back to article Vodafone scores soapy company deal

Vodafone will be supplying 50,000 mobile phones, equipping around a third of Unilever's staff, as part of a deal to make the company more mobile as well as more communicative. As well as providing mobile phones, and management tools to let the company see exactly how much its spending and where, Vodafone will be providing …

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  1. Pete 2 Silver badge

    Why this is a bad thing

    > Vodafone will be supplying 50,000 mobile phones, ... to make [Unilever] ... more communicative.

    And the First Law of Communication tells us:

    "The inevitable result of improved and enlarged communications between different levels in a hierarchy is a vastly increased area of misunderstanding."

    Personally, I have a feeling that all these 50,000 extra mobiles will achieve is to increase the company's mobile phone bill.

  2. Velv
    FAIL

    Call&Go

    Carry two mobiles everywhere? Not me, I Call&Go.

    These sorts of deals won't work until the networks offer two lines on one handset (yes, it's in the GSM spec).

    I want to keep my business calls away from my personal calls, and 2 lines is the perfect way to segregate the ownership. Company pays the bill for the phone and business calls. Calls on the second line are charged directly to the employee. From a network perspective, this is likely to increase revenue - if I have a work and a personal mobile, they are likely to be on different networks. If it's two numbers on one SIM, they're on the same network - network wins!

    I guess there aren't many handsets actually support it these days :(

    And yes, I know, you get dual SIM contraptions - but that's not the same as it just working as per the spec, is it!

    1. paulf
      Unhappy

      It was done

      Many years ago (in the good old Hans Snook days) Orange used to offer a service called Line 2. A single SIM card with two lines on it - the second line had its own number and price plan for just the use you require. Only restriction IIRC is that the second line price plan couldn't be lower than the first line.

      Not sure if they still offer it though - so much was destroyed when Orange was Borged by France Telecom in 2000 and they stripped out all the good value, excellent customer service and network performance ^H^H sorry "costs".

      1. Robin

        re: It was done

        I remember it.

        I think post-Borging, Orange were the first company to coin the term 'simplifying' in relation to price plans, as a synonym for "increasing cost whilst reducing service".

    2. Andy Johnson

      Personal & Work phones

      >if I have a work and a personal mobile, they are likely to be on different networks.

      Not only are they likely to be on different networks, I'm more likely to have a better deal that suits my calling & data needs than a company mobile. Plus who says the network that my company uses has coverage at home ?

      So, end result... I carry around 2 mobiles...

  3. Andy Johnson
    FAIL

    more communicative ?!

    For a company who themselves struggle to pick up a phone to talk to customers and instead prefer to use email so they can take a month to respond, maybe they should be looking at their own business. Lets hope none of Vodafones customer service skills get passed on to Unilever along with the graduates.

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