| Home |
| About Us |
| Latest News |
| Features |
| R-100 Index |
| Newsdesk |
| Free Email Alerts |
| - - - - - - - |
| Wireless Business Review |
| - - - - - - - |
| Vodafraud |
|
|
| Monday, 16 June 2008 | |
|
Mobile giant treats its customers like mushrooms. Kept in the dark and fed plenty of ****. Users pay a princely sum for the privilege.
Personally, I’d like to like Vodafone. They sponsor things I like, like cricket and horse racing, although they also sponsor things I don’t like, like motor racing (vroom! vroom!). Fancy driving a motor car at 200mph while calling your granny on your cellphone! The sort of people I don’t like are those who gouge prices to the detriment of consumers. Around the world they are known variously as ‘touts’, ‘scalpers’, etc. And around Europe they are known as ‘mobile phone companies’, too. Now, we have spent years examining the excessive roaming charges levied by mobile operators. Standing loud and proud in her digital chariot, Commissioner Viv Redding has done a Boudicca-like job on the more venal aspects of international mobile charging. Yet even Viv’s remit stops where the borders of the EU’s 27 nations end. Obsequiously, Europe’s main mobile operators bleated about fixed costs, market forces and the impenetrable law of Sod while conceding minor downward pricing structures in their roaming. Vodafraud, like European majors 02/Telefónica, T-Mobile and FT/Orange, made play of special deals which enabled users to get cheaper roaming by signing up to plans designed around partner networks. Such arrangements, they argued, balanced the reality of market forces with a preferential treatment derived of pan-border scale economies. Amazingly, Vodafraud’s European customers can now call home from EU-27 countries for just UK£0.38 per minute or thereabouts. A bargain, albeit an expensive one: a domestic call would cost fractions of a penny. Flop over the EU border from Greece, at the EU’s outer edge, into Turkey, beyond the EU’s pale, and that ppm rises to UK£1.69 to make a call and UK£1.35 to receive one. Clearly, in Turkey, Vodafraud relies on a ‘partner network’: it’s called ‘Vodafone TR’ and Vodafraud owns the damned thing. So all the rubbish about embedded or incremnental operating costs are nonsense. An optical string between Turkey and the EU would eliminate cost from the pricing equation. But why should Vodafraud do anything other than perform an up-the-jacksie manouevre on its piteous paying customers. It is all about what and how much you can get away with. You doubt me? Go to Vodafraud’s website and try to find details of roaming charges for voice, text, mms and Internet. Find me the price of two calls, a text message and a photo transfer: if you can find that information in less than, say, 40 clicks, you are ahead of me. Vodafraud rips you off, hides true pricing from the user and takes any chance it can to fleece its users. It didn’t become one of the world’s biggest companies by being soft: not least when it’s drilling lucrative if tiny holes into the fleshy nether regions of its customer base. It's anything but the fall of the roaming empire. Jim Chalmers **** = shit |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|