back to article Vodafone txt loses revenue crown to data

Vodafone ended 2010 on a high note, with an end-of-year profit prediction pushed to £12bn by growth in India and Turkey. This is only an interim statement, covering the last three months of 2010, but shows that Vodafone is holding its own in Europe (where revenues dropped very slightly, though the company blames exchange rates …

COMMENTS

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  1. David Holden

    Clueless networks.

    How do they create these stats - I pay 10 quid for voice and 5 for data. Why because I'm forced to - most of that voice is unused yet I use all of that data, why can't I pay 2 quid for the little amount of voice I use and 10 quid for more data - because the networks are clueless is why.

    1. Chris Miller

      Not so clueless

      They'd rather have £15 than £12. Grasping, venal and customer-unfriendly perhaps, but it's hard to describe a business making £12 billion a quarter as 'clueless'.

  2. Dazed and Confused

    links to Ozzie advertisers?

    This story should be linked to the one about the Ozzie advertisers wanting bigger files for flashier ads. Download quantities and times might not be so important on the new Oz network, but they are a major issue to mobile users.

  3. Martin 19
    Headmaster

    How do they divide bundling revenue?

    eg. where someone pays £30/mo for X minutes, Y texts and Z Mb of data per month, and uses A mins, B texts and C Mb, how does the £30 of revenue get divided up into the different pots?

    Maybe I'm wrongly assuming that more people are on contracts than really are? Do most people use top-ups which are depleted per-minute/text/meg?

  4. Mage Silver badge
    Boffin

    The reason is

    That £10 voice costs them 50 times less than £5 data.

    Voice is about 12kbps symmetrical and in a perfect scenario what the pay out for out going calls termination charges is nearly balanced for what they receive in incoming call termination charges.

    Many voice calls are on their own network.

    Almost all Internet data is I/O on their network to others. All of that they pay for in both directions per MByte, not time.

    So maybe 50:1 to 200:1 difference in profit for same Voice and Data Revenue

    People want > 1Mbps for Data.

    A Cell phone mast sector can only support maybe 3 to 5 people simultaneously streaming YouTube. So capacity/Congestion is a huge issue for data versus voice.

    Also if people using it instead of Fixed Broadband, instead of a complementary "on the go" Mobile solution, their data sessions are very much longer than typical phone calls.

    Another problem also is that for equal SMS and Data revenue, the profits are maybe 1000:1 as SMS costs them nearly nothing. Especially on their own network.

    1. David Holden

      Interesting

      Thanks for the informed post. I guess forcing me to pay for voice I don't use cross subsidises the data I do. Given these stats I suspect cheaper and more complete fixed broadband is going to be needed to justify the cost of phones built for streaming multimedia and other data centric applications.

  5. Jacqui

    VF android and insane charges

    Recently bought a ZTE racer for playing with android. First put my VF sim card into it and immedately saw my PAYG account start dropping by ~1UKP/hr even with all anroid services disabled.

    I them tried switching the phone off and when I logged back in an hour later my bill had dropped by another 75p.

    VF must be making assumptions about traffic and charging for this. I dont any other way a switched off (powered off/batt removed) phone could run up ~80p worth of traffic...

    Replaced the VF sim with a GiffGaff sim and in nearly a week have spend 4 minutes of calls but no network or text charges.

    To double check I put the VF sim back into the Tocco Lite and the insane charges suddenly stopped.

    been a VF user for 10+ years but GG seems a far far better deal for me.

  6. David Holden

    Weird

    This sounds similar

    http://www.upi.com/Business_News/2011/02/01/ATT-faces-lawsuit-over-billing/UPI-87561296594363/

  7. Sean Bailey
    Thumb Up

    VF android and insane charges #

    It would also depend considerably what services were setup on the vf sim and what type of sim. If it was a sim starting 8944100000 then you might want to request one of the newer versions starting 8944100030.

    Mage, very nice explanation.

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