There are changes afoot for customers of Australia’s last major telco without 4G services, as Vodafone makes data a little more cost friendly.
Changing in February, data will no longer be charged to the nearest megabyte for prepaid customers (or 25kb for FlexiCap customers), but will switch to what select plans have had for a while, with 1 kilobyte charges.
Pricing hasn’t changed, with Vodafone still making every megabyte cost roughly $2, but breaking it down to that each kilobyte fetches less than a cent, with a price tag of $0.00195313 per kB.
For those keeping up at home, there are 1024 kilobytes in a megabyte, which makes one megabyte cost $2.00000512, or two bucks in Vodafone’s plans.
What this means is that customers are paying for what they’re using, as opposed to downloading half a megabyte and being charged for the entire megabyte, which could add up over time.
The move to change this comes after prepaid customers reached out to Vodafone before the Christmas period.
“There’s no denying data pricing is confusing, industry-wide,” said Cormac Hodgkinson, Vodafone’s Director of Customer Care. “Our intention is to introduce a consistent rate across our prepaid plans, and there’s more than one way we can do this.”
“We have decided to not only reverse our decision to introduce per MB charging, we’ll also be dropping the existing minimum data session to 1kB for all our prepaid customers.”
Meanwhile, customers with a 4G capable phone – such as Apple’s iPhone 5 and Samsung’s Galaxy Note II – on the Vodafone network are still missing out on the higher speeds on offer from a next-generation network, and while we’d like to say Voda will be bringing it soon, there’s still no word as to when.
Representatives for Vodafone this week told us that it has “no updates on a 4G roll-out,” but would let us know when anything happens. Here’s hoping it’s soon.
