When in roam…
With mobile phone operators increasingly struggling to differentiate themselves and thus improve customer loyalty, data (as opposed to voice) and roaming charges could be a key battle ground. Vodafone certainly seems to think so.
The UK operator kicked off the week by announcing new, simpler tariffs for data roaming in Europe. Now there's the simple choice between a daily surcharge or a monthly one. The daily one is available to all tariffs, even PAYG, and costs €2 per day, which Vodafone reckons represents an up to 60 percent reduction on existing tariffs.
In the Italy example below you got 50MB for that, but it's unclear if the same allowance applies across the board, nor whether that translates to £2 or less in the UK.
Vodafone has been a bit cunning with the monthly offer. In the UK example below a tenner gets you 25MB per day for a month. However, if you're on a £40 per month contract (the monthly offer isn't available to PAYG customers), it's thrown in. The reason we think this is cunning is that many high-end smartphones are initially available for ‘free' on the £35 per month deal, so this entices people to commit to another fiver a month.
"This is the year of the smartphone and we want our 35 million European data users to feel free to use their devices in Europe in the same way as they do at home," said Vittorio Colao, CEO of Vodafone. "We expect smartphone sales in Europe to grow from 32 per cent today to more than 70 per cent by 2013, and we want to drive that growth with what we believe to be the best value, market-leading roaming data packages."
While this seems like a positive move, the system could be simpler still. As you can see in the tables, Vodafone specifies "Vodafone's European countries", and then chucks in a few others on the daily deal. Surely it would be simpler if this announcement just applied to the whole of Europe and users didn't have to worry about whether or not their destination country is on Vodafone's arbitrary list or not.
|
Home Country |
Price |
Data allowance |
Valid Destinations |
Domestic Price Plan |
|
Vodafone Italy: Daily offer |
€2 per day plus domestic price plan |
50MB when roaming |
Vodafone's European countries plus Switzerland, Austria, Belgium & France |
All pre paid and post paid price plans |
|
Vodafone UK: Monthly offer |
Included in price plans of £40 and above (£10 for price plans below £40) |
Daily allowance of up to 25MB |
European Economic Area & Switzerland |
All post paid price plans (included in plans over £40 per month, £10 for plans below £40) |
Update - 10:40, 29 November 2010: I just had another look at the headline and realised it could be interpreted as meaning Vodafone is charging nothing for data roaming, which clearly isn't the case, so I've changed it. Don't know why that didn't occur to me in the first place - I blame Monday morning. Ed.
