Vodafone’s flat rate data: less than what meets the eye

Back in November 2006, Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin told Business Week that by 2010 nearly 10 percent of his company’s revenues would come from data related sales. We did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and figured that would be a whopping $7 billion. How they were going to do that, we weren’t quite sure. Now we have some ideas how they are going to hit that target.

First by offering flat rate data plans for about $15 a month (buys you 120 MB), only to let people know that they can use it just for web browsing and email. For everything else, you have to pay about $4 per megabyte and additional money there after. (The fine print) In other words, pay the Vodafone tax.

The folks from Truphone were complaining about this development earlier. A couple of other start-ups are in Vodafone cross hairs. “Vodafone is planning to charge more for VoIP traffic than for web traffic on its new mobile web service,” said James Tagg, CEO of Truphone, a mobile VoIP start-up based in UK.

In the US, we have the limited-unlimited data strategy of Verizon, which coincidentally is part owned by Vodafone. Check out what Orange offers as a flat rate plan.

Originally uploaded by smstextnews.

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