Data makes the tills ring at Vodafone
Vodafone made £1bn from data in the six months to September this year, with data revenue up 48.8 per cent across the group, and 40.8 per cent in Europe alone. The figures come from the company's six monthly financial report, which shows things are going swimmingly for the world's largest mobile phone operator. In Europe, …
Accidentally left my 3G card connected overnight on a trip to the UK a few weeks ago.
My online backup software (Carbonite) unpaused itself and uploaded 450MB of data.
I returned to a €2000 roaming bill (outside the "Connect abroad" 100MB monthly limit it goes to per-MB billing).
Vodafone haven't returned three of my calls requesting mercy. Now the money has been taken by direct debit.
Bastards.
John
"In Europe, revenue is up two per cent, despite price cuts averaging 19 per cent, as cheaper services are driving more usage. Calls are up 24 per cent and messaging up 8.6 per cent."
HINT if you drop prices to a reasonable level (not price per megebyte!!!) your revenues will continue to go up. It's not that we've not been wanting to use the data, it's that we were terrified of the bills that would follow!
even Paris could have worked out this little gem!
OUCH!
My Vodafone data has shot up since the corporate interweb has been picking off personal websites... :-(
I still can't log in after the Vodfaone billing fiasco so I still don't know if they've given me the money back for charging me for data access as well as taking the flat rate money for 120M, double charging willl always make you money.
John, I feel for your situation, that must have hurt but do you seriously expect that Vodafone are going to let you off your roamaing bill due to some accidental usage?
That's like me crashing my car, by accident, and then expecting my insurance company to let me off because I wasn't driving dangerously!! Pay up and learn my friend.
I made the mistake of buying their unlimited 3G/month 3G data product which supposedly costs 25 pounds a month.
So far they tried to charge me 150+ pounds for the first month (300M transferred) , 57+ pounds for the second month (under 100M) and after finally setting the "line rental" correctly to 25 pounds for the third month they started charging me for every megabyte transferred. So much for "unlimited". Actually it is unlimited. Unlimited lies and unlimited time you spend on their support line.
Frankly, their data revenue should be material for the serious fraud office press releases not their PR.
"do you seriously expect that Vodafone are going to let you off your roaming bill due to some accidental usage?"
No, I expect that they drop the connection after, I don't know, the first €500 euros of the session (or some other sensible default). Or charge reasonable rates for the excess.
Your analogy is poor, since the insurance company actually pays for the replacement car, whereas data doesn't cost Vodafone €€€s per MB (or else they would bankrupt themselves on the 100MB plan.
John
...but what's Picard done for them lately?
& don't get me started about their Vodafone @ Home broadband service. Andrea
Sign up, sign up for The Register's weekly mobile & wireless newsletter - click here
