Below one cent price for a message (SMS)

MXit which was originally an acronym for “message exchange” is a free instant messaging software application developed in South Africa that runs on internet enabled (GPRS/3G) mobile phones. MXit allows the user to send and receive text and multimedia messages to and from phones and PCs connected to the Internet. These messages are sent and received via the Internet, rather than with standard SMS technology. MXit does not charge for sending and receiving messages but some mobile operators do charge for GPRS/3G data although this is much cheaper than traditional SMS messages, a fraction of 1 cent (ZAR) per message compared to the normal SMS rates of approximately 75 cents (ZAR). For the price of one SMS, MXIt users can send several thousand messages.

MXit has now more than 11 million registered subscribers, of whom 9 million are located in South Africa. There are more than 1 million subscribers in more than 150 countries. On a typical day, MXit receives about 25 000 new subscribers and more than 250 million messages have been transmitted over its network. Its servers, located in Mauritius, Cape Town and Frankfurt, receive 25Gigabytes of data and transmit 145 Gigabytes of data per day.

Source: Herman Heunis, founder and CEO, MXit.