Following in the footsteps of rivals O2, Orange and T-Mobile, Vodafone has announced that it will be raising the cost of making a call by a third on its pay-as-you-go tariffs.
Vodafone’s 11 million PAYG customers will see the cost of a standard call rise from 15p to 20p a minute as of next month, as the UK’s second biggest mobile phone company attempts to claw back some of the revenue lost due to stricter EU regulations on roaming charges and mobile termination rates – charges mobile networks levy on each other and fixed-line operators to call mobiles – which make up about 20% of Vodafone’s overall revenue. Pay monthly customers will also feel the pinch if they use more than their assigned number of monthly minutes. Extra minutes will rise from 12p to 15p.
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Posted by ellie_mears on August 19th 2008 in General, O2, Orange, T-Mobile, Vodafone
The UK market is already one of the most competitive in the world for mobile services and now Swedish flatpack furniture store Ikea is likely to drive down prices still further. The company will launch its prepaid mobile offering, Ikea Family, initially to lure holders of its loyalty card with super-cheap rates and a SIM-only deal. However, next year it plans to offer the service to the general public, and move into 3G and web applications, and it has already added some low cost Nokia handsets for those who sign up online.
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Posted by Peter on August 14th 2008 in Carphone Warehouse, General, O2, T-Mobile, Vodafone
The mobile music market is becoming hyper-competitive and the UK is one of the biggest battlegrounds for the fight against iTunes. As Microsoft apparently considers teaming up with Nokia to boost Zune, the operators are trying to grab a bigger piece of the action. This week, Vodafone and O2 will both announce new offerings, and both now provide multiple mobile music services, giving consumers wide choices but probably confusing them too.
Vodafone already offers MusicStation, mainly on midrange handsets, and Nokia MusicStore on high end Nokia phones, providing one-click access and the distinctive user interface. On Thursday it will add Vodafone Music, which was co-developed with streaming supremo RealNetworks and is already used by Verizon Wireless, Vodafone’s US joint venture.
MusicStation, by contrast, is a managed service provided by Omnifone, and was launched late last year, in the same week as Nokia unveiled MusicStore. How can all these options appeal to customers and make money? And these three are all coming from one carrier – it is likely that all the main UK cellcos will also launch multiple music brands, not to mention those available directly from the internet or marketed directly by device makers like Sony Ericsson.
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Posted by Peter on August 13th 2008 in General, Nokia, O2, Sony Ericsson, Vodafone
We all know that mobile music is the smartphone application of 2008, and most of the handset makers and operators are chasing music lovers, and the appeal of iPhone/iTunes is prompting some unlikely partnerships from those looking to dethrone it. None more improbable than Nokia with Microsoft Zune, but that is the anti-Apple alliance most widely rumoured this week – just as Apple is said to be developing a ‘nano’ iPhone to spread its net to more budget conscious and PAYG consumers.
Microsoft has always been cagey about a possible phone version of its Zune media player, though this would be a logical move as other device makers start to put a cellular link into their star products – notably Sony with the PSP. One problem for Microsoft would be that the non-Windows Zune might muddy its strategy in the handset market where it wants to push Windows Mobile – though Zune might also be better at Windows at taking MS out of its mobile enterprise sector. In the short term at least, it seems more likely that Zune content and services will be more tightly integrated with Windows Mobile phones and also, possibly, Nokia devices. This could pave the way for Microsoft dumping Zune devices altogether and focusing on multiplatform music services instead.
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Posted by Peter on August 8th 2008 in General, Nokia, O2, Sony Ericsson, iPhone
Yet another bout of iPhone speculation has set the net afroth with frantic fanboy fulminations – a piece in the Mail on Sunday, of all places, revealed that a ‘nano’ version is expected to arrive in UK shops in time for the Winterval season. The phone with reportedly retail for around £150 on O2 Pay & Go – no pricing details for Pay Monthly contract details issued yet.
“This will be a big one,” said the Mail’s unnamed an ‘industry source’:
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Posted by Tom on August 7th 2008 in O2, Orange, iPhone
O2 have just announced price changes to the £25 tariff on their wildly popular SIM-only Simplicity tariffs.
Throughout August, customers signing up to the normal £25 Simplicity tariff, which gives customers 600 cross network minutes per month as well as 1000 texts if the itemised bills are handled online, can now qualify for the same great savings for £5 less. Customers who sign up in August can continue to qualify for the £5 discount every month for as long as they stay on the tariff.
In addition to this, Simplicity customers can choose from a range of free Bolt-Ons to go with their minutes and texts – the Unlimited O2 to O2 calls is included as standard, but punters can choose to switch this one for any of the following:
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Posted by Tom on August 1st 2008 in General, O2
In the first generation of the mobile web, where users remained safely confined within operators’ walled gardens, personalization was supposed to make them happy to stay there. Even within a closed-in service like the original Vodafone Live! subscribers’ preferences could be recorded and used to deliver an experience that was specific to the user.
Now that consumers insist on roaming freely around the internet, operators are looking to keep their customers loyal by making the navigation and overall experience simpler and richer, and by delivering a personalized service even with off-portal content.
O2 is probably the UK leader in this respect and plans to upgrade its offering after the summer, and it could take some tips from US carriers, which unusually enough, are ahead of their European counterparts in personalization. Alltel has been a pioneer, using the same Qualcomm UIone technology, for adapting user interfaces to the individual user, that O2 employs. Now Sprint Nextel has launched Sprint Web, with an improved browsing experience that will set a new gold standard for operators round the world.
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Posted by Peter on July 30th 2008 in General, O2, Vodafone
The internet is once again abuzz with rumours that the iPhone 3G may be made available on the Orange network here in the UK before Christmas, as early as October, if the stories are true.
It has long been suggested that O2’s exclusive network deal with Apple was only a temporary one, as we’ve seen Jobs and Co. dabble in network polygamy elsewhere in the world, such as Australia, where the handset is available on three different networks.
The net reached boiling point when a story published on The Register last week cited the blog of one Ernest Doku who claimed that a “very, very credible source on the inside” revealed that the iPhone 3G would arrive on Orange by October.
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Posted by Tom on July 28th 2008 in 3G, O2, Orange, iPhone
It is interesting to see just how widely varied the price of the 3G Apple iPhone is in various parts of the world and then to throw in the minimum contract rate for owning one and see what kind of investment it turns out to be. Certainly in most countries it is now higher than owning a top of the range PC.
Our friends over at Rider Research in the US have put together a table of comparison providing pricing details for most of the countries where the new iPhone 3G launched last Friday.
Even though carriers require minimum length contracts of varying lengths, Rider Research has used 24 months for each in the chart to show a comparison of the total cost of ownership in the far right column.
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Posted by Peter on July 18th 2008 in General, O2, iPhone
Despite shifting millions of units worldwide on its first day, the 3G iPhone hasn’t performed quite as well as everyone was expecting. When we say ‘performed’ we should say ‘working’, and when we say ‘well’, we really should say ‘at all.’
Demand for the new 3G-enabled wonder gadget has been so great, that customers are still having a hard time waiting for a connection as O2 are struggling to cope with the demand of thousands of users all trying to get their SIM cards registered on the network. O2 had reportedly invested “several million pounds” in order to cope with the anticipated demand – which, as it turned out – considerably outstripped everyone’s expectations.
Customers who had pre-ordered the new iPhones and had ported their old number across were on average getting connections faster than new customers who has bough phones in store.
A blog entry posted last Friday over on Cnet however is revealing. Apparently; “O2’s system runs on Windows and requires Microsoft’s Internet Explorer — clearly the Macs at the Regent Street [Apple] store weren’t running Boot Camp…”
Somewhere in Redmond, Bill Gates sniggers into a glass of Chianti.
Posted by Tom on July 17th 2008 in 3G, O2, iPhone
