I have only seen 3G at Gateway (luckily I work across the road), Durban International and the ICC in Durban. I doubt that 3G will be that much more available anywhere else in South Africa (as in how much choice you have).

For the price I don't think it's worth it. Heard quite a couple of complaints about it as well.

If it's for mobile connectivity you'd be much better of with one of the other wireless offerrings.

As long as you have a 3G phone you can still use 3G. will cost R2.00 per MB.
So if you want 3G for your cellphone to update tasks and calender etc, this will be ok,... for connectivvity, id go for iBurst,... they have had their problems,.. but they are the best of the bad,...

Check out the 3G section on the MyBroadband forums.

http://www.mybroadband.co.za/vb

"For the price I don't think it's worth it."

It can be the same price as GPRS. You can get onto a basic package where you pay nothing per month excepting for the bandwidth you use. You don't know about it because they don't advertise it. :-)

Firstly lets clarify that you mean UMTS which is what MTN and Vodacom are offering. 3G covers many technologies including i-Burst provided by WBS and Sentech's offering.

A friend of mine is happily using the Vodacom 1gig bundled offer with UMTS and he is suitably impressed. Sure he has had some coverage issues but in general its been great.

Another contact of mine informs me that EDGE is going to be a more successful option when it comes to MTN. EDGE offers about 104kbit and has more coverage.

A problem with using UMTS is that the technology is not really that efficient for broadband access compared to technologies like i-Burst from Kyocera. Apparently one i-Burst tower can handle that of one UMTS tower.

I just want to say the guys comparing 3G to GPRS it is in different leages 3G is much faster(43kb- 384kb) and with their new option of the 3G 500 which I am currently using, that is you pay R500 for the card and then R350 per month for 500mb of data it out prices the others.

So unless you want to audio stream and down load movies take another option but for internet access it is great, especially with the fact that Vodacom have put in another 500 million into the project and predict speeds of up to 2 mb per second by the end of the year. Otherwise go to i-burst see how often they have downtime and view myadsl for forum on all broadband.

Do not forget the cell companies have more cash and infrastructure, i-bursts coverage is not the best same with sentech and when it comes to telkoms adsl well remember you still have to pay for the ISP and line rental!!!!

How do we laymen know what to go for - MTN or Vodacom?