Vodacom subscribers can now browse the internet for free through Opera Mini, following the expansion of Opera’s free-browsing offer in South Africa.
Announced on October 20, the offer allows Vodacom subscribers to access up to 100MB of free browsing per day, equivalent to a maximum of 3GB per month. The service was previously available only to MTN subscribers.
According to Opera, Vodacom users can access the free data by downloading or updating to the latest version of Opera Mini and browsing while connected to the Vodacom mobile network.
Mobile data and Opera Mini’s Data Saver mode must be switched on for the offer to work. The free browsing should activate automatically when users open Opera Mini and start browsing.
The offer covers ordinary web browsing within Opera Mini but excludes video streaming, large downloads and other activities that consume substantial amounts of data. Small PDFs, MS Word documents, text files and images are downloadable.
Once the daily free allowance has been used, browsing switches to the user’s normal data plan. Customers without any remaining airtime or data will go offline when the free allowance is exhausted.
It is important to note that the free data does not show up under balances. One can only estimate how much data they have used from Opera Mini’s data usage and savings stats.
Opera says its data-saving technology can reduce browsing data consumption by up to 90% through the compression of web pages.
We discovered the free-browsing option while investigating the Vodacom outage on Thursday morning. During the outage, when other apps would not connect to the internet through Vodacom, the Opera browser continued to work. We subsequently found and confirmed the free-browsing offer on Opera’s official website, where the company announced its expansion to Vodacom subscribers two days earlier.
The discovery is particularly relevant as Vodacom customers reported waking up to find their data and airtime balances missing. The free-browsing offer could help them access websites without using their regular data bundles.
