Vodafone has sparked a mini riot amongst its users by announcing that it will be scrapping its "fair usage" terms and sticking to its guns on it’s 500mb data allowances and charging for extra usage.

Vodafone has stated that the reason behind this decision is to “to make it fairer for everyone, and to protect network from data abuse”. Here is an extract of the forum post in full:

We are planning to introduce Out Of Bundle charging for Pay Monthly customers from 1st June 2010. The reason we’re introducing these charges is to make it fairer for everyone, and to protect our network from data abuse. We’re introducing a real-time notifications service to be completely transparent about these charges and keep customers in control of their spend. No Out Of Bundle charges will happen this month but they will take effect from 1st June. The messages you’ve received this month were sent in error and no more will be sent out from today.
The charging will be as follows:
Monthly bundle customers will pay £5 for every 500MB after the first 500MB
Customers without a monthly bundle will pay 50p for every 10MB after the first 25MB

To conclude its textbook lesson in how not to treat customers- it then unhelpfully,went on to proceed to go into legalese about why users cannot cancel their contracts- which I am sure will have caused some frustrated forehead slapping amongst its PR company and no amount of anger to its customers as shown in the following 40 pages( to date!) of forum postings.  Interestingly it seems that their IPhone and Nexus One plans offer 1 GB of data- which hopefully will not be subject to  change. 

Vodafone has without doubt the best line up of Smartphone handsets on the market and I am really disappointed that they have opted to go this route. Although they claim that less than 3% of its userbase go over the limit, the fact that there is a risk of extra costs will make a lot of businesses and personal users more reluctant to opt for Vodafones’ service.  

Since Google Nexus One and the HTC Legend, are Vodafone exclusive for at least the next month- it could hit sales hard.  O2 has by far the best service offering an “unlimited” service(subject to fair usage), with T-mobile offering an excellent comparative offering. With handsets like HTC Sense available on other networks, there are a lot of options for cost conscious consumers – and opting to offer excellent internet experience handsets with one hand and punitive charges for internet on the other hand doesn’t sound like a prize winning combination for Vodafone.

Click here to see Vodafone forum link (Via Zdnet)

Related posts:

1. Android devs see red at Google maps tax