from MTN’s standard one to Afrihost’s, and we were set.
Afrihost provides a guide to do this for various devices if you are unfamiliar with the process.
This is a convenient way to add monthly data to an existing MTN prepaid or contract sim card without changing the current MTN agreement.
While we are still busy testing Afrihost’s uncapped package, we can say that the experience so far has been nothing but impressive — from the easy sign-up to downloading gigabytes of games on Steam.
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