Vodafone UK upped the competitive stakes today when it announced that its pay monthly customers will now get 500 MB of mobile data free each month as a part of their tariff. That’s awesome, and it will be interesting to see what impact this has in the market and on mobile data usage in the UK.
You can quibble with a few things: the fact that they’re calling it “unlimited” access, then saying “subject to a fair usage policy of 500MB / per month”, which ain’t unlimited. But for most folks it should be fine. You could also take exception to the statement “Since launching the internet on mobiles last summer”, but we’ll leave those out for the time being, and just say nice one Vodafone.
So, for those of you in the UK, would this offer convince you to switch to/stay with Vodafone?
Hmm…”all pay monthly customers” may be a bit broad.
We small business Vodafone customers seem to be left behind. I am on a small business 300 plan - I get great call rates, roaming with passport, low international rates BUT I have to pay £15/month to get just 20MB of mobile internet.
And, I pay £15/month for my VF 3G data card and get 3GB! Why do handset business data users get slugged for mobile internet?
On another (pre-paid) test phone I get 15MB/day for £1 of 120MB or £7.50 per month with the add-on. But for business users - we’ve been stuck with the same, boring internet data plans for 18 months.
Perhaps the deal will eventually spread to business plans. Generally I spend between £300 and £500 per month as a business user (I travel a lot so data roaming makes the bill higher), but get no relief on the UK data for my handset……
The iPhone in the US showed us that when people get (in this case forced to have a data package, but therefore, they have it so why not use it) a data package they use it. This should spur growth in this area and lead to other avenues of revenue for Voda.
Hi from Thought Den @ the Pervasive Media Studio! We were discussing this, earlier and what the other operators are calling ‘unlimited’. Seems a bit cheeky, especially since free would mean we can watch You-tube for-ever or surf, download anything.
Interestingly though we’re caring less about the 3G rates, our phones are becoming Wi-Fi enabled. Then with that, people like
- Street Net in Bristol are opening up complete city Wi-fi
- Steve Andrews from BT (British Telecom) the MD of Strategy, Convergence & Products is pushing to have every home-hub broadcasting a common channel so anyone can connect
- the new shopping centre in Broadmead hosted an afternoon where creative were given the chance to come up with cool ideas for their Wifi net.
But as we’re pushing more of our applications and ideas onto a mobile market, a night we hosted found that most Film makers have wicked ideas of what they want to do with mobile film, but they need the bandwidth on their clients phone to back it up! (http://www.thoughtden.co.uk/blog/2008/03/28/re-cineformation-film-and-new-media/)
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