Some notes about Vodafone's new fixed line broadband service

1. Its three free unlimited calls to Vodafone numbers are only free up to 59 minutes. According to Fionnuala Coburn, head of fixed line services in Eircom, you have to hang up and redial once an hour to derive the free call benefit.

2. You can't get just one bill for your mobile and fixed line Vodafone services, a deliberate move, according to Coburn: "we looked at our research and found that people regard their mobile phone service as a personal thing, separate from their fixed line". Hmmm…

3. What advantage does a Vodafone customer have in opting for a 2Mbs broadband product over a (putative) 3.6Mbs mobile broadband service? Coburn suggested that "heavy downloading" is better facilitated by fixed line broadband. When asked about the higher stated speeds for its own mobile broadband service, she said: "my understanding is that the mobile broadband experience does vary. I'm not sure what the average speed there is." That's code, really, for 'mobile broadband is not reliably close to 3Mbs'.

4. Am still a little baffled as to why Vodafone is going into this fixed line market. It can only be a long term strategic decision not to be excluded from the main infrastructure (as a stakeholder), if there's ever a massive carve-up of the network.

Comments

[Justin Mason]

As a matter of interest -- what justification have the mobile network operators given for imposing such low bandwidth caps? Never mind the spotty coverage, this is the other reason why "mobile broadband" isn't useful broadband.

[Adrian]

Believe it or not, it's that "customer feedback indicated that this is sufficient" and that "it is the equivalent of [insert number] hundred thousand web-page visits".

And the like.

(Up to a year ago, Vodafone and O2 were still offering 50MB data cap limits on some of its 3G data products.)