Why I Hate Vodafone

A bit like banks, all mobile networks are rubbish. However I reserve my greatest distain for Vodafone.
I've had two contracts with them: one for voice and one for my Blackberry email.
Firstly with the voice, the tarriffs are very poor. Other networks such as T-Mobile, Orange and even 3 have far more generous offers.
Having called them (it took 3 frustrating calls to find someone who could help) I gave them the chance to match an offer that I found on T-Mobile. Most of these offers involved charging more than the other operator for LESS minutes etc. In the end they admitted that they couldn't get near the T-Mobile offer.

Then there was the issue of data. I was paying £15 per month for data only on my Blackberry. except that it is only email data. If I click on a link in an email I'm charged for it. How can anyone separate data? It's just bits flying about the internet. Whether it ends up in my browser or my email is irrelevant in terms of charging.

Vodfafone did offer an SMS/data package. In this they treated them as the same bundle and you could use x amount of data or x number of SMSs. The allowance was stingy but at least there was one.
Except they have now separated the two. You have to buy internet data on it's own. And the cost is £2.35 per megabyte. Totally outrageous. Even worse, try finding this information on their website. It's only after some considerable grilling that I found this out.

T-Mobile charge a more reasonable £7.50 for 1 gig of data. That's more like a fair price.

The bottom line is that Vodafone are restricting downloads, particularly third party downloads with their ridiculous policy. We have systems that can easily deliver full track audio - it's around 3 meg for a standard song using AAC encoding. So over £6 to download if you are on a vodafone tariff. with T-Mobile it's a more reasonable 75p per meg (not fantastic, but not outrageous).
With the advent of the Iphone, we need networks to allow mobile users to download data at a reasonable rate. The cost is probably less than a few pence per meg. So how about 10p per meg for a download? They're still making money and more people will use it.
Better still more people will go onto the 3g network and they can make even more out of premium billing.

My next campaign will be for Fair Data for mobile users!