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Some of Vodafone's customers will start to notice their data quota vanish quicker than usual after the telco announced changes to take effect on February 13.
One
of the changes will mean prepaid customers' access to social networking
sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace will no longer be free.
The
other change will see the telco begin billing data usage in 1 megabyte
blocks with a minimum "session" of 1 megabyte on all prepaid plans.
This
second change will mean that whenever a notification or email is pushed
to a customer's smartphone, it will be charged at 1 megabyte,
regardless of whether only a few kilobytes of data were used.
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The move comes after Optus stopped offering unmetered social networking access on its contract plans in December.
"No
one likes to have to pay for something that they were ordinarily
getting for free," said Elise Davidson, a spokeswoman for the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network,
the peak body that represents consumers on communications issues. "But
Vodafone remain one of the cheaper providers when it comes to prepaid.
Because this only affects prepaid plans, customers are free to go
elsewhere."
Ms Davidson said the change to bill in 1
megabyte blocks for some customers would mean that their data would
disappear quicker, but noted that other carrier's prepaid customers,
like Optus, were billed in a similar way.
"If you are
getting your emails pushed from Microsoft Exchange every 15 minutes,
that's 4 megabytes an hour," Ms Davidson said. "People are therefore
going to have to look at the settings on their phones in terms of the
push notifications if they want to minimise the data that they are
using."
Vodafone spokeswoman Karina Keisler said the
telco would start billing for social networking access because it was
becoming "confusing" for customers who were using different apps to
access their social networks on their smartphones.
Under
existing arrangements, Ms Keisler said that if a customer used Twitter
but accessed it through an app like HootSuite, then it counted towards
their metered data anyway and that some customers didn't realise this.
It was only access through Twitter, Facebook or MySpace's official app or website that was free.
"Some of our customers found these charges confusing," Ms Keisler said.
The
change in some plans from billing in 25 kilobyte blocks to 1 megabyte
blocks was attributed to Vodafone bringing all of its plans into line.
Ms
Keisler said affected customers initially "will notice that they will
reach their credit limit quicker", but pointed out that there were a
"range of options" available to them when assessing their current plan.
One of those options was to change plans, another to purchase a data
pack.
When Vodafone reviewed its 2.6 million prepaid
customer's usage patterns, Ms Keisler said 117,000 were identified as
being potentially affected by the prepaid plan changes.
Telco
analyst Foad Fadaghi said Vodafone offering free social networking on
prepaid plans wasn't sustainable, but something that would have lured
quite a few customers.
"From a competitive standpoint
it might put Vodafone at a disadvantage if some of the resellers
continue to offer better deals," Mr Fadaghi said.
He added that the changes were unlikely to be popular among users.
"It might encourage prepaid customers – who tend to be quite receptive to churning between carriers – to shop around," he said.
"That might not be so good for Vodafone if they start losing customers because of it."
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